MOSCOW, March 30 - RAPSI. Bailiffs failed to bring the notorious MMM Ponzi scheme founder Sergei Mavrodi to the Moscow Magistrates Court for a hearing on his failure to pay fines.

Mavrodi has been charged with avoiding administrative punishment. The offense is punishable by up to an administrative arrest. Mavrodi was earlier jailed for five days for a similar offense. Meanwhile, his defense expects about 300 administrative cases to be submitted against him.

Mavrodi attracted the public's attention after he announced his new MMM-2011 electronic project in early 2011, promising investors a 360 percent return per annum. The new scheme suggested that investors would finance each other and all the operations would run through the Internet. A number of officials and public figures have called the scheme another Mavrodi fraud.

In the early 1990s, millions of people suffered from Mavrodi's MMM Ponzi scheme. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for fraud and was released only in May 2007.

The bailiff service earlier reported that Mavrodi's debt to his investors is almost 5 billion rubles ($172.7 million).