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Gozman reveals details of smuggling case against his wife
Gozman said he asked his wife to hand over kitchen utensils that had been given to him by her parents to their daughter in Germany. He said he and his wife did not believe the items had cultural value.
The wife of opposition politician Leonid Gozman, Marina Egorova (including one from the Register of Foreign Agents), was accused of smuggling cultural valuables after attempting to deliver silver and cupronickel tableware to her daughter in Germany, which was given to her by Gozman's parents. The politician told RBK about this.
"Unfortunately, a crime has occurred," he said. According to him, Egorova handed over the cargo to the carrier, but it was confiscated at the border.
"I am guilty of asking to remove something that did not pass the Ministry of Culture's inspection. At the same time, my wife and I were and still are convinced that these things have neither cultural nor serious material value," Gozman told RBK.
He explained that there was no "venal motive" and no attempt was made to sell the kitchen tools he wanted to give to his daughter. "However, I was irresponsible, I broke the law, I made my wife break the law, and of course she couldn't reject me," he added.
According to Gozman, Egorova has no complaints about the investigation and the FSIN employees. He said that everything was done as accurately and legally as possible. "We hope for justice and humanity," Gozman concluded.
Egorova's lawyer Mikhail Biryukov previously told RBC that she was detained on October 3 and arrived in Russia in August. A search was conducted in the Moscow apartment of Gozman and his wife, after which the capital's Lefortovo Court placed Egorova under house arrest.
Leonid Gozman is a Russian politician and former leader of the right-wing United Party. In the early 1990s, he served as an adviser to Yegor Gaidar, the founder of Russian economic reforms and former prime minister, and later worked in the presidential administration and the government of Anatoly Chubais.
In July last year, the court sentenced Gozman to 8 years and 6 months in a general regime penal colony on a fictitious case against a military man (paragraph 2, paragraph "d" of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). The politician left Russia in 2022 after being placed under administrative arrest for 15 days for publicly identifying the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. He flew to Israel. That same year, a criminal case was opened against him for failure to notify of dual citizenship due to an Israeli passport. The counterfeit case was opened last year.