Italy agrees to transfer Russian suspect to United States

MILAN (Reuters) – An Italian court on Tuesday agreed to hand over to U.S authorities a Russian national who has been accused of offences including shipping oil from Venezuela in breach of sanctions.

Milan appeals court said in a statement on Tuesday it had agreed to the extradition of Artem Uss, but only on two of the four counts with which he is charged in the United States.

His lawyer, who could not immediately be reached for comment, could now lodge an appeal to Italy’s top court to try to prevent his client from being sent across the Atlantic.

Judges gave the green light to extradite Uss, who was detained at Milan’s Malpensa aiport on an international arrest warrant last October and is now under house arrest, on charges of violating an embargo against Venezuela and for bank fraud.

However, the Italian appeals court ruled against handing over the Russian for the alleged crime of smuggling military technology from the United States to Russia and that of money laundering.

The judges wrote in the statement that they refused extradition due to lack of evidence for the first charge and the issue of “double jeopardy” for the second.

U.S. prosecutors last year charged Uss and four other Russian citizens with shipping military technologies bought from U.S. manufacturers to Russian buyers, some of which ended up on the battlefield in Ukraine.

They used a German company to ship the military technologies, as well as Venezuelan oil, to Russian purchasers, prosecutors said.

(Reporting by Emilio Parodi; Editing by Keith Weir and Sandra Maler)