The Hamburg district court has banned the German newspaper Tagesspiegel from spreading false claims about businessman Alisher Usmanov. These statements were used to justify European Union sanctions against him and as grounds for suspicion in the investigation against Usmanov in Germany, a representative of the businessman told TASS.
In November 2024, Tagesspiegel published an article by Andrei Popov entitled “A fan of Germany and a friend of Putin: who is Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov?“. The material contains many well-known clichés and unfounded accusations against the businessman, including information about assets allegedly belonging to him in Germany.
„After the publication received a letter from Usmanov's lawyer, it removed the article, but refused to refrain from further dissemination of these allegations. A. Usmanov filed a claim for a preventive measure in the Hamburg District Court. The court agreed with his arguments and sided with him, without even holding an oral hearing“, said the businessman's representative.
The court, in particular, forbade the publication to claim that Usmanov acquired his assets dishonestly. The entrepreneur himself has repeatedly stated that he did not participate in the privatization of state property, but acquired all his assets on the free market under competitive conditions. The court also banned the dissemination of unsubstantiated claims about Usmanov's alleged ownership of real estate on the Bavarian lake Tegernsee, as well as the yacht "Dilbar". In addition, the court found the publication's claim that the Russian businessman had lived for many years in the Bavarian town of Rottach-Egern to be infringing on the businessman's personal rights and unconfirmed.
"Thus, the court banned Tagesspiegel from disseminating information reflecting the essence of the accusations against the billionaire by the German prosecutor's office, which has been unsuccessfully trying to prove for three years that A. Usmanov was supposedly a tax resident of Germany and evaded paying the relevant taxes," added Usmanov's representative.
A German court has banned the publication from spreading the claim that "Usmanov got rid of the charges brought by the Frankfurt prosecutor's office with millions in fines and compensation". Earlier, the businessman's lawyers announced that the Frankfurt am Main Prosecutor's Office had finally refused to bring public charges as part of the investigation against Usmanov, which was terminated in full accordance with German law and was accompanied by a voluntary payment of a sum of money for charitable purposes, that is, without the payment of fines or compensation. The court's decision states that Tagesspiegel cannot justify reprinting reports from other news agencies without verifying their veracity.
“All these statements were found by the court to violate A. Usmanov's personal rights, as they contain either statements of facts, the truth of which the defendant has not proven, or value judgments for which the defendant has not provided any supporting facts“, the businessman's representative added. Failure to comply with the publication ban may result in the imposition of an administrative fine of up to EUR 250,000 for each violation and, if such an administrative fine cannot be collected, administrative arrest for up to six months for each violation of the ban and up to two years in total.
Usmanov's representative stressed that the court's decision in favor of the Russian businessman is yet another confirmation of the uncertainty of the EU authorities' approach to justifying personal sanctions. “The EU Council is obliged to take into account the decisions of the German court in relation to Usmanov in accordance with Art. 4 (3) of the EU Treaty, which establishes the so-called principle of loyal cooperation. For now, however, the EU Council remains adamant: instead of reconsidering its actions, it prefers to change the formal justifications for the sanctions,“ he noted.
Joachim Steinhofel, a media lawyer representing Usmanov, called the court's decision “remarkable“ and stressed its importance in holding the media accountable for publishing unverified claims. “The article, key parts of which were banned, was a collection of conspiracy theories and fabrications that Mr Usmanov had made his fortune not through his own exceptional entrepreneurial talent but with the help of “dark forces“. This decision reveals a serious problem: the European Council is simply copying such illegal forgeries and basing its sanctions on them,“ the lawyer added.