MOSCOW, January 17 (RAPSI) – A foundation established by Alexey Navalny has filed an appeal against a ruling ordering recovery of 88 million rubles ($1.4 million) from the opposition blogger and his associate Lyubov Sobol in favor of a company supplying food to schools, RAPSI has learnt in the Moscow Commercial Court.

In 2019, the court issued its ruling in favor of Moskovsky Shkolnik. 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, claimed it had lost a customer after the information was published.

On November 1, Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court, upheld a decision of the Justice Ministry to add the nonprofit organization created by Navalny to the list of NGOs acting as foreign agents.

Russia’s Justice Ministry published its respective decision based on the Federal Law on NGOs in early October.

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.