Intigam Aliev's defence provides court with rebuttal of prosecution's version

The advocate of the Azerbaijani human rights activist Intigam Aliev, accused of illegal entrepreneurship, has presented to the court the screenshots of the pages, deleted from the website of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). They show that the grants, which were implemented by the Aliev's organization, had been duly registered by the MoJ.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that Intigam Aliev, the head of the non-profit organization (NPO) "Society of Legal Education", was detained on August 8, 2014. Initially, he was accused of tax evasion and illegal entrepreneurship, but in December 2014 the charges were supplemented by an article about a large-scale embezzlement.

At the today's court session, the advocate Shakhla Gumbatova said that while Aliev is charged with implementing 13 projects without registration of grant contracts, seven of them had been implemented before 2009, when the law did not demand any registration. The remaining six grant contracts were implemented after the due registration at the MoJ.

Despite the fact that the MoJ had deleted the information from its website, copies of the pages were cached in the search engine of the Google. Gumbatova has presented notarized screenshots of the pages, which contain information about the due registration of the grants, and asked to add the materials to the case files.

"Interestingly, the usually loquacious prosecutor, when it came to the adding the screenshot from the website of the MoJ, got confused and asked for some time to 'study the petition.' The defence has put the prosecution into a difficult position. In fact, the charges are falling apart," Rovshan Gadjibeili, the head of the NGO "School of Democratic Journalism", who was monitoring the trial, told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.