Deripaska sued the head of the investigation department of Navalny’s team

Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska filed a lawsuit in the Moscow Arbitration Court for the protection of honor and dignity against the head of the investigative department of Navalny’s team Maria Pevchykh. In the lawsuit, Deripaska demands to refute the publication of information about his participation in mortgage auctions in the mid-1990s, thanks to which a number of businessmen received shares in large state-owned industrial companies.

Last year, the businessman already filed a lawsuit against Maria Pevchy, 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.
• In 2018, Alexei Navalny released an investigation into how Deripaska rested on a yacht with the then Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Sergei Prykhodko, in what the opposition saw as a conflict of interest. The publication became widely known due to the fact that Nastya Rybka, an employee of the escort agency, rested on the yacht together with the billionaire and the official.