On 26 April a year passed since the former ambassador and minister Mikhail Marynich was arrested. Now he is in prison. Because the court ruled he had allegedly misappropriated computers.

26.04.2005.

It is considered that Mikhail Marynich was arrested on 26 April 2004, though the background to his detention runs covers several earlier days. Late in the evening a Minsk traffic police officer stopped Marynich's car for alleged speeding. The interesting thing is that they never made a report registering the speeding offence allegedly committed by Marynich. The officer immediately demanded that the driver show him the car trunk and then called in help by radio.
In several minutes a man who identified himself as a KGB agent came to take Marynich and his personal belongings for examination. The examination procedure was filmed and then broadcast on one of the national TV channels on 26 April. The broadcast centered around 90 thousand dollars the KGB agents had found in the ex-ministers' briefcase. The Procurator's Office announced that part of the money was forged, so Marynich would be detained until they established the origins of the money.
True: where did the former minister and ambassador widely known in the power circles of Belarus, Russia and western countries get forged dollars? Marynich's sons are convinced: the forged money was thrown in by the KGB agents, which may well have happened before their father got in the car.
"When he was detained, he was going from his garage. They were following him from the garage. Witnesses then said that they had seen some suspicious people outside the garage. Then he was detained with this case filled with money. It turns out that a part of the money was earlier replaced with forged", Paval Marynich, the son of the political prisoner, told Radio Liberty.
What was Marynich's story? He made no secret out of the origins of the greenbacks: friends in Russia had given him the money for the election campaign. During the investigation he kept to the version that the forged money had been thrown in. However, the trial over Marynich, which took place 8 months after his arrest, did not deal with the financial side of the case at all. The former minister was accused of stealing computers, removing the forged money count into a separate case that involved Marynich as a witness. According to the Belarusian laws, witnesses cannot be familiarized with the criminal case materials, so Mikhail Marynich still does not know where the forged money came from or whether it was there at all.
(according to Radio Liberty).

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