MOSCOW, July 11 - RAPSI. The High Court of Justice in London turned down the BTA Bank's motion to issue an arrest warrant for Anatoly Yereshchenko on charges of contempt of court, according to the judgment made available to the Russian Legal Information Agency on Wednesday.

Yereshchenko is involved in the bank's lawsuit against its former President Mukhtar Ablyazov.

The motion was filed in the bank's litigation to recover assets, and to compensate for losses that were allegedly inflicted on the company by its former executives, including Ablyazov.

In the latest motion, the plaintiff alleged that Yereshchenko, a former employee of Eastbridge Capital Ltd., UK, intentionally lied to the court, which asked him to present several documents on major transactions that supposedly resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for the bank.

Earlier, courts issued arrest warrants for Ablyazov and two other parties to the litigation upon the banks requests.

On February 16, the court found Ablyazov guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to 22 months in prison before the hearing of the case on its merits had even begun. However, it was impossible to execute the sentence as the 49-year-old businessman has been on the run ever since.

The case against Ablyazov began in 2009 after the state acquired a stake in BTA and the bank came under the control of the Kazakh Samruk-Kazyna sovereign fund.

Ablyazov fled the country and settled in the UK. He believes the charges against him are politically motivated. Kazakhstan seeks his extradition for large-scale fraud, and draining the bank's funds using dummy companies.

Russia has also launched criminal proceedings against Ablyazov. In October 2010, a Moscow district court issued an arrest warrant for Ablyazov in absentia on charges of large-scale fraud.