Moscow court orders four critics to pay Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska 40 million rubles in defamation case
Moscow’s Tagansky District Court has ruled partly in Oleg Deripaska’s favor in his defamation lawsuit against Anti-Corruption Foundation investigators Maria Pevchikh and Sergey Yezhov, former Popular Politics host Irina Alleman, and human rights activist Olga Romanova, the businessman’s lawyer, Alexey Melnikov, told Interfax.
Melnikov said the court found that the information the defendants had circulated was false and defamatory. The court also ordered the defendants to pay 40 million rubles in compensation.
Deripaska had sought 1 billion rubles from Pevchikh, Yezhov, Alleman, and Romanova.
In his lawsuit, Deripaska alleged that for several years, “the defendants have been waging a large-scale campaign against him to tarnish his honor and good name.”
The lawsuit stemmed from a video titled “Organized Crime, Officials, Girls: The Criminal Biography of Oleg Deripaska” on the Navalny Live YouTube channel. The video’s description calls Deripaska “an oligarch for whom crime has always been the norm.”
Oleg Deripaska has repeatedly sued the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In August 2022, he filed a lawsuit against Alexey Navalny, Maria 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 Deripaska’s favor. He had previously 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.”
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