Piotr Nidzelsky became one of Russia’s biggest investors in Crimea after Moscow annexed the peninsula in 2014. On Wednesday, police in Moscow arrested him on charges of large-scale fraud. The details of the case and the nature of the alleged crime are still unreported.
Nidzelsky, who served from 1994 until 2004 as a deputy energy minister in Russia’s federal government, will face up to a decade behind bars. In 2015, Nidzelsky’s Southern Energy Company acquired a majority stake in KrymTETs, Crimea’s largest conventional energy producer.