(CJES/IFEX) – In the city of Omsk, three lawsuits entailing demands for damages totalling 1.7 million rubles (approx. US$64,000), have been filed against the newspaper “Omskoe Vremya” (“The Omsk Times”). As the editor of the newspaper, Mr. Yury Perminov, told CJES, all three claims were filed under clause 129 of the Criminal Code of the […]
(CJES/IFEX) – In the city of Omsk, three lawsuits entailing demands for damages totalling 1.7 million rubles (approx. US$64,000), have been filed against the newspaper “Omskoe Vremya” (“The Omsk Times”). As the editor of the newspaper, Mr. Yury Perminov, told CJES, all three claims were filed under clause 129 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (slander in a public statement or media).
“The 50th issue of the newspaper was issued on December 27th, 2006, and carried an article under the headline ‘Gone for a campaign for your money’ that quoted various Omsk media reports describing the activities of a regional trade and construction tycoon, Mr. Valery Kokorin,” Perminov explained. In his opinion, this article did not contain anything new; however, the compilation of facts already published in other newspapers, when presented as a whole, had a powerful effect that displeased Kokorin.
The editor said that on 12 January 2007, they were notified of Kokorin’s lawsuit, in which he claims 500,000 rubles (approx. US$19,000) in moral damages.
“Simultanoeusly with this claim, another one was filed by Kokorin. It concerns Tatiana Sablina’s article published seven years ago in our newspaper which we only now reprinted. The claimant demands the right to publish a refutation and to be paid indemnification of moral damages in the amount of 1 million rubles”, Perminov told CJES.
The editorial office received a telephone call from the city police department saying that the Office of the Public Prosecutor had received an application from Kokorin for opening a criminal case. Perminov was summoned to the police station, where he was compelled to write an explanation regarding the articles published in the newspaper.
The third claim was filed by the head of the department of internal affairs of Omsk region, Mr. Victor Kamertsel, who was offended by an article about the regional governor, reprinted from the website http://www.kompromat.ru , in which Kamertsel was mentioned. The article was reprinted in a September 2006 issue of the newspaper, but the claim was filed only in January 2007. The claimant demanded compensation for moral damages in the amount of 200,000 rubles (approx. US$7,500), with the author of the article as defendant.
Perminov associates the legal attacks on the publication with the beginning of the local campaign for elections to the Legislative Assembly of Omsk region and the City Council of Omsk, planned for 11 March.
“The claims seem very strange because, under the law, a publication does not bear responsibility for reprinting materials from other publications while indicating the sources. We are sure that all this is done with only one purpose: to freeze the accounts of our founders and to block the work of the publication during the election campaign, which will start in the media on February 11. This already happened to us during the gubernatorial elections in 2003. At that time, several claims, for a total sum of 2.5 million rubles, were filed against the newspaper. History repeats itself,” Perminov concluded.
