Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court has placed former Aeroflot CEO Mikhail Poluboyarinov in pretrial detention in a case on abuse of official powers, according to Mediazona. The hearing at which the preventive measure was chosen took place on June 19.
The outlet says the detainee is Mikhail Igorevich Poluboyarinov. According to leaked database records, there is only one person in Russia with that full name: the 60-year-old former head of the airline.
The exact grounds for the criminal case have not been disclosed. A former colleague told The Bell that he had heard about the arrest from an acquaintance in the banking sector. In 2020, Poluboyarinov was a member of the management board of VEB.RF.
In April, the same court placed current state corporation deputy chairman Artyom Dovlatov under house arrest on the same charge. Sources cited by Vedomosti linked that case to an investigation into events during the 2016 bank bailout process, where Poluboyarinov also worked.
He became head of Aeroflot in November 2020 and left the post in March 2022 after personal sanctions were imposed on him. At the time, Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev said his departure was due to “stressful conditions.”
That same month, Lithuanian authorities banned transactions involving real estate owned by the former executive’s family. Lithuanian media reported that his relatives owned two apartments on the Baltic Sea coast, which experts valued at 500,000 euros. Poluboyarinov later denied rumors in an interview with Forbes that he had left Russia because of the war in Ukraine.
In March 2023, Poluboyarinov moved to Rostec. An RBC source said he took a senior management role overseeing financial support for the group’s companies. According to TASS, he became an adviser to Sergei Chemezov. Rostec’s press service told Mediazona that Poluboyarinov works at one of its subsidiaries and, when asked about his arrest, replied:
“Unfortunately, we have no comment.”
Mediazona writes that Poluboyarinov’s relatives did not respond to the reporter’s calls and messages.