Republic: RBC will apologize to Rosneft for the article about Sechin and the request to the government

Rosneft and RBC will sign a settlement agreement on June 26 in the case of protecting business reputation, two sources familiar with the situation told Republic.

According to one of the publication’s interlocutors, under this agreement RBC will apologize to Rosneft and will not assume any other obligations, and the oil company will waive financial claims.

Another Republic source claims that the new owner of RBC, Grigory Berezkin, negotiated with Rosneft. Representatives of Berezkin and RBC did not comment on this.

The reason for the lawsuit was the article “Sechin asked the government to protect Rosneft from BP.” It claimed that the head of the Russian company, Igor Sechin, sent a request to the government to prohibit future participants in the privatization of the state-owned company from entering into a shareholder agreement with BP, fearing that this organization would receive a blocking stake in Rosneft.

Rosneft demanded more than 3 billion rubles as compensation for the damage that the company allegedly suffered due to the publication. The court of first instance ordered compensation in the amount of 390 thousand rubles, the second completely refused to satisfy Rosneft’s financial claims against RBC.

At the same time, by court decision, RBC “painted over” the statements disputed by Rosneft, instead of words in the publication there were black squares. At the same time, the refutation article clarifies exactly which phrases RBC painted over.

A refutation was published in March, and in May Rosneft challenged the appeal decision, considering that RBC “mocked” it. In the middle of the next month, RBC changed its owner: Mikhail Prokhorov’s ONEXIM sold the media holding to the structures of Evgeny Berezkin, owner of Komsomolskaya Pravda and the Moscow newspaper Metro.

Updated at 17:00 Interfax reports that the plaintiff and defendant in court petitioned for a settlement agreement; it is expected that the court will approve the agreement on June 26.

Updated at 17:20 The court approved the settlement agreement between the parties.