After his arrest on August 13, Shambir handed over his electronic Duma voting card to Pavel Sazhinov, a member of the regional Communist Party. A stern reaction from the United Russia soon followed. This month, the party leadership decided to kick Shambir out of the party.
”We agreed that the handover of Shambir’s voting card to a representive of another fraction is discrediting the party and its fraction in the Duma”, regional party leader Sergey Dubovoy says to newspaper Kommersant. ”The membership in the party of Shambir has now ended, he is excluded”, Dubovoy adds.
The exclusion takes place although Communist Party member Sazhinov says he would never have used Shambir’s voting card.
With the exclusion of the party, the political career of Vasily Shambir seems to have reached a point of no return. He himself claims however that the deprival of the duma chairmanship, the arrest and the exclusion from the party is politically motivated.
As previously reported, he has earlier denied all accusations against him.
Shambir has three different criminal cases against him. He is accused of fraud of 42 million rubles (€872.257) from the joint stock company KOMZ (Kandalaksha Developmental Engineering Plant) while serving as General Director of the plant from 2007 to 2009. Later, he was accused of stealing 26 million rubles (€539.968) from Barentsbank in the same period, and even later he was also accused of stealing 24 million rubles from DnBNOR Monchebank.
Shambir was arrested in August when supposedly trying to get on a plane to Spain when he was stopped in passport control and detained. Since he is under investigation, Shambir is not allowed to leave the country. He was brought to Murmansk, where a court sentenced him to two months of prison for breaking pre-trial restrictions and trying to hide from investigation and court.
Vasily Shambir (45) had been speaker of the Regional Duma since December 2011. Before being elected to the Regional Duma, he was Head of the Kandalaksha district, south in the Kola Peninsula
