MOSCOW, December 17 (RAPSI) - A foundation established by Alexey Navalny, the blogger himself and his associate Lyubov Sobol have challenged in the Supreme Court an 88 million-ruble ($1.4 million) against them in a dispute with a school catering company, according to court records.
They have filed appeals against the Moscow Commercial Court’s ruling of December 2019 as well as appeal and cassation instances’ rulings of March and October 2020.
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. In March, appeals filed by Navalny and Sobol against the ruling were dismissed.
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, 2019, 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 2019.
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.