Sanctions | The entrepreneur was sentenced for violating Russian sanctions: he took defense equipment across the border

Eastern Uusimaa on Thursday, the district court sentenced a nine-month conditional prison sentence for the crime of rationing and the crime of exporting defense equipment.

Tuomio became the CEO of Siberica Oy and Luminor Oy To Gabriel Teminwho at the same time was ordered together with the company to forfeit to the state the financial benefit produced by the crime, 11,000 euros.

The court mostly rejected the charges of regulatory crime. The charges against the other defendants were also dismissed. The prosecutor had demanded up to four years in prison for Temini.

This is the first sentence in Finland related to violations of the new sanctions against Russia.

Temin is a French citizen who was accused, among other things, of exporting thousands of Drones to Russia, which is waging a war of aggression. In the end, the court found no evidence of this.

The court considered that in the case of another company's drone exports, nothing but circumstantial evidence was presented to support the prosecution. It was not enough to show that the drones were intended to be taken to Russia or that they had ended up in Russia.

The court also stated, unlike the prosecutor, that it has not been proven in the case that Siberica's or Luminor's operations were directed from Russia.

“It has become clear in the trial that such an assumption could at least partially have been the result of translation errors in the preliminary investigation material,” it stated.

Legal therefore rejected the majority of the gross regulation crime sub-deeds from 2022 and 2023, but convicted Temin for the export, where the destination was declared to customs as Kazakhstan, but the material found in Siberica's information systems showed that the goods went to St. Petersburg. It was about the export of tools subject to export restrictions, worth a few thousand euros, from Germany to Russia.

The court justified the dismissal of the charges, among other things, by the fact that the customs had not been able to advise the companies on whether a certain product was subject to export restrictions, when the companies repeatedly asked about them.

When the companies had been instructed by customs to make an export declaration in an unclear situation, the district court considered that the defendants could not have intended to commit a regulatory crime on the basis that they had made an open export, i.e. made an export declaration in the customs' electronic system.

Defense supplies the export crime involved equipment called Skynet, which Luminor had bought in Taiwan. They are devices designed to stop unmanned aerial vehicles, worth almost 400,000 euros.

Luminor sold the equipment to Kazakhstan without the required permit for the export of supplies, and it was suspected that they might have ended up in Russia's military operations.

The court stated that the supplies had been transported through Russia, but in the case there was not sufficient evidence that the destination of the goods was Russia. However, Temin was guilty of a crime by taking the supplies from Finland. The punishment was increased by the fact that the transit was carried out through Russia, which is waging a war of aggression, and which is subject to significant export sanctions.

The court gave eight months for this crime alone and one month for the regulation crime, thus a total of nine months suspended.

The court also pointed out that the prosecutor always has the burden of proof, and the evidence threshold cannot be lower than normal in such cases because it is difficult to obtain evidence.

The prosecutor demanded that Temini be banned from doing business, which the court did not agree to.