Moscow’s Court of Arbitration has turned down 11 million roubles ($370,000) defamation suit, filed by businessman Aleksandr Lebedev’s National Reserve Bank, or NRB, against Kommersant publishing house.

Lebedev wanted to sue journalist Vladimir Trifonov and Darya Yurisheva for the article titled NRB Returns Income to Shareholders, published in Kommersant daily on 4 March 2011.

NRB claimed that the article in Kommersant contained information “damaging for the reputation of the bank”. NRB brought the libel action, demanding that Kommersant pay 10 million roubles in damages to the bank and 1 million to Lebedev, and publish a refutation. Earlier the plaintiff said that Irina Kireeva, chairman of the board of Russian Capital bank, had been accused of siphoning assets, and NRB had nothing to do with the fraud scheme. 

The representative of Kommersant said that the plaintiff’s claims were “ungrounded”, because “there was no defamatory information in the fragments [of the article] in question”. In October the Court of Arbitration dismissed two libel lawsuits, filed by Lebedev against Kommersant. NRB lost another libel suit against Kommersant publishing house on 7 November. The bank sought 10 million roubles in damages.