Jury selection is scheduled to begin in federal court in Boston in the case of Vladislav Klyushin, 42, who before his arrest in Switzerland in 2021 owned a Moscow-based information technology company with ties to the Russian government.
Prosecutors say Klyushin's company, M-13, not only did work for Putin's administration but also employed a former Russian military intelligence officer wanted by the U.S. government for his alleged involvement in hacking schemes aimed at interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. U.S. authorities say the hacker, Ivan Ermakov, while working for Klyushin helped infiltrate the networks of two firms that help publicly traded companies file reports with securities regulators to download yet-to-be-announced financial reports.
Klyushin's lawyers say he was already wealthy before the alleged conduct occurred and that the government's evidence linking any trades he placed to the hacked information suffers from"serious flaws."