ORYOL, June 14. /TASS/. The Uritsky District Court in Russia’s Oryol region has refused to commute the sentence of Oleg Navalny, the brother of blogger and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was handed three years and six months for fraud, the court’s spokesperson Inna Safronova told TASS.

According to her, Navalny’s defense attorney had insisted that his remaining prison sentence be replaced with a fine in accordance with Article 80 of the Russian Criminal Code.

As TASS reported earlier, on December 30, 2014, Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court had found the Navalny brothers guilty of embezzling the funds of the Yves Rocher beauty company and handed Alexei Navalny a suspended sentence of three years and six months, while Oleg Navalny had been sentenced to three years and six months in a penal colony.

He has been serving out his sentence in a penal colony in the Oryol region.

The court also ordered the Navalny brothers to pay over 4 million rubles ($65,000) in compensation in a lawsuit filed by the Multiprofile Processing Company recognized as an affected party in the embezzlement case, and also fined each brother 500,000 rubles ($8,800).

The Moscow City Court later upheld the verdict and relieved Alexei Navalny of the fine due to procedural violations.

In July 2016, the Uritsky District Court denied Oleg Navalny an early release saying that while making such decisions, the prisoner’s behavior was taken into consideration while Oleg Navalny was said to persistently breach the penal colony’s regulations which had made the colony’s administration transfer him to solitary confinement. The court reiterated this in a February 2017 decision.