Russian investigators claim that the wife of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, Yelena Baturina, continues to ignore an invitation to return to Russia for questioning in a bank fraud case, RIA Novosti reported on Monday.
Baturina, a businesswoman who became a billionaire during her husband's tenure as mayor, is a witness in a fraud case involving Bank of Moscow. Baturina, who is currently in London, told Russian Ren-TV in an interview broadcast on Tuesday that she would appear for questioning as soon as she received an official invitation.
“To this day nobody has sent an invitation for questioning to me. As soon as I receive it, I will come,” Baturina said, adding that she wants to resolve the case, which she said "is purely fabricated.”
The case surrounds a loan of about $400 million that Bank of Moscow made to a company that used the money to buy 58 hectares of land near Moscow from Baturina's company at the end of 2010. The heads of the bank at the time, Andrey Borodin and his former first deputy Dmitry Akulinin, are the defendants in the fraud case.
