On Monday, Greece deported a Russian money launderer to the US, hours after his release from a French jail, his lawyer said on Friday.
Zoe Konstantopoulou says Alexander Vinnik was loaded onto a private plane to the US without being allowed to lodge an asylum request in Greece.
A source with knowledge of the case in France reveals that on Thursday afternoon, Vinnik had been handed back to the Greek authorities, just weeks after the Court of Cassation in Paris confirmed his five-year sentence for money laundering.
For the past two years, Vinnik, 43, had been in French custody, following his deportation from Greece.
The father-of-two has been the subject of a long legal dispute between Greece, France, Russia, and the United States.
Vinnik’s French lawyer, Frederic Belot, said that Washington appeared to have applied significant pressure to secure his deportation.
He said that his client was sent to San Francisco via Boston and spent 55 years in prison in the United States.
US Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite says in a Justice Department statement that after more than five years of litigation, Vinnik was deported to the United States yesterday to be held accountable for operating BTC-e, a criminal cryptocurrency exchange, laundering more than $4 billion of criminal proceeds.
