MOSCOW (Reuters) – Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Monday launched an international anti-corruption organisation, a year after his Russian Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) was outlawed as extremist.
Navalny’s Telegram channel, which carries messages passed to his supporters via lawyers who are allowed contact with him, said the fund’s advisory board would include former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, and Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya.
Navalny came to prominence by using his Foundation to catalogue the wealth of senior Russian officials in a series of caustic and widely watched videos, and has become President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic.
Last year’s court ruling outlawing the Foundation in effect barred his allies from running in elections and gave authorities the power to jail ACF activists and freeze their bank accounts, cutting off its ability to receive donations from supporters.
Navalny’s social media feeds said on Monday that the new Anti-Corruption Foundation International would be “completely transparent and understandable”, and that its first funds would be the 50,000 euro ($50,000) Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought that the European Parliament awarded him last year.
“As always, we are counting on your help and support, and we promise that we will work well,” Navalny was quoted as saying.
Navalny was jailed in 2020 for violating bail conditions on his return from Germany, where he had been recovering from a near-fatal poisoning in Russia with a Soviet-era nerve toxin.
This year he was sentenced to a further nine years in prison for fraud and contempt of court, charges that he says were fabricated in order to thwart his political ambitions.
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(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Hugh Lawson)
