MOSCOW, OCTOBER 29 - A Russian court has condemned activist and opponent Alexei Navalny and his allies to pay over 1.2 million euros in total, as compensation, for defaming a catering company at multiple public schools in Moscow.
The arbitral tribunal has indeed ordered Navalny, the Anti-Corruption Fund and Lyubov Sobol - 'godmother' of last summer's protests - to each pay over 400 thousand euros in damages. The spokeswoman for Navalny, Kira Yarmysh, said this.
For the Kremlin's critics, this is nothing more than yet another blow to Navalny - which dedicated a video-inquiry to the shoddy food scandal in Moscow's schools - and to its supporters, already harassed by multiple searches and an accusation of more than 13 million euros in money laundering. Navalny rejected the sentence. "The cases of dysentery have been demonstrated and documented, but we have to pay," he wrote on social media. This is reported by several Russian media.