Businessman Oleg Deripaska withdrew his lawsuit against The Bell founder Elizaveta Osetinskaya after she deleted fragments of an interview with Olga Romanova, head of the Sitting Rus' Foundation. Deripaska's lawyer Alexey Melnikov reported this to TASS.
According to the lawyer, Osetinskaya was influenced by the threat of paying a penalty and the “possible imposition of legal costs.”
In an interview with the “This is Ossetian” channel, human rights activist Olga Romanova said that Deripaska has two PMCs. The billionaire considered these words invalid and discrediting his reputation.
Deripaska filed a claim for protection of honor and dignity against both Romanova and Osetinskaya. Initially, he demanded that the founder of The Bell delete the video interview completely. For each day of non-compliance with the court decision, the businessman asked for a penalty of 10 thousand rubles.
Osetinskaya and the Center for the Protection of Media Rights confirmed the removal of a fragment from the interview: “The interview has already received decent coverage among the business audience, collecting more than 100 thousand views. Additional attention was attracted to him, among other things, by the information itself about Oleg Deripaska’s lawsuit, triggering the well-known “Barbra Streisand effect.” As a result, the lawyers of the Center for the Protection of Media Rights and I We decided that we would save the two-hour interview on YouTube by sacrificing a ten-second snippet.”
As Melnikov noted, the claims against Romanova, on the contrary, have been expanded. “Now we also dispute her words in an interview with journalist [Katerina] Gordeeva. We ask the court to recognize the information as untrue and oblige Romanova to publish a refutation on her Twitter account, as well as impose a court fine on her if she does not do this voluntarily,” explained Deripaska’s lawyer. The hearing will take place on December 6 in the Tagansky District Court of Moscow.
“The plaintiff insists that in Russia PMCs are not legally permitted, and also refers to judicial practice in relation to a certain citizen P., who was also credited with creating PMCs and who managed to prove in court that this information is defamatory,” journalists from The Bell previously wrote, suggesting that we are talking about the founder of the Wagner PMC, Evgeniy Prigozhin.
Prigozhin claimed until September last year that is not involved in a private military company, and filed lawsuits against publications and journalists publishing his name in the context of Wagner PMC. Later, the businessman renounced some of his claims.