The democratic party YABLOKO has happily joined the campaign of “collecting large sums of money from Navalny to stop him from working.” Every lawsuit against me, no matter how absurd, gets upheld by the court; “Navalny must lose in court” is one of the regime’s basic pillars. So the line has formed: from Neverov, Liksutov, and Kirovles to the drug-addicted deputy Lisovenko. Now YABLOKO has tagged along too.
Tomorrow, the Lyublinsky District Court will hold a hearing on their lawsuit against me. They are demanding 1,000,000 rubles.
The essence of the claim is this: YABLOKO did not like the phrase from this post: “the local YABLOKO branch was bought by a local oligarch who had just left United Russia, and it will devote its campaign to going after us using this oligarch’s money. They’ve already started.”
I won’t spend long discussing the YABLOKO people’s propagandistic nature—it’s obvious. These guys may carry out all sorts of minor assignments for the Kremlin (like working for Moscow City Hall in the last Moscow City Duma elections, when they were even coordinating candidate lists with Sobyanin’s crooks, as RBC reported), and although the media still tells plenty of lies about them, they are the ones running to court to sue me.
To address the substance of the matter: I stand by my words. Everything is exactly as I said, and every dog in Kostroma Region knows it.
YABLOKO says that the leader of its list, Kostroma oligarch Vladimir Mikhailov, left the United Russia party in 2011. That is true.
But what I said was: “had recently left United Russia.” That is the plain truth. Mikhailov remained in the United Russia faction until quite recently. More than that, when Mikhailov was expelled from the faction (the local United Russia members had a falling-out and started expelling one another), he went to court demanding reinstatement in the United Russia faction. That’s how deeply attached he was to them.
Let’s see whether he is an oligarch.
Here is a list of Mikhailov’s legal entities:
FEST is a huge holding company with numerous contracts with healthcare institutions and customs authorities. Mikhailov is one of the richest people in Kostroma Region; everyone knows that.
The campaign budget spent by YABLOKO with Mikhailov’s list was second only to United Russia’s budget. All the other parties—not to mention PARNAS—were left far behind.
As for the ridiculous demand to award this party “a million for moral damages”:
A legal entity can seek compensation for losses, but under the law it cannot be awarded compensation for moral harm.
Could it be that my cruel post caused donors, who had been filling the coffers of Kostroma’s YABLOKO branch, to turn away from it?
Let’s look at the second-quarter report: not a single citizen or organization donated a single ruble. So what losses could there possibly be?
YABLOKO exists at our expense, receiving 247,755,970 rubles a year from the state budget.
Next. Since YABLOKO was an electoral association in the election, negative information about it also constitutes campaign speech:
Citizens decide for themselves whom they will vote for—that is the whole point of elections.
In that sense, there is no need even to cite European Court of Human Rights case law to demonstrate the legal bankruptcy of this claim: “the limits of acceptable criticism are wider with regard to politicians as such than with regard to a private individual. Unlike the latter, the former must display a greater degree of tolerance of the close scrutiny of journalists and society as a whole, of his every word and deed” (ECHR judgment in Lingens v. Austria, July 8, 1986).
That is exactly what my representative will be talking about in court tomorrow, although who in that courtroom really cares. Still, at least you’ll know.