The Italian court agreed to prolong the detention term of Alexei Kalinichenko until February 2009. The accused is suspected of masterminding a pyramid scheme and embezzling more than 1 billion RUR and is now under the criminal extradition proceedings.

The Russian authorities revealed that for a number of years, Kalinichenko had been advertising his company and promising people a lot of income from the interbank foreign currency exchange speculation his firms would deal in using the investors’ money. The accused even went so far as to upload fake financial reports about his companies’ ‘brilliant’ performance on the Net, while the money obtained from the customers was transferred into his personal accounts.

Alexei Kalinichenko is believed to have thus stolen the money of over 4,000 people living in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Sverdlovsk Region, Yaroslavl Region, Krasnodar Territory, and other parts of Russia. His activity resulted in 119 criminal lawsuits now combined into a single case.

The public prosecution authorities insisted that the alleged fraudster, who was hiding abroad, should be arrested. At the end of the day, the General Prosecutor’s Office’s Administration for International Legal Cooperation sent their query to the Italian authorities, who managed to have the man arrested by the Interpol representatives in Italy early in June 2008.

The Russian public prosecution authorities have placed an extradition request with the Italian decision-makers in order to have the accused tried in Russia. The Italian authorities are currently keeping Kalinichenko under house arrest.