The director of the Sobchak holding was sentenced to 7.5 years in a penal colony

A court in Moscow sentenced Kirill Sukhanov, the commercial director of Ksenia Sobchak’s “Ostrozhno, Media” to seven and a half years in a high-security prison in a case of large-scale extortion. This is reported by Kommersant.

Two other defendants — the former editor-in-chief of the Russian version of the Tatler magazine Arian Romanovsky and the former Life journalist Tamerlan Bigaev — each received seven years in a high-security colony.

Earlier, the prosecutor asked for seven and a half years in prison for them, and eight for Sukhanov.

The case was initiated at the request of the head of Rostec state corporation Sergey Chemezov.

Sukhanov, according to the investigation, allegedly demanded 11 million rubles from Chemezov for the removal of negative materials about him in the Tushite Svet Telegram channel. Bigaev was the administrator of this channel, and Romanovsky made materials for it.

Ksenia Sobchak initially called the case a “roundup on the last free editorial office in Russia”, but later apologized to Chemezov for the “actions of her colleagues”.

Commenting on the sentence to her colleagues, Sobchak wrote in her Telegram channel “Bloody Lady”: “There are no words. It’s not just injustice. It’s much more. I fulfilled everything, all the agreements, so that there was a softening. Why are you breaking people’s lives? For what? 7.5 years old ?????

• The case against the director and authors of the Tushite Svet Telegram channel is one of several other similar cases of extortion from officials and businessmen that have been brought against journalists over the past two years. So, in 2022, the police detained Alexandra Bayazitova, the host of the “Hell’s Grandmothers” blog, and the former administrators of the “Scanner Project” and Riddle telegram channels Alexei Slobodenyuk, Evgeny Moskvin, and Vladyslav Malushenko. All of them have already been sentenced. Bayazitova was given five years in a general regime colony , was found guilty of extorting 1.2 million rubles from the top manager of Promsvyazbank, Alexander Ushakov, and three administrators were sentenced to eight years in a strict-regime prison, allegedly for extorting 470 thousand rubles from the director of special assignments of “Rostech” and the husband of TV presenter Tina Kandelaka, Vasily Brovko.
• Last week, the Khamovniche court of Moscow sentenced the administrator of the Kremlin Mamkoved telegram channel Stanislav Sadovoy to two and a half years in prison – he was also found guilty of extortion from the top manager of “Rostech” Brovko.