ALMATY, March 13 - RAPSI. On December 17, 2012, a court in Vienna upheld charges against former Kazakh Ambassador to Austria Rakhat Aliyev, who is accused of creating a criminal group for purposes of extortion and money laundering, Vienna lawyer Gabriel Lansky representing the plaintiffs in the case said at a news conference in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Wednesday.

A court in Kazakhstan heard the case of Aliyev, ex-husband of President Nursultan Nazarbayev's daughter Dariga, in absentia and sentenced him to 40 years in prison for planning a coup and organizing a criminal group.

In mid June 2011, the Vienna court refused to extradite Aliyev to Kazakhstan, arguing that he was unlikely to get a fair trial in his home country.

Later, Kazakhstan's prosecutor general said that Aliyev had also been charged with the murder of two managers of Nubank, a bank which he controlled. Their bodies were found in quicklime filled metal barrels in mid May 2011.

The Vienna court also accepted the results of the investigation in Kazakhstan and the main conclusions of the verdict in the case of Nurbank as justified, and the testimony of witnesses in the case as reliable.

The court added that political arguments cannot absolve Aliyev of responsibility for his crimes.

According to previous press reports, Aliyev has left Austria and is currently living in Malta.

Aliyev, 50, moved to Malta in 2010 after Viennese prosecutors began investigating allegations that he commissioned the murder of two bankers in Kazakhstan. As former ambassador to the OSCE in Vienna, Aliyev was stripped of his diplomatic immunity in 2008 when a Kazakh court sentenced him to 20 years in absentia for the murders, and was forced to divorce Nazarbayev's daughter.