Opposition leader Leonid Volkov announced that he was «taking a break» as chairman of the board of ACF International. The statement was published on his telegram channel.
“Soon we will meet with colleagues and they will decide how they see the possible formats of our joint work (and see it). <…> I want to apologize to everyone whose trust I did not justify — first of all, of course, from my colleagues in the governing bodies of the FBK, from supporters and, of course, from Alexei Navalny, ”Volkov wrote.
The politician made this decision after the editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy, Alexei Venediktov, published a letter that Volkov signed in defense of banker Mikhail Fraidman, who is trying to challenge EU sanctions in court. The appeal was addressed to the office of the President of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell.
“In October 2022, I signed and sent the following letter to the office of Josep Borrell. This letter was a big political mistake. Worse, by doing so, I overstepped my authority by signing it not in my personal capacity, but on behalf of the organization. I didn’t inform my colleagues, and, therefore, set them up,” Volkov explained.
Initially, Venediktov published a collective letter asking him to lift the sanctions against Fridman — it was also signed by Volkov. The authenticity of the document was confirmed by journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, who also signed it. At the same time, yesterday Volkov replied to Venediktov’s post that his signature was “photoshopped” into the document.
After that, Venediktov published Volkov's second, already personal letter to the European Parliament. As a result, today the politician admitted that he really wrote it without warning his colleagues.
But for all that, it's impossible to ignore the elephant in the room: a letter published by Venediktov , I did not sign, my signature is photoshopped there. How and why this letter came to Venediktov in this form — I do not know.
— Leonid Volkov (@leonidvolkov) March 8, 2023
The former editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy published letters after the release of the FBK investigation that his firm received 680.5 million rubles from the Moscow City Hall for the publication of the magazine My District
The investigators assumed that some of this money was payment for public relations of the mayor's office. FBK cited as an example posts from Venediktov's blog in which he defends the results of electronic voting in Moscow and praises the organization of the mobilization by Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Similar publications were published by other people and publications that received money from the PR campaign of the My District improvement program.
In addition, FBK claimed that part of the services for publishing My District, a special issue of the Diletant magazine, is were overpriced. According to Navalny's supporters, Venediktov received 23.4 million rubles directly.
Area Sobchak, Simonyan and Venediktova. The main thing from the FBK investigation about Sobyanin's PR through propagandists
The journalist spoke about the publication of special issues about each of the 123 districts of Moscow back in April 2020, but only now confirmed that he received money for this from the mayor's office. He explained that he earned about 17 million rubles from the publication of My District, and the remaining 6 were «repayment of the loan» that he gave the company at the beginning of the pandemic.
The authorities terminated the contract with Venediktov when he years was declared a «foreign agent» — at that time there were 112 issues.
Venediktov said that he decided to publish 11 more magazines at his own expense, which «cost his family's budget a lot more than the 17 million he earned.» “I personally did not earn a dime on this project, but I consider it an excellent educational story,” the journalist emphasized.
“It hurts to see how this whole story is used by Putin’s friends of all stripes in order to try to trample on Navalny, who has been illegally in prison for more than two years, in torture conditions,” concluded Leonid Volkov.