The court satisfied Oleg Deripaska’s claim against Navalny’s associate Maria Pevchykh

The Arbitration Court of Moscow satisfied the claim of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska for the protection of honor and dignity against Maria Pevchykh, an employee of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. This is reported by “Interfax”.

The court found the information spread by Pevchy on the Internet about the businessman’s participation in mortgage auctions in the mid-1990s to be untrue and defamatory of Deripaska’s business reputation. According to the court’s decision, Pevchykh must publish a refutation of these facts on the YouTube channel “Popular Politics” and in the newspaper “Kommersant”, the businessman’s lawyer Aleksey Melnikov said.

Otherwise, a fine of 5 thousand rubles will be applied to her for each day of failure to comply with the court’s decision, the lawyer added.

The reason for the lawsuit was a February interview of Pevchy to journalist Yuriy Dudy, in which she told about Deripaska’s participation in mortgage auctions, thanks to which a number of Russian businessmen received shares in large state-owned industrial companies.

Last year, Deripaska already filed a lawsuit against Maria Pevchykh, another investigator from Navalny’s team, Georgy Alburov, and Alexei Navalny himself. Deripaska demanded the removal of a photo of him with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Japan. The photo was published in an investigation entitled “Yachts, bribes and a mistress. What Minister Lavrov is hiding.” It said that Lavrov’s relatives use private planes, houses and hotels belonging to Oleg Deripaska, and in return the Foreign Minister lobbies for the businessman’s interests.

As a result, the Russian court then took the side of the billionaire and ordered Navalny’s supporters to pay large compensation for the moral damage caused. Commenting on Deripaska’s new lawsuit, Navalny’s team stated that “they did not pay anything for the last lawsuit” and “they are not meeting now.”

• Oleg Deripaska is the former head of the company “Русский алюминим”, now he is the chairman of the supervisory board of the company “Bazovy element”, founded by him. Since April 2018, he has been under US sanctions as a person close to Vladimir Putin and financing his projects. After the full-scale invasion of Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine, Deripaska also came under the sanctions of the European Union, Great Britain and a number of other countries. Due to this, the billionaire was deprived of the citizenship of Cyprus, which he received in 2017.