Of course I won

The Zamoskvoretsky Court of Moscow partially satisfied the claim of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and the Moscow government for the protection of honor and dignity against the co-chairman of the United Democratic Movement "Solidarity" Boris Nemtsov and the Kommersant newspaper. Luzhkov demanded five million rubles from the defendants, the court ruled that they must pay the plaintiffs 500 thousand each. In addition, according to the court decision, the defendants will need to refute the information they disseminated - in particular, the phrase from Nemtsov’s brochure “Luzhkov. Results” that corruption permeates almost all spheres of activity of the executive branch in Moscow.

Luzhkov called everything stated in the brochure a complete lie. The mayor demanded that the newspaper refute Nemtsov’s quoted opinion: “I believe that Luzhkov is a corrupt official and a thief, but I am not!” It is not entirely clear, however, how one can refute the fact that Nemtsov thinks so.

As Nemtsov’s lawyer Vadim Prokhorov told the Daily Journal, the plaintiffs’ side did not help the judge much in his task of making a decision against the defendant: according to him, representatives of Luzhkov and the government “formulate their demands strangely, find excerpts from the text in a strange way and justify their position in a strange way , which, by and large, boils down to one thing: in general, we do not dispute the facts, but you should have given them a different assessment, and it would be better not to say anything about them at all or to say: the government and the mayor are doing a good job.” Representatives of the plaintiffs admitted the facts of cutting down trees, providing benefits to the Inteko company, owned by Luzhkov’s wife Elena Baturina (although even on this point, according to Prokhorov, the plaintiffs could fight), recognized the fact of social stratification in Moscow, but at the same time talked about the provision of social support to various segments of the capital's population. The judge was perplexed by the method of refuting the information that the plaintiffs insisted on: print it in a certain printed publication in the territory in the amount of 200 thousand copies.

At the hearing on November 26, the court refused, at the request of the lawyer, to order a linguistic examination of Nemtsov’s statements. The defendants asked to check six phrases that appeared in the statement of claim. In their opinion, the phrases were taken out of context and devoid of value judgments.