Moscow court partly satisfies Rosneft lawsuit against RBK media
A Moscow court partly satisfied a lawsuit filed by Russia’s state-owned oil giant Rosneft against RBK, ordering the media holding to pay 390,000 rubles ($6,300), a TASS correspondent reported.
Rosneft had demanded to recover more than 3 billion rubles ($48.7 mln) from RBK.
The lawsuit was prompted by an article posted on the RBK’s website in April and titled: "Sechin requests government to protect Rosneft from BP." The article said that Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin was requesting the government to limit the rights of the buyers of the company’s shares slated for sale, fearing that BP might gain a blocking stake during privatization of Rosneft’s 19.5 percent share package.
Judge Ubusha Boldunov ordered RBK to remove the article, refute the report and compensate for the legal costs.
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The RBK media holding plans to appeal against the decision, its lawyer Alexei Melnikov told TASS. "We will challenge the decision, of course, but the compensation sum already inspires optimism," he said.
"The biggest recovered sum under a defamation lawsuit in Russia is 30 million rubles under the lawsuit of Alfa Bank to Kommersant and we are glad that today this record was not broken," Melnikov said.
The representatives of the media holding and the authors of the article said that the satisfaction of the lawsuit in full would deal a heavy blow to the freedom of mass media and drive the journalists to bankruptcy.
Source: TASS