MOSCOW, March 28 (RAPSI) - The Commercial Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region has scheduled for April 27 the hearing of a claim filed by the former head of EEFC-Ural Bank, Alexander Gitelson, who was running banking business in Russia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, for his own bankruptcy, RIA Novosti reported on Monday.

Gitelson’s claim was accepted by the court for hearing in February 2016.

In October, Russia’s Supreme Court refused to review court rulings ordering Gitelson, and two other former top managers of the bank to pay 300.2 million rubles ($4.4 million) in damages in a lawsuit filed by the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA).

The Commercial Court of Appeals of the Sverdlovsk Region on March 1, 2015 dismissed a petition filed by the Deposit Insurance Agency, the current bankruptcy receiver of EEFC-Ural Bank, to collect 350.2 million rubles ($5.1 million) from the defendants.

The DIA argued that the defendants did damage to the bank in the said amount by approving unrecoverable loans.

The Seventeenth Commercial Court of Appeals in late May overturned this decision and issued a ruling that Gitelson, and two other former top managers of the bank must pay 300.2 million rubles in damages. On August 21, the Commercial Court of the Urals District upheld this ruling.

Gitelson was arrested in Austria in April 2013 and extradited to Russia in December.

In March 2015, Gitelson was convicted and sentenced to three years for embezzling over 2 billion rubles ($26.3 million) in public funds from Inkasbank. A court in St. Petersburg also fined the banker 500,000 rubles ($6,600).

Inkasbank was declared bankrupt in May 2009. The bank’s administrator conducted an inquiry into the circumstances of the bank’s insolvency. As a result, the Russian Federal Security Service received a motion to open a criminal case (premeditated bankruptcy) against the bank’s former management.

In April 2011, Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court sentenced Gitelson in absentia to five years in prison and a 1 million ruble ($13,200) fine for embezzling 495 million rubles ($6.5 million) from his acquaintance, MP Adnan Muzykayev.