MOSCOW, October 28 (RAPSI) – The Moscow Commercial Court on Monday ordered opposition politicians Alexey Navalny and Lyubov Sobol, as well as an anticorruption NGO, to compensate 88 million rubles (about $1.4 million) to a company supplying food to schools, RAPSI learnt in the court.
Navalny was also ordered to retract and remove certain incorrect information from his YouTube channel.
Moskovsky Shkolnik, a company catering Moscow schools and residential care facilities, says it has lost a customer after the information was published.
Earlier in the day, Valentina Norbakh, the press-secretary of Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court, said the court was to hear an administrative case brought by a nonprofit organization established by opposition politician Alexey Navalny, seeking to reverse a Justice Ministry’s decision to add the foundation to the list of NGOs acting as foreign agents, on November 1.
In early October, Russia’s Justice Ministry published its respective decision based on the Federal Law on NGOs.
The fact of the organization’s conforming to the “foreign agent criteria” had been established during the monitoring of its activity conducted by the Justice Ministry’s Moscow Main Directorate, the Ministry’s official website informed at that time.
The decision to give Navalny’s foundation the status of a foreign agent was made based on evidence of its funding from abroad, the acting director of the Justice Ministry’s NGO affairs department Vladimir Titov told journalists.
The organization was to be brought to administrative liability by court if it failed to comply with legislation and refused to register as a foreign agent, according to the official.