PARIS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th January, 2020) Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national jailed in France over alleged cyberfraud, is determined to continue his hunger strike despite being in poor health, his lawyer Timophey Musatov said on Wednesday.
Vinnik was extradited to France on January 23 from Greece where he was arrested at the United States' request over money laundering charges involving billions of Dollars. A court in France, where Vinnik was wanted on separate allegations of financial fraud, ruled earlier in the day to keep him in jail.
"We have ten days to appeal the ruling. To prepare it, we need access to the materials and our client," the lawyer said, adding that both points were lacking.
According to Musatov, the legal team had a limited access to the dossier of indictments and evidences and was only allowed to interact with Vinnik for about 30 minutes in his cell. The lawyer described Vinnik as being "in a terrible state, as the past day made it clear to him that what happened in Greece was just for starters and that the French court would not treat him any better."
"He definitely needs psychological help. Given that he has been on hunger strike for 40 days now, all my attempts to convince him to give it up were derailed by yesterday's trial," Musatov said, recounting it to have been carried out "with catastrophic violations of all his rights."
He said Vinnik is now in "a separate bloc of the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital which is designed as a prison," with single-occupancy hospital wards constantly superintended by staff.
France considers Alexander Vinnik a component of a larger criminal network which has sourced 20,643 bitcoins ($190 million) by extortion through the BTC-e cryptocurrency trading platform from some 5,700 victims across the world, including from France. He was charged on counts of extortion, aggravated money laundering, conspiracy and harming automatic data-processing systems.
Vinnik was arrested at the request of the US while in Greece with his wife and two children for a summer vacation in 2017. He is imputed laundering $4 billion worth of funds through BTC-E and faces over $100 million worth of civil penalties. The charges against him were brought on behalf of the US Department of the Treasury on July 25.
