A libel case was opened against the founder of the Smotra.ru community, Erik Kituashvili.

A third criminal case has been opened against the founder of the Smotra.ru automobile community, Eric Kituashvili. He was suspected of slander, coupled with an accusation of committing grave or especially grave crimes (Part 5 of Article 128.1 of the Criminal Code), according to the website of the Moscow Investigative Committee.

On February 22, 2016, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow considered the police petition to arrest Kituashvili. According to investigators, he wanted to spread deliberately false information and make it public through journalists who were in the courtroom: Kituashvili “publicly stated that some heads of departments of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow jointly gave a bribe to the head of the capital’s police headquarters on an especially large scale for the appointment to the positions they fill."

The investigation believes that in this way the founder of Smotra.ru disseminated deliberately false information that discredits honor and dignity and undermines the reputation of Moscow police officers.

Kituashvili is a defendant in two more criminal cases: fraud on an especially large scale and the laundering of money stolen from an insurance company. His common-law wife Anna Kaganskaya is an accomplice in the first case. The amount of damage caused to the insurance company exceeded seven million rubles.

The investigation believes that Kituashvili and his accomplices staged the theft of three cars and, by providing false documents to the insurance company, received compensation for the allegedly stolen and insured foreign cars. During the investigation of this case, it turned out that money was transferred from the bank accounts of the defendant to the current account of an organization controlled by him for use in financial and economic activities.