The administrators of two telegram channels were sentenced to 8 years in prison each in the case of extortion from Tina Kandelaki and her husband for a “negative block”

The Khamovniki Court of Moscow sentenced Vladislav Malushenko, Yevgeny Moskvin and Aleksey Svobodenyuk, the administrators of the telegram channels Riddle and Project Scanner, to eight years in prison each in a case of extortion (paragraph “a” of Part 3 of Article 163 of the Criminal Code). It is reported by TASS.

According to investigators , in 2020, Malushenko, Moskvin and Slobodenyuk “united into an organized group to extort money from public people” and threatened to publish “defamatory information” about them on the Internet. According to the Prosecutor General's Office, the channel administrators published articles about the deputy general director of Gazprom-Media, Tina Kandelaki, and her husband, director at large of Rostec, Vasily Brovko. The information in these articles allegedly negatively covered their work and personal lives.

The defendants allegedly demanded 470,000 rubles from Brovko for deleting the posts, “threatening to post new defamatory information.” According to the prosecution, Brovko agreed to pay the money, but posts about him and his wife continued to appear in the channels.

According to Baza, during the proceedings, Malushenko, Moskvin and Svobodenyuk pleaded guilty and paid Brovko and Kandelaki three million rubles as compensation. After that, Vasily Brovko asked not to deprive the defendants of their freedom, but the prosecutor's office insisted on real terms.

The security forces began to actively pursue the administrators of Telegram channels and accuse them of extortion for “blocking negative” last year. In August 2022, journalist Alexandra Bayazitova was arrested, as well as media manager Olga Arkharova and PR person Inna Churilova. They are accused of extorting money from a top manager of Promsvyazbank. Last fall, Kirill Sukhanov, commercial director of Ksenia Sobchak's Caution Media holding, and Arian Romanovsky, former editor-in-chief of Tatler, were arrested. They allegedly extorted money from Rostec.

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