Russian opposition leader and head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation Alexei Navalny plans to file another lawsuit against Russia's Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, with opposition-leaning Novaya Gazeta newspaper acting as Chaika's "technical co-defendant."
"This time we are going to the Basmanny [district] court, which has not processed our lawsuits before," Navalny wrote in his blog on Monday.
This lawsuit is one of many attempts that Navalny has made to sue Chaika for defamation. Several Moscow courts refused to register his earlier lawsuits, giving various reasons for their refusals.
In December 2015 Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation released "Chaika," an investigative film that accused Chaika's family members, including his two sons, of being involved in shady business deals and various illegal activities.
Two weeks later Chaika claimed that British-American investor Bill Browder and the U.S. secret services were behind the film and claimed Navalny "played a humble role in this story" in a letter to the Kommersant newspaper.
After three Moscow courts declined to process Navalny's suits, he tried to sue the media outlets that had published Chaika's letter — the Kommersant and Vedomosti newspapers, the Ekho Moskvy radio station, the Slon news website, the RBC news agency and the Dozhd TV channel — along with Chaika, in order to have the suits processed by courts.
However, the courts also refused to process these suits, claiming that "interests of A. Navalny were not affected," he wrote in the blog on Monday. This lawsuit will include the results of a full linguistic examination of Chaika's letter to Kommersant.
"[We] had ordered a proper examination [of Chaika's letter] which proves that when the Prosecutor General talks about 'A. Navalny,' the interests of A. Navalny are affected," Navalny wrote.
Contact the author at d.litvinova@imedia.ru. Follow the author on Twitter @dashalitvinovv
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