MOSCOW -- A court in Moscow has sentenced a municipal lawmaker from the opposition Yabloko party to four years in prison on extortion charges that she rejects as politically motivated.
The Tver district court on December 12 also ruled that Ketevan Kharaidze must pay a 700,000-ruble fine ($11,000) and 5 million rubles ($78,000) to the plaintiff.
Kharaidze insists that her case is linked to her decision in June to run for the State Duma, the Russian parliament's lower chamber.
The opposition politician was arrested in June after police searched her apartment.
Investigators say she and another municipal lawmaker, Guram Grigoryan, tried to extort 15 million rubles from a construction company by blackmailing its leaders with "flaws found in a building erected by the company."
After her arrest, Kharaidze launched a hunger strike protesting against her detention. On June 28, she stopped the hunger strike and two weeks later she was transferred to house arrest.
She took part in September in the election of the municipal council of Moscow's Tver district and was reelected.
Kharaidze's sentencing comes three days after a Moscow court sentenced another opposition politician, Ilya Yashin, to 8 1/2 years in prison on a charge of spreading false information about the Russian military amid its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Yashin, 39, is an outspoken Kremlin critic and one of the few prominent opposition politicians still in Russia after a wave of repression against supporters of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and people who have spoken against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
