A millionaire Russian businessman sentenced in Boston to nine years in jail for a massive stock market hacking scheme was freed in this week’s prisoner swap, and his local lawyer says he may not have to pay restitution.

Vladislav Klyushin, 42, of Moscow, who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s military and spy networks, “was in the swap,” and the “clemency by President Biden” is unclear about any damages he still owes America, Boston attorney Maksim Nemtsev told the Herald.

“It remains to be seen if he does have to pay restitution,” Nemtsev said Friday.

The voluminous court case against Klyushin states he’s not an ordinary Russian citizen.

“The defendant is not simply one of Russia’s approximately 144 million citizens,” a pre-trial detention memo states. “He holds the below-pictured Medal of Honor, awarded in June 2020 by the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.”

A photo of the Russian Medal of Honor given to Vladislav Klyushin. (Federal court document photo)

That photo and others of key events inside Russia — including one to “commemorate Mikhail Kalashnikov,” the inventor of the AK assault weapon — show him glad-handing some of the biggest names in his government, court records state.

“The defendant is accordingly an individual with significant ties to the Russian government, and, more specifically, to parts of the Russian government engaged in defense and counter-espionage,” the memo adds, saying he was always “a serious risk to flee.”

Klyushin was sentenced last year to nine years in federal prison. He was found guilty of a $34 million computer hack of the stock market. That cyber infiltration included gaining advance notice of Tesla’s — “positive” — quarterly “draft earnings release” that allowed him to purchase stock to watch them “go up,” court records state.

They hacked into U.S. computers hunting for any advantage on what stocks to buy or sell and the timing of it all in “a global get-rich-quick scheme,” the FBI said.

Many of the illegally obtained earnings reports were downloaded through a computer server located in downtown Boston, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said when explaining why Klyushin was prosecuted here and held in the Plymouth federal prison.

“Mr. Klyushin hacked into American computer networks to obtain confidential corporate information that he used to make money illegally in the American stock market,” said Acting United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy in September of 2023. “He thought he could get away with his crimes by perpetrating them from a foreign base, hidden behind layers of fake domain names, virtual private networks, and computer servers rented under pseudonyms and paid for with cryptocurrency. He found out otherwise.”

Klyushin was arrested in Sion, Switzerland, in March of 2021 “minutes after he arrived by private jet … (as) a helicopter had been waiting on the tarmac to take him and his party to Zermatt, an exclusive ski resort nearby,” the pre-trial memo stated.

He had a “safe full of cash,” a $3.97 million luxury yacht and property in London, court records state. But now he’s free to sail again.

Ironically, the pre-trial memo was signed by then-U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Rachael Rollins, who quit her post in disgrace after a series of ethical breaches.

The Kremlin acknowledged Friday some of the Russians traded in the swap belonged to its security services, the Associated Press reports.

The AP added that while journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva and former Marine Paul Whelan were greeted by their families and President Joe Biden in Maryland on Thursday night, Putin embraced each of the Russian returnees at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, and promised them state awards and a “talk about your future.”

Klyushin was in that group.

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Vladislav Klyushin, a/k/a “Vladislav Kliushin,” was sent back to Russia in the prisoner swap. He is seen here in his Russian passport. (U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston)