Russia: Police Raid St. Petersburg Org

with thanks to mnql1

Russia: Police raid Saint Petersburg org, Sept. 25, 2014

At 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, September 25, 2014, police raided the Church of Scientology located at 21 Rozenstein Street in Saint Peterburg, Russia. Authorities are investigating a "large-scale fraud" by the construction company "Olimp" whose directors are Scientologists Ekaterina and Michael Zaborskikh. Money that buyers paid to purchase apartments in buildings yet to be constructed was allegedly siphoned off to pay for Scientology courses or as donations to Scientology's "volunteer ministers." According to present estimates, 9 million rubles were stolen from defrauded investors.

A video posted on Russia's NTV website on September 27 shows some scenes from the raid. The speaker heard in the video is Vyacheslav Stepchenko, an official of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He states that the raid took place and summarizes the fraud allegations.

Sources (in Russian):
NTV video Sept. 27, 2014
NTV video Sept. 25,2014
Article, Sept. 25, 2014: Police raid Scientology business

Incidentally, the raid of the Church of Scientology in Saint Petersburg took place exactly one week before the European Court of Human Rights is scheduled to hand down a decision on Thursday, October 2, 2014 regarding Russia's refusal to register the Saint Petersburg org.

Source: Forthcoming judgments re: BG, CZ, FR, GR, MD, NO, PT, RU & UA 30.09-02.10.14

Church of Scientology of St Petersburg and Others v. Russia (no. 47191/06)

The applicants in this case are the Church of Scientology of St Petersburg, an unincorporated group
of Russian citizens formed for the collective study of Scientology, and six members of this group:
Galina Shurinova, Nadezhda Shchemeleva, Anastasiya Terentyeva, Ivan Matsitskiy, Yuliya Bryntseva,
and Galina Frolova, Russian nationals, born in 1954, 1955, 1979, 1975, 1977, and 1955 respectively.
The case concerns their complaint about the authorities refusing to register their Scientology group
as a legal-entity.

Between March 1995 and August 2003 the applicants’ Scientology group, led by Ms Shurinova since
the late 1980s, submitted six applications for registration. The registration authorities rejected all
their applications, each time citing new grounds for their refusal. The most recent refusal referred in
particular to the alleged unreliability of a document confirming that the group had been in existence
for 15 years, a legal requirement under Russian law for any new religious group to be registered. In
October 2003 the applicants challenged the refusals in court and, in December 2005, the
St Petersburg District Court held that the refusal to register their group as a legal entity had been
lawful, citing defects in the document confirming the existence of the religious group for 15 years.
This judgment was upheld on appeal in May 2006.

Relying in particular on Article 9 (freedom of thought, conscience, and religion) interpreted in the
light of Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association), the Scientology group complain that the
decisions refusing to register them as a legal entity were arbitrary.

Just decide to get married in your 'religion', spend five whole years realing off a load of crap,it adds to it's authenticity, smile sweetly at the judge, a few pay offs won't go far a miss, produce a baby, smile even sweeter and produce a solicitor, you really can't go far wrong...they did it in Britain...I am not sure where Britain is...I am English.

 

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