Moscow court orders four critics to pay Oleg Deripaska 40 million rubles in defamation case
Moscow's Tagansky District Court has partly upheld Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska's defamation suit against four critics, awarding him 40 million rubles in compensation. He had sought 1 billion rubles.
A court in Moscow has partly sided with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in a defamation lawsuit against four of his critics. The defendants are Maria Pevchikh and Sergey Yezhov, investigators with the Anti-Corruption Foundation founded by Alexey Navalny, former Popular Politics host Irina Alleman, and human rights activist Olga Romanova. Moscow's Tagansky District Court ordered them to pay 40 million rubles in compensation. The businessman's lawyer, Alexey Melnikov, told the news agency Interfax about the ruling.
According to Melnikov, the court found that the information the defendants had circulated was false and damaging to Deripaska's reputation. Deripaska had demanded 1 billion rubles from the four, so the amount awarded is far smaller than the sum he sought.
What the case was about
In his suit, the businessman claimed that for several years the defendants had been running a large-scale campaign against him aimed at tarnishing his honor and good name. The case grew out of a video titled "Organized Crime, Officials, Girls: The Criminal Biography of Oleg Deripaska," published on the Navalny Live YouTube channel. The video's description calls Deripaska an oligarch for whom crime has always been the norm.
Earlier lawsuits
Deripaska has repeatedly gone to court against the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In August 2022 he sued Navalny, Pevchikh, Georgy Alburov and The Insider over an investigation into Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; in October 2022, Moscow's Zelenogradsky District Court ruled in his favor. He had earlier sued over an investigation by Navalny's team into his yacht vacation with Sergey Prikhodko, then a Russian deputy prime minister, and escort agency employee Nastya Rybka. In December 2024, Deripaska sued Pevchikh and Google over her statement in a Popular Politics video that the billionaire "chips in to fund a private military company."
