The Moscow Arbitration Court approved a settlement agreement in the case brought by Renova-StroyGroup CJSC and Megastroy LLC (also part of the Renova group) against BFM.RU LLC, which owns the business news web portal, and the publication’s journalist Olga Karaulova on the protection of business reputation, RIA Novosti reports .

The construction companies demanded to refute the information about claims allegedly filed against them by defrauded shareholders in Shcherbinka and Ivanteevka near Moscow, which discredited their business reputation, and to recover 100 thousand rubles from the media and the journalist in equal shares.

As a result, the parties agreed that the defendant would publish the agreed text of the refutation and stop disseminating information discrediting the plaintiffs, for which purpose the fragment about Renova would be removed from the text of Karaulova’s article, which became the cause of the dispute. The plaintiffs, in turn, waived their claim for compensation for material damage.

Judge Tatyana Vasilyeva, after announcing the decision, informed the parties that it would come into force immediately, and a refutation should be published no later than tomorrow. A representative of the plaintiffs at earlier stages of the process stated in court that his clients were ready to enter into a settlement agreement if the article that led to the filing of the lawsuit, as well as a later note on the same topic, were removed from the defendant’s website.

The representative of the defendants told the court that her clients conducted pre-trial negotiations with the applicants and developed a text of a refutation, which, according to her, satisfied both parties and was published on the portal on October 15, 2009. In turn, the plaintiffs’ representative explained that this text differs from the one approved by Renova’s lawyers.

Renova-StroyGroup is a development division of the Renova group of companies, a Russian business structure owned by Viktor Vekselberg and specializing in asset management.

Renova's development structures agreed to a settlement with a journalist