MOSCOW — To no one’s surprise, a judge in the city of Kirov Thursday found Russia’s most effective anti-corruption campaigner guilty of stealing about half a million dollars from a timber company, and sentenced him to five years in prison.

Alexei Navalny, a 37-year-old with a penchant for exposes and cutting jibes, has said since before his trial began in April that he expected to be convicted on what he and his legions of supporters contend are trumped-up charges.His case is the most prominent of a series of criminal prosecutions that Russian authorities have launched against their critics.

Prosecutors asked for a six-year term for Navalny, and a lesser term for a co-defendant. Navalny had been hoping for a suspended sentence.

Shortly after noon, Judge Sergei Blinov, 35, gave Navalny a five-year sentence and the co-defendant, Pytor Ofitserov, a four-year term. He ordered both men put into custody. Blinov, who commuted to the court in Kirov from a village 35 miles away, now has a record of no acquittals in 131 cases. At Navalny’s fiery closing statement two weeks ago, he kept his head down, as if finding the words uncomfortable.

“I declare that I and my colleagues will do everything to destroy this feudal order which exists in Russia, to destroy the system of power under which 83 percent of national goods belong to 0.5 percent of the population,” Navalny had said.

Thursday’s session was attended by a pack of supporters and television crews. Navalny, smiling and relaxed, and sending out an occasional tweet, had left Moscow by overnight train Wednesday evening. Among those present in the courtroom were his wife, his father and the long-time opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.

After hearing the sentence Navalny tweeted his supporters: “OK. Don’t get bored here without me. And most important — don’t dawdle.”

On Wednesday Navalny was registered as a candidate in Moscow’s September mayoral election. The authorities in the capital have been eager to have him in the race, confident that he will lose to the incumbent, Acting Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Conviction won’t necessarily bar him from running, as long as his appeals have not been exhausted.

“No one is thinking about surrender,” his press secretary, Anna Veduta, said Wednesday as his staff was preparing for the court session in Kirov. Referring to the ruling United Russia party, which Navalny memorably labeled the “party of crooks and thieves,” Veduta said, “These cheaters expect us to give up, close down the office and go home to cry. This will never happen.”

If Navalny goes to prison, she said, “he will in any case search for ways to contact us and give orders. The best that we can do for him is to continue working as hard as we are now.”

Navalny’s supporters had called his prosecution a decisive moment for the protest movement.

“Putin’s team made an art of stealing from construction sites,” he said in a recent interview. “That — and oil — is a very good source of money for the team . . . Putin will be president forever. He understands if he leaves he will go to jail, and he will resist to the end.”

Now, Navalny, said, the only way for Putin to hang on to power is through repression.

Navalny began coming to public notice about four years ago when he began his web-based anti-corruption campaign. He emerged as one of the most charismatic leaders of the protest movement when demonstrations against rigged elections broke out in December 2011.

Grigory Golosov, a St. Petersburg political scientist, calls him a natural politician with the instincts to make him a leader.

“Show me another person who, acting almost alone, has been able within a year to deal a tangible blow to a political monopoly of such magnitude,” Golosov wrote before the trial began, saying Navalny has a rare gift of communication. “After two decades of unbridled political ridiculousness he has largely rehabilitated political debate as a meaningful.”

Navalny was charged with theft from a deal he arranged in 2009 when he was an assistant to the governor in Kirov — he found a middleman to buy timber from a struggling logging company. Because the middleman then made a profit on the timber, the prosecution has charged that Navalny effectively deprived the lumber company of nearly $500,000, by getting it to agree to sell below market value.

Late Tuesday, Navalny posted his latest expose — of the head of the government-owned Russian Railways, Vladi­mir Yakunin. He alleged that Yakunin has funneled millions of dollars of public money into companies run by his wife and sons, many of them based offshore.

NEWS SOURCE:http://www.washingtonpost.com/