So, today the seventh hearing in the Yves Rocher case took place.
There were two prosecution witnesses. The first witness works at Russian Post as an adviser to the CEO. Unlike her colleagues, she did not overuse abbreviations, so she was easy to understand. The essence of her testimony was that she could not implicate Oleg Navalny in any crime, and did not know me at all.
The second witness was more interesting. He is the CEO of the "Multidisciplinary Processing Company"—the very company that is listed as one of the "victims" in the Yves Rocher case. It is, in effect, a state-owned company, a "granddaughter" of Vnesheconombank (a Russian state development bank).
And here is what this witness told the court:
We asked this question thirty times in different ways, and every time we got the same answer: the only information we have about the damages comes from the investigator; the amount of damages was calculated by the investigator on the basis of data that only he has.
MPC itself conducted no checks either before or after, relying entirely on the investigation. In fact, the witness repeated this point about complete trust many times.
I understand that this is hard to believe (I would not believe it myself), but there were plenty of witnesses in the courtroom :)
In the statement the witness submitted to the prosecutor's office, he said that Oleg Navalny had deceitfully induced the "Multidisciplinary Processing Company" to terminate its contract with "M-City" and enter into a contract with "Glavpodpiska." What exactly that deceit consisted of, the witness was unable to say.
The witness also refused to comment on a curious sequence of events: first, Yves Rocher filed a complaint. Then Yves Rocher said there had been no damages. Three to four days later, a complaint from MPC appeared.
And on top of everything else, at the very end of the hearing it suddenly turned out that the "Themis" system had broken down again: someone had stepped on the socket, the judge explained awkwardly. She then added that she had no way of influencing whether the hearing transcript was being recorded word for word.
People