MOSCOW, February 12 (RAPSI, Olga Siverkina) – The Moscow City Court on Thursday upheld a lower court’s ruling that the telecom authority, Roskomnadzor, shall review an application for the registration of a media outlet submitted by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the court’s spokesperson Ulyana Solopova told RAPSI.

In October 2014, Moscow's Lyublinsky District Court granted in part the claim filed by Navalny’s attorney Vadim Kobzev to overturn a Roskomnadzor decision to deny registering the Alexei Navalny News Agency. The court ordered the regulator to review the application. At the same time, the court refused to instruct Roskomnadzor to register Navalny’s media outlet.

A Roskomnadzor representative said that they had not rejected the application but had simply returned the documents submitted for application purposes. Media outlets cannot be established by institutionalized persons in Russia, and Roskomnadzor had “reason to question Navalny’s legal status” when they received the documents. The telecom authority is willing to review the issue of registering Navalny’s media outlet after requesting the necessary information from the Federal Penal Service.

The plaintiff said that Alexei Navalny was establishing a media outlet to distribute information about the operation of his Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger, opposition leader and head of the Party of Progress who came in second in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election, has already been given two suspended sentences for embezzlement – five years in the Kirovles case and 3.5 years in the recent Yves Rocher Vostok case.