MOSCOW, August 27 (RAPSI) – The Moscow City Court on Thursday upheld a 14-year prison sentence passed on ex-president of the Bank of Moscow Andrey Borodin in absentia for embezzling over 14.5 billion rubles (about $200 million at the current exchange rate), the court’s press service told RAPSI.

Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court convicted and sentenced Borodin in March. In addition to the jail term the court ordered the former banker pay a 2.5 million-ruble (over $33,000 at the current exchange rate) fine.

Borodin’s former first deputy Dmitry Akulinin was sentenced to 12 years in jail and a 2-million-ruble fine (about $30,000) in absentia.

The defendants are on the international wanted list. However, the UK earlier refused to extradite them to Russia.

Investigators believe that Borodin along with his accomplices embezzled over 14.5 billion rubles from the Bank of Moscow between 2008 and 2011 by granting knowingly unrecoverable loans and making loss forex trading transactions through companies controlled by them.

Borodin, whose Bank of Moscow functioned as the capital's chief investment vehicle under its then-mayor Yury Luzhkov, fled to the UK in 2011. In November 2011, the Russian Interpol bureau put Borodin and Akulinin on the international wanted list. In March 2013, Borodin was granted political asylum in the UK.

In 2016, Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court sentenced former top managers of the bank Konstantin Salnikov and Alla Averina to 4.5 and 4 years in prison respectively for embezzling over 1 billion rubles (about $15.6 mln) from the bank. Later, the Moscow City Court reduced prison term for Salnikov to 4 years.