MOSCOW—A Russian news agency reports that a Moscow court has dropped charges against a gravely ill executive from the dismantled oil giant Yukos.
The RIA Novosti agency said prosecutors at the Simonovsky court in Moscow announced Thursday that embezzlement, tax evasion and money laundering charges against Vasily Alexanyan have been dropped "because of their expiration."
Alexanyan, who was arrested in 2006 and released on bail in 2008, suffers from AIDS, tuberculosis and is nearly blind.
He was a vice president at Yukos, whose owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year sentence on fraud and tax evasion charges and is standing trial in Moscow on embezzlement charges.
Their cases were widely seen as the Kremlin's punishment for Khodorkovsky's political ambitions.
