You’ve probably heard:
Businessman Vladlen Stepanov has filed a lawsuit against well-known blogger Alexei Navalny in Moscow’s Lyublinsky District Court. The plaintiff believes Mr. Navalny knowingly spread false information linking him to the theft of 5.4 billion rubles from the Russian state budget. Mr. Stepanov is demanding 1 million rubles in damages and asking the court to freeze the blogger’s assets in that amount for the duration of the proceedings. According to the lawsuit filed by Vladlen Stepanov on June 29, Mr. Navalny disseminated false information “in a humiliating form.” The plaintiff argues that he was accused of involvement in “several serious crimes,” and that details of his private life, travel, and property ownership were “distorted beyond recognition.” The grounds for the lawsuit were a post on Alexei Navalny’s blog dated April 18, 2011.
They’re talking about this post on my LiveJournal:
You owe it to yourself to spend 14 minutes on this video
and this video:
Here’s what I’d like to say:
Yes, the lawsuit is real. After yesterday’s media reports, one of my staff went to the post office and picked it up.
The hearing on the merits is scheduled for August 2. The full text of the lawsuit can be viewed here.
In the lawsuit, Vladlen Stepanov writes resentfully that he paid to place open letters to me in various media outlets several times, but “Navalny could not be bothered to reply.” That’s true — I didn’t reply, unfortunately. Here is the text of the first letter:
To Navalny — from an untouchable.
And here is the second:
In short, Stepanov says he divorced his wife long ago, earned all the money himself, and that the luxury real estate belongs to him alone. His wife, he says, has nothing to do with the money. The same thing is stated in the lawsuit against me:
The million is being demanded only from me, even though V. Stepanov suffers not only from reading my post, but feels particular bitterness from reading the comments on it as well:
Better late than never, so I’d like to respond to Vladlen Stepanov’s open letters. Though in light of the upcoming trial, I’m forced to do so in a restrained manner:
Vladlen,
Like any citizen of Russia, I have the right to put forward theories about the involvement of particular people in crimes — especially in a case as high-profile as the “Magnitsky case” (the case surrounding lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s death and alleged tax fraud).
The version put forward by Browder, Firestone, and others is based on irrefutable documents made available for public scrutiny, and I have no reason to doubt it.
So my views about you and your wife have not changed.
On the contrary, they only became stronger after I read your explanations.
When I was in school and hadn’t done my homework, I came up with far more believable stories to excuse myself than the ones you are telling.
Just look:
I have a wife. We’ve been living together for 11 years. And if tomorrow, for some reason, I decide to convince everyone that I divorced her 10 years ago, that would be rather difficult, because it would be easy to establish that
- we live in the same place - we run a household together - we fly together and travel by train together - we vacation together / stay in hotels together - we have given each other powers of attorney for our cars - countless witnesses see us together all the time
and so on and so forth
Proving that a divorce or marriage is fictitious is a very common matter and relatively straightforward.
I hope that when you and your wife, along with all the other persons involved, end up in the dock, the court will have no trouble sorting that out.
In any case, all your claims that you personally bought the luxury property in Dubai with your own money, and that your wife Olga Stepanova had nothing to do with it, are completely undermined by the fact that at the same time, two of your wife’s deputies bought property in the very same development.
Or do they also have businessman husbands who divorced them 15 years ago?
You write that you have “stopped living the life of an ordinary person.”
That’s true, except it happened not after my post, but after the remarkable coincidence of 5 billion rubles in taxpayers’ money being stolen and the beginning of a luxurious life for you and your wife.
And after Magnitsky was tortured to death in prison, all the persons involved not only “stopped living the life of ordinary people,” but lost every last trace of human decency.
You, Vladlen, are lucky. Browder and Magnitsky’s relatives have been deprived of any effective way to pursue you in a Russian court. Your assets have been frozen by a court in Lausanne.
There, you are guaranteed far fairer justice than Sergei Magnitsky received, as he was slowly killed under the cheerful smirks of investigators, prosecutors, and judges of Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court.
So enjoy it while you can.
But know this: one day, in our country too, you will answer for everything.