I've lost so much

The head of PO Teplotekhnik LLC, Alexander Semchenko, filed a lawsuit against the defenders of the Khimki Forest. The company he heads is a contractor for the construction of the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway, and Semchenko, outraged that worthless environmentalists dared to interfere with deforestation, demands compensation for the losses that Teplotekhnik incurred due to equipment downtime. Semchenko promised back in July that he would “inundate” environmentalists with lawsuits. Recently, the leader of the Movement in Defense of the Khimki Forest, Evgenia Chirikova, said at a round table at RIA Novosti, where the problem of building the highway was discussed, that Semchenko was going to collect six million rubles from them. As a result, Semchenko asked for eight million. Among the defendants are Chirikova, as well as Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Kostyuchenko, who was generally present in the forest as a correspondent. Let us note that when environmentalists set up camp in the forest to observe the work, pumped up guys in masks showed up to them. Environmentalists and journalists were detained using physical force, several people were injured, in particular, Kostyuchenko’s cervical vertebrae were damaged. It is also known that Semchenko himself hired certain people to provoke environmentalists into illegal actions while in the camp. The head of the company himself admitted this in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda. Apparently, he believes that this measure is legal, as well as pitting bullies against environmentalists. In addition, we must not forget that when environmentalists demanded that the builders present documents permitting logging, they were not shown any. Semchenko himself promised to show the documents, but never showed them.

Novye Izvestia quotes one of the forest defenders, Andrei Margulev, who said that everyone who saw Semchenko’s lawsuit, especially lawyers, “are at a loss as to how the judge accepted such a claim. Such a claim will never be accepted from an ordinary person, even if there are half as many defects.” Environmentalists have already prepared an objection and will demand that the court reject the claim. In particular, according to them, work under the government contract to which Semchenko refers should have been completed before December 31, 2009. Thus, work in the Khimki forest during the period from July 14 to July 23, 2010 has nothing to do with the execution of the specified government contract. Environmentalists believe that President Dmitry Medvedev should be a defendant along with them, since it was on his orders that the deforestation work was suspended.

The lawsuit will be considered on September 23 in the Savelovsky District Court.