The Moscow City Court has upheld an arrest warrant for a U.S. national who founded an Andrei Sakharov prize, a court spokesperson said Wednesday.

Peter Vins, an American-Russian businessman who currently lives in Latvia, is facing tax evasion charges and could be sentenced up to seven years in prison if convicted.

Vins emigrated to the United States in the late 1970s but returned to Russia in 1993 and established a logistics company called Vinlund.

In September 2007, he complained of police harassment and fled Russia in late 2008 after being slapped with a 3.4-million-ruble bill in unpaid taxes. He said the tax claims against him were unjustified.

Vins' problems have widely been seen as linked to his human rights activism.

He is a former member of the human rights organization Moscow Helsinki Group and the founder of an Andrei Sakharov prize for investigative journalism. In 2000, Vins established the $5,000 award called For Journalism as an Act of Conscience.

In January, Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner, urged President Dmitry Medvedev in an open letter to intervene.

According to media reports, Bonner said she was writing the letter "in the name of Sakharov, who for many years defended Peter Vins, his father and mother."

MOSCOW, February 3 (RIA Novosti)