An appeals court in the southeastern Serbian city of Nis on February 14 overturned the verdict of a lower court that had found an ex-officer of Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) guilty of money laundering and sent the case back for a retrial.
Andriy Naumov, the former head of the Main Department of Internal Security of the SBU, was sentenced by a court in Nis to one year in prison for money laundering in September after being arrested by Serbian authorities in June 2022 while he was attempting to cross into North Macedonia.
Pending his appeal, Naumov was released from custody in December after his documents were confiscated and he was banned from leaving Serbia.
Naumov denied the money-laundering charges, telling the court that 608,000 euros ($653,000) and $125,000 found in his car during the arrest was "family money" and intended to pay for a move to Istanbul. Two diamonds were also found in his possession.
Naumov has been charged in Ukraine with embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, fraud, and other charges related to the handling of state funds. According to reports, he has also been charged with treason, but the charge has not been officially confirmed.
Kyiv sent a request to Serbia for his extradition in October 2022, but the Nis court rejected it last July. Naumov has said that his safety would be endangered if he was extradited back to Ukraine.
A former general, Naumov worked in the SBU from 2019 until he was dismissed in July 2021, when he was holding the position of head of the Department of Internal Security.
Before joining the SBU, Naumov, a former prosecutor, had worked at the State Agency for the Management of the Exclusion Zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Naumov has been at the center of a number of investigations by news outlets into contraband imports and corruption.
He appeared in an investigation by Skhemy (Schemes), a joint investigative project run by RFE/RL and UA: Pershy television, into the acquisition of property considered not to be commensurate with the income of a civil servant.
The investigation found that Naumov left Ukraine just several hours before the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.