A court in central Russia on Wednesday placed the director general of the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Plant (ChEMK), under arrest in a high-profile pedophilia prosecution.
The hearing, which was held behind closed doors, concluded with an order that ChEMK CEO, Pavel Khodorovsky, be held in pre-trial detention for two months, which is standard practice in Russia.
The local chapter of the Russian Investigative Committee has announced that “Criminal cases have been initiated against the director and other persons for committing crimes against the sexual integrity of minors and public morals,” .
The court has also ordered the detention of a young woman whose identity has not been publicly disclosed. According to local media reports, the woman had sexual relations with Khodorovsky when she was a minor, and allegedly acted as a pimp on his behalf, after coming of age.
“The middlewoman used to be a girlfriend of Khodorovsky, but she grew too old, and he asked her to get him younger girls. The girlfriend delivered girls she knew to him, getting money in exchange,” a source close to the investigation told local 74.RU media outlet.
At least two underage girls have reportedly been identified in the case. One, who is already 16-years-old, the age of sexual consent Russia, allegedly slept with Khodorovsky for money, while another, a younger minor, became the target of “indecent actions” on his part.
The suspect is also reportedly accused of possessing and procuring illegal pornographic material, a large cache of which was allegedly discovered on his phone by investigators.
Khodorovsky has held top management posts with ChEMK since the early 1990s and has served as the plant’s director general since 2001. The pedophilia case against the CEO comes amid troubled times at the plant and the larger ChEMK conglomerate, which was seized by Russian authorities early this year over alleged privatization irregularities in the 1990s.
The group’s now-former owners, billionaire Yury Antipov and his associates, were also ordered to pay 105 billion rubles (nearly $1.2 billion) in restitution over a debt write-off scheme, deemed by the court to have been unjust enrichment.
