MOSCOW, March 10 (RAPSI) – Appeals filed by Alexey Navalny and his associate Lyubov Sobol against a ruling ordering them to pay 88 million rubles ($1.4 million) in favor a company supplying food to school have been dismissed, according to the records of the Ninth Commercial Court of Appeals.

In late 2019, the Moscow Commercial 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.