Rusia Opens Fraud Probe Against Kremlin Critic.

The investigatory Committee, which probes major crimes, aforesaid during a statement that the cash was a part of quite 588 million rubles Navalny had raised "exclusively" for his non-profit organizations, together with the Anti-Corruption Fund.

Russian investigators on Tuesday opened a criminal probe into Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, alleging he used quite 356 million rubles ($4.8 million) of donations to his organizations for private functions together with holidays abroad.

The investigatory Committee, which probes major crimes, aforesaid during a statement that the cash was a part of quite 588 million rubles Navalny had raised "exclusively" for his non-profit organizations, together with the Anti-Corruption Fund. The committee aforesaid Navalny used the cash to accumulate "personal property (and) material assets and to pay expenses (including holidays abroad)."

"In this fashion, the funds collected from voters were taken," the committee additional, locution it had opened a criminal case into "fraud on AN particularly giant scale". The charge provides a penalty of up to ten years in jail.

Navalny, 44, is presently ill from a poisoning try in the Federal Republic of Germany. He has aforesaid he can come to Russia once his health is fixed. In August, the Kremlin critic fell violently sick throughout a flight from the geographic region to Moscow and was hospitalized within the town of Omsk before being transferred to Berlin by medical craft.

Experts in many Western countries terminated that he has poisoned with the Soviet-era Novichok agent a claim that Moscow has repeatedly denied. Navalny, Russia's most distinguished opposition figure, has aforesaid the most security agency Federal MI (FSB) was behind the poisoning at the direction of President Putin.

On Tuesday Navalny delineate the recent criminal probe against him as "invented by Putin". "Well, I in real-time aforesaid that they're going to attempt to place Pine Tree State in jail as a result of I did not die" from the poisoning, he wrote on Twitter.

Navalny has long-faced charges of fraud before. In Feb 2014 he was charged with fraud and concealing and spent nearly a year beneath confinement before receiving a suspended sentence in Dec that year.