23:10, 29 January 2026

The court ordered the arrest of Akhmed Bilalov in absentia.

Moscow's Tverskoy Court has arrested in absentia Akhmed Bilalov, former vice president of the Russian Olympic Committee and former head of North Caucasus Resorts, who lives in the United States, in connection with the attempted theft of $200 million from Sberbank. The court chose a preventive measure in the form of pretrial detention for two months from the date of arrest or extradition.

As "Caucasian Knot" reported, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow received a petition for the in absentia arrest of the former head of North Caucasus Resorts, Akhmed Bilalov, who left Russia more than 12 years ago after Putin criticized the failure to meet deadlines for the construction of Olympic facilities.

Until February 2013, Dagestan native Akhmed Bilalov headed North Caucasus Resorts and was vice president of the Olympic Committee. Vladimir Putin demanded that he be dismissed from all positions due to the disruption of the Olympic construction schedule, after which Bilalov left the country. In October 2019, Bilalov was detained at his Florida home on October 22 for immigration violations, but a week and a half later he was released on bail. According to investigators, Bilalov and Musayib Ismailov, the founder of Kiwi Gardens LLC, organized the fabrication of a fictitious agreement from 2013, according to which, allegedly on behalf of Sberbank, 27.3% of the shares of Krasnaya Polyana OJSC were sold for $200 million to another company, RIA Novosti reports today. They then filed a lawsuit in the Kyiv region against Sberbank for the recovery of lost profits from the sale of shares, which ruled Bilalov and Ismailov subsequently filed a lawsuit in a US court seeking recognition and enforcement of the Ukrainian court's decision, but the lawsuit remains pending. The investigation classified the defendants' actions as attempted fraud on an especially large scale. .

The lawyer stated at a hearing in Moscow's Tverskoy Court that the defendant "has the right to be present in person during the arrest," and the investigation provided no information indicating that he had been notified of the upcoming hearing. At the same time, the defense attorney noted that her client "opposes the charges," Kommersant reports.

Presiding Judge Anna Bazhenova granted the investigators' request for Akhmed Bilalov's arrest in absentia. His sentence will begin to run from the moment the former sports official is detained in Russia or extradited to the Russian Federation.

The court stated that Bilalov resides in New York, the publication states.

Translated automatically via Google translate from https://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/420349