Rinat Akhmetov: oligarch and libel tourist
Will Sunday’s election mark the latest stage in Ukraine’s Road from Democracy and signal the sad end to the Orange Revolution? If so, the results of what some anticipate as an anti-Orange election will be at least partly due to the influence of the country’s increasingly powerful oligarchs, not least Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man.
Akhmetov has thrown his support behind Viktor Yanukovich, the opposition leader and clear front-runner who was defeated back in 2004 by Viktor Yushchenko.
His name featured prominently in this week’s discussion of media and civil society groups’ vulnerability to punitive libel and defamation suits, held by the Center for International Media Assistance, an initiative of the National Endowment for Democracy.
“Vested political, business, and criminal interests…are increasingly using the courts to redress alleged harms, punish journalists and scare off publishers,” according to Libel Tourism: Silencing the Press through Transnational Legal Threats, a CIMA report authored by Drew Sullivan.
The meeting heard how Akhmetov employed high-powered London lawyers to sue Ukrainian news outlets, including the English language Kyiv Post and the online Ukrainian-language website Obozrevatel, over reports that he was a major figure in organized crime. At one time he went into voluntary exile in Monaco after accusations that he was personally involved in the murder of business rivals were expected to lead to criminal charges.
According to this report:
Akhmetov, the country’s richest man and member of parliament, won the judgment despite being mentioned in a report by the Chief department on organized crime titled, “Overview of the Most Dangerous Organized Crime Structures in Ukraine.” It listed him and hundreds of others. The report lists his name under a different spelling, Renat Leonidovich Akhmetov, and alternates its spellings of the group he is said to have headed. According to the report, Renat Akhmetov, born in 1966 in Donetsk, is listed as the leader of the “Renat’s” organized crime group. According to the document, “the group dealt with money laundering, financial fraud, and controlled a large number of both real and fictitious companies.” The group is listed as one whose activities “have been stopped,” and says further that their criminal natures “have not been confirmed.”
As CIMA notes, its report “explains how such lawsuits can force media organizations to censor themselves or limit the distribution of their news content, restricting freedom of expression and thus threatening one of the foundations of democracy.”
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