MOSCOW. July 30 (Interfax) - Lawyer Igor Tretyakov, a suspect in the NPO Lavochkin fraud case, was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport immediately after his flight from Irkutsk arrived, his wife Anna told Interfax late on Sunday.
"As soon as Igor Anatolyevich and I stepped from the airplane at about 8:40 p.m., six men in civil clothing came up to us and asked my husband to follow them. That was the last I saw him," Tretyakov's wife said.
Sheremetyevo employees could not give any comment to an Interfax correspondent about any police operations possibly taking place in the airport's premises.
The Russian Investigative Committee's press service said earlier that Tretyakov had been put on the federal wanted list after a criminal probe was launched against NPO Lavochkin chief Sergei Lemeshevsky, suspected of embezzling corporate funds.
The law firm Tretyakov and Partners denied reports that Tretyakov absconded. The lawyer took his family on a planned vacation to Lake Baikal on July 25 and was going to get back to Moscow on Sunday, the firm said.
Tretyakov himself confirmed to Interfax this past Friday that he was planning to return to Moscow "with a clear conscience," expressing confidence that he "will be grabbed right from the plane, off the gangway" so that he could not see a defense attorney or anyone from the press.
Tretyakov remarked, however, that he was hoping to convince the court to order a restrictive measure other than custody for him.
Earlier on July 26, Moscow's Babushkinsky District Court ordered a two-month arrest of NPO Lavochkin chief Lemeshevsky and Yekaterina Averyanova, head of the company's Legal Support Directorate, both accused of large-scale fraud (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code).
Investigators believe that NPO Lavochkin top managers and Tretyakov misappropriated approximately 330 million rubles belonging to the state corporation Roscosmos "by means of making fictitious contracts on legal services with the law firm Tretyakov and Partners, while the same services were provided by in-house lawyers employed at NPO [Lavoochkin]."
Lemeshevsky pled not guilty. He said that he reached out for outside legal advice because NPO Lavochkin's in-house lawyers lost two lawsuits filed after several dozen contracts had been breached.
In his comment to Interfax, Tretyakov said: "They say that Tretyakov's lawyers did not attend any court sessions and simply got the money. But let us ask: which cases did not they attend? Well, apparently the investigators think: right now it does not matter, we will arrest them all and investigate later."