High rank Karelian officials are at law with the press
Mar 5, 2010
Lyudmila Kosyuk, the head of Karelian governor's administration, and Victor Asanov, the chief of the economic board of Karelian governor's administration, have lodged with the city court of Petrozavodsk legal claims against the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets v Karelii (MKK) for circulating what she believes to be “libelous” information.
The underlying publication by Svetlana Lysenko “Hospitality for the Chosen”, describes the privatization of state property by top-ranking government officials in the republic. For that purpose, they set up a company, “Hospitality”, which took over from the administration the management of a number of government sites, such as a government hotel, a state reception villa, several countryside houses, etc. In the course of an independent investigation, journalists have established that the hands-changing procedure was preceded by the allocation from the republic’s budget of astronomic sums for reconstruction and repairs; and that administration officials have been building private cottages instead of state-owned dachas, with part of the costs financed from the republic’s budget again. A close study of the biography of L. Kosyuk brought to light another unseemly story: working in a high school at one time, she had abused her official position by taking food products free of charge from the school canteen.
Lyudmila Kosyuk wants MKK to refute the information about her pedagogical past while staying cool about some much more serious abuses cited by the newspaper. (But the article’s author, feeling that legal claims were likely to follow, collected written evidence from the former director of the canteen of the high school Kosyuk used to work at.) The plaintiff is claiming RUR 300,000 from MKK and RUR 200,000 from S. Lysenko in moral damage compensation.
The newspaper, for its part, continues investigating the reasons for the administration’s strange attitude towards government assets being transferred to private ownership.
Victor Asanov, the chief of the economic board of Karelian governor's administration, has also submitted the claim to Petrozavodsk city court against the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets v Karelii (MKK). He has morally suffered after the newspaper published the fact concerning his private summer residence to which the power cable in cost of 170 thousand budgetary roubles had been laid at public expense.
The deputy of parliament of Karelia Victor Stepanov who once was the head of the republic named such actions of high-ranking officials of governor's administration shamelessness demanding to carryi out parliamentary hearing about the way the republican authorities dispose state property.
Anatoly Tsygankov,
Glasnost Defense Foundation staff correspondent
