I'm about to tell you something important — and also illegal. Or rather, it's considered illegal specifically for me personally, so I don't give a damn about that ban. I want you to know.
On Thursday I will be on trial, which is hardly an original thing to say, because I'm being tried today as well (and even sentenced), and in fact I'm tried constantly — since the beginning of this year alone, I've already been convicted three times.
But on Thursday it will be a major trial again. It is the so-called "Yves Rocher case," in which my younger brother Oleg and I will be the defendants.
As you may remember, this case was opened in an extremely cynical way: quite openly as payback for my call to attend the unauthorized December 15 protest. The message was clear: if you think you can lead people into mass unauthorized rallies and that we won't retaliate lawlessly, you're mistaken. Within a week, the Investigative Committee announced no fewer than three criminal cases against me.
The "Yves Rocher case" was the main one, and it was actively used by the zomboyashchik (slang for state TV propaganda) and all the disgusting United Russia party hacks to spend two years attaching this phrase to the name "Navalny": "who, together with his brother, stole 50 million rubles from the French company Yves Rocher."
Gradually, the amount supposedly "stolen" dropped to 27 million rubles, but that changed nothing in substance.
www.sledcom.ru/news/362002.html
Fighting this isn't easy. You understand that it's complete nonsense. Pure nonsense, completely made up. But you also understand that any normal person will think: surely you can't just invent the theft of 27 million rubles out of thin air. Putin wouldn't expose himself like that. So there must be some kind of evidence. Or Navalny will prove in court that he's right.
Prove it, sure. In every trial over the past few years, right up to the very end, it seemed to me that they couldn't possibly convict me, because both the law and the truth were on my side.
How can they convict me in the "Kirovles" case without a financial expert review?
How can they convict me of resisting the police when anyone can see from the video that there was no resistance?
How can they convict me for shouting slogans when anyone can see in the video that I was just standing there calmly?
Quite easily. They convicted me everywhere. They watched the video, saw that there was no shouting, and then wrote in the court ruling: he shouted slogans and waved his arms. By the way, the judge in the "Yves Rocher case" will be the same Judge Korobchenko who somehow managed to spot chanting and shouting in this video.
So I won't prove anything in court. But I do want to prove it to you, which is why I'm writing this. And that's why I'm asking you to help spread this information.
So, from the very beginning we knew that Yves Rocher had been forced to file the complaint. They had worked with "Glavpodpiska" (the company through which the alleged theft supposedly took place) for five years, were satisfied with the arrangement, and now all of that work was suddenly being declared fraud.
The FSB and the Investigative Committee came to them and said: if there is no complaint, you won't be able to keep operating. We know this from the company's own employees. Yves Rocher's business depends entirely on customs, which are controlled by the FSB, and "minor problems with cargo clearance" would have buried the whole business within a month.
So they filed it — what else could they do? We're not the FSB, and we can't force them to take the complaint back.
After some time, apparently, Yves Rocher realized that they were being used not just for routine intimidation and threats, but for the outright fabrication of a political criminal case. They issued a very vague statement: "once everything is over, no one will have any doubts about our reputation." What exactly that meant was completely unclear.
Then various reports started circulating saying that Yves Rocher did not recognize any damages and was withdrawing its complaint. In particular, Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta (an independent Russian newspaper), said this many times, citing a personal conversation with the company's director, Bruno Leproux.
However, this had no formal consequences: the case moved forward, and under its cover there were seizures of documents, searches, interrogations, travel restrictions, and so on. Yves Rocher remained silent, remains silent to this day, and has made no statement other than the one linked above.
And then, at last, the long-awaited moment came when the Investigative Committee announced the "end of the investigation," and we were finally able to review the case materials. 157 volumes. When we started going through them, in one of the very first volumes we found the following sequence of documents:
A statement from the company's director asking for an inquiry into possible damages and fraud (the very same statement written at the insistent request of Investigative Committee and FSB officers).
A document in which Yves Rocher says it will conduct an internal review to determine whether there were any possible losses.
A document in which Yves Rocher officially informs investigators that there were neither direct losses nor lost profits, and that "Glavpodpiska" provided services at prices 4–15% lower than other contractors.
You didn't misread that, and you're not mistaken. This is an official letter from the company to the Investigative Committee.
When we read it, we thought we must be misunderstanding something about life itself. The Navalny brothers are accused of stealing money from a company, and the company says: nothing was stolen from us.
It was too good to be true. Whatever kind of crook, drunk and brawler, or even foreign spy Bastrykin may be, he can't be such a complete idiot as to stitch together a high-profile criminal case out of material like this.
So we were sure that in one of the final volumes — which we were only allowed to see strictly in order, and were forbidden from jumping ahead to — there had to be a document from Yves Rocher contradicting this one.
The further we got, the clearer it became that no such new document existed. This, by the way, explained one strange thing: another complainant had appeared in the case — some company called MPK — with completely absurd and incomprehensible accusations. The dates made it obvious: Yves Rocher wrote that there were no damages, and the investigators ran off to find a new "victim."
So the further we read, the more we kept asking the investigators: are you people completely out of your minds? Where is your document showing that Yves Rocher suffered damages?
And we asked one time too many: realizing there was about to be a scandal, the Investigative Committee found a wonderful solution — house arrest with the exotic and utterly illegal condition of "a ban on any comments to the media about the case." Notice this: I am allowed (through intermediaries, namely my lawyers, of course) to comment on Putin, Medvedev, Crimea, Ukraine, Kadyrov, Yakunin, Sechin, and everything else. The only thing I am officially forbidden to comment on in the media is the "Yves Rocher case."
When we saw that exact — and completely unprecedented — demand in the letter to the court, we understood for certain that we would find no new paper from Yves Rocher. There are no damages, and that is officially recorded in the case file. And the investigators now have only one task: shut us up until trial, and then the judge will help them get around this awkward problem.
So now I am saying this completely openly and officially: I don't give a damn about these bans and demands that I keep quiet. I don't give a damn about threats to turn house arrest into actual detention. I will not stay silent, and even if I prove nothing in court, I will do everything I can to prove it to you.
That is why I passed this letter to the Anti-Corruption Foundation and asked them to publish it and help me write this post. Read it for yourselves. It's very simple:
That's it. There you have the "Yves Rocher case," and there you have the so-called "theft."
I don't know what else I can do in court. I don't know of any stronger argument for my innocence and Oleg's than a letter from the alleged victim saying that it is not a victim.
I won't write anything further about the substance of the case; it's pointless now. I can only add that we are filing a criminal complaint over the prosecution of a person known to be innocent. The text is here.
What do I want from you? You can help me very simply. Read all this and tell someone else about it. My LiveJournal blog has been blocked, and Twitter, VK, and Facebook are next in line. Only a handful of media outlets remain that are not afraid to write about this.
That's exactly the calculation: only a small number of people on the internet know the truth, while the zomboyashchik (state TV propaganda) keeps hammering away with "he stole 27 million."
But you are not just "a small number of people on the internet." There are hundreds of thousands of you. There are hundreds of thousands of us. Click a button three times and talk to a couple of people, and already several million will know about this.
The guys at the Anti-Corruption Foundation even made a small website to make it easier to share this Yves Rocher calculation: http://delo.navalny.ru
If you want to help, share it wherever you can (or this post, if that's easier), send it to everyone who repeats the propaganda line about "stealing from Yves Rocher." Tell your mom. Tell your grandmother. Talk to your taxi driver.
That's all. I've said it a hundred times: there are more of us, and our strength is such that we can expose any propaganda instantly. We just have to do the work and not think that someone else will do it for us — someone with more time or more Facebook friends.
No one else will do anything — it will simply mean that your section of the front is left uncovered.
And into that gap will crawl the nasty little snout of Dmitry Kiselyov and the various Margarita Simonyans with their twitching pseudopods. No one will be to blame but you.
There is no other kind of resistance. This resistance can win, and it will.
With that, I'll end my pompous motivational speech.
My thanks in advance to everyone who helps. http://delo.navalny.ru