MOSCOW, April 30 (RAPSI) – Yevgenia Vasilyeva, an aide to former defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, faces new charges over sale of an agricultural company in the Krasnodar Territory in southern Russia, Kommersant newspaper reported on Thursday.

The company in question is Leningradskoye, which had 4,800 hectares of farmland and 2,200 cattle and was registered as a federal state company of the North Caucasus Military District until May 2009.

The Main Military Prosecutor’s Office found that the company was declared a noncore asset and was sold with the permission of then-Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.

Military prosecutors claim that Vasilyeva prepared and carried out the transaction in cooperation with other suspects in the first Oboronservis case. They have estimated the related damages at over 1.2 billion rubles ($23.2 million), the newspaper writes.

Kommersant writes that the military prosecutors have forwarded the case materials to the Main Military Investigation Department of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which has initiated criminal proceedings under an article on large-scale fraud.

In 2012, the Defense Ministry’s Department of Property Relations and the company Oboronservis became involved in a corruption scandal that led to the resignation of Serdyukov and Vasilyeva.

Vasilyeva was charged with 12 counts of illegal sales of property, land and shares belonging to Oboronservis subsidiaries. Oboronservis is a group of service companies involved in armament and military vehicle repair and maintenance, construction materials and food production, power facility management, cartography and printing goods production, and housing services for military towns.

During the hearing on April 29, Vasilyeva asked the court to acquit her.

Prosecutor Vera Pashkovskaya earlier requested that Vasilyeva be given an eight-year suspended sentence, fined 1 million rubles ($19,340), and be prohibited from holding government office. She also asked the court to give Vasilyeva’s suspected accomplices suspended sentences ranging from four to eight years.