Ukrainian prosecutors are preparing charges against the director of a winery in Russia-occupied Crimea for uncorking a 240-year-old bottle for Vladimir Putin and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The Russian president and his old friend spent last weekend in Crimea, touring ancient ruins and visiting the peninsula's prized Massandra winery.
Massandra, which has been nationalised after Russia's annexation of Crimea last year, has many bottles of rare wine dating back more than 200 years in its collection.
Russian television showed Mr Berlusconi examining a bottle from the cellars and asking the winery's director if he could try it.
Ukrainian media quoted prosecutors for Crimea saying they are looking into filing embezzlement charges against the winery's director who gave the valuable bottle to Mr Berlusconi.
When the winery was Ukrainian property, two separate presidential decrees were required to approve the sale of vintage wine from its collection. That means that under Ukrainian law, giving a bottle as a gift without Ukrainian presidential permission would amount to theft. The charges would be moot as Russia currently has full control over Crimea.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article