CNN
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Russian TV host and 2018 presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak has fled Russia for Lithuania, Russian state information company TASS reported Thursday.
Sobchack entered Lithuania the usage of her Israeli passport, in keeping with the rustic’s State Security Department director Darius Jauniskis.
“Yes, I can confirm that Sobchak is in Lithuania,” TASS cited Jauniskis as pronouncing.
Sobchak left the rustic after it used to be published on Wednesday that her condo were searched as a part of the felony case towards her business director Kirill Sukhanov, who used to be detained on extortion fees.
“Our commercial director Kirill Sukhanov has been arrested. They are trying to charge him with extortion,” Sobchak wrote on her Telegram channel Wednesday.
Sobchak denounced this as “nonsense” and an assault on her editorial crew.
“I don’t believe [these charges] at all, and I hope that now they will quickly sort everything out and will see that all this is some kind of nonsense,” she mentioned. “If not, then it is obviously a raid on my editorial office – the last free editorial office in Russia, which had to be clamped down.”
Sobchak is a suspect in relation to her director accused of extortion of eleven million rubles (more or less $179,000) from the pinnacle of Rostec state company Sergei Chemezov, a regulation enforcement company supply advised TASS.
The protection is making plans to attraction Sukhanov’s detention, his attorney Svetlana Lipatova mentioned Wednesday.
Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Sobchak has shut ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who used to be mentored through her overdue father, reformist flesh presser Anatoly Sobchak, at first of his political profession.
In the 2010s Ksenia Sobchak often attended opposition protests and rallies, however misplaced fortify from opposition figures after operating for the Russian presidency in 2018.
Her resolution to run for the presidency used to be broadly criticized through leaders of the Russian opposition, together with Alexey Navalny, who accused her marketing campaign of being a sham and categorised her as a “Kremlin project.”
