Prigogine makes a chop out of the tongue

Entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin wrote a complaint to the prosecutor’s office. He demands to punish the leading researcher of the Institute of the Russian Language. Vinogradov RAS to Irina Levontina.

The reason is her conclusions, in which she refuted the arguments of Prigozhin’s demands in lawsuits for the protection of honor and dignity against journalist Maxim Shevchenko and editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy Alexei Venediktov. The businessman accused Lewontina of “illegal actions”, which allegedly resulted in the fact that she did not have the right to use the official seal of the institute when certifying her conclusions.

The prosecutor’s office supported Prigozhin and made a submission (available to the editors), which indicated: the conclusions were prepared in private and “did not belong to the field of activity” of the research center.

Levontina is sure that they are trying to put pressure on her through a prosecutor’s check, and Prigozhin’s lawyers are seeking through the court to exclude her conclusions from the case.

The pro-Kremlin businessman is actively suing anyone whose statements, he believes, offend “his honor and dignity.” He sued opposition politician Alexei Navalny and his associates. As a result, more than 500 thousand rubles were recovered from the oppositionist, and one and a half million from Lyubov Sobol. In addition, at the request of Prigozhin, the police opened a criminal libel case against Leonid Volkov. And at the end of October, it became known that a case had been opened on a similar charge against Sobol.

The legal battle with Navalny’s associates prompted Prigozhin to file lawsuits against other opponents. Now he is suing journalists. The defendants in his lawsuits were Meduza and The Insider (both publications, according to the Ministry of Justice, are recognized as foreign agents), and Sobesednik. Prigozhin’s lawyers are considering bringing News.ru journalists to justice as well.

Now several lawsuits of the businessman are being considered in Moscow courts at once. One of them is in the Presnensky District Court.

Prigozhin was indignant that on July 18, 2020, on the air of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, Alexei Venediktov called him “the owner of the Wagner PMC.”

The plaintiff demands a refutation of this information and removal from the site. In case of refusal, he asks to establish a fine in the amount of 200 thousand rubles, as well as to recover from the defendants 30 thousand rubles a day in case of further non-execution of the court decision. The editor-in-chief of the radio station Alexei Venediktov and the editor-in-chief of the Ekho Moskvy website Vitaly Ruvinsky were appointed defendants.

The editor-in-chief of “Echo” called the words spoken on the air, which became the reason for the lawsuit, his opinion and does not see anything in them “belittling and hurting the honor and dignity of Prigozhin.” His position is just confirmed by the linguistic conclusion of Irina Levontina. “Venediktov responds spontaneously, rather briefly, setting out his personal vision of a particular problem. <…> Information about Prigogine E.V. not in an indecent form in the text, the document says. “The very information about E. Prigozhin’s connection with the Wagner PMC cannot be considered unambiguously negative.”

The expert gave a similar conclusion on Prigozhin’s lawsuit against journalist Maxim Shevchenko. The businessman demanded five million rubles for Shevchenko’s statement in a YouTube video posted at the end of August 2020. According to the lawsuit, in Shevchenko’s words, Prigozhin saw negative information that the businessman was mocking and mocking Aleksey Navalny, who was fighting for his life. But the linguist Lewontina did not find negative information about Prigogine in the form of statements of fact in the controversial fragment. Based on this conclusion, the Savelovsky Court of Moscow dismissed Prigozhin’s claim. However, the Moscow City Court overturned the decision of the first instance and returned the case back. According to the case card on the court website, the hearing is scheduled for December 6.

As Irina Levontina told Novaya Gazeta, after she prepared the first opinion on Prigozhin’s lawsuit against Shevchenko, the plaintiff’s lawyer began sending letters to her at work: he tried to find out if she really works there and whether she has the right to draw conclusions. The institute’s management confirmed that Lewontina works for them, prepared conclusions for Shevchenko in her personal capacity, noting that this is not a study of the institute itself.

Prigozhin’s lawyers did not calm down and continued to importunately collect data on the linguist. After the conclusion in the Ekho Moskvy case, the institute received another similar letter. “The Institute has repeatedly explained that these are my conclusions. According to the law, any person with special knowledge can give an opinion. And the institute certifies my signature on the documents that I am an employee of the institute,” the expert explained. And on November 1, the institute received a notification from the Khamovniki inter-district prosecutor’s office that Prigozhin had approached them with a request to conduct an investigation into the fact of the misuse of the official seal of the institute. Senior Assistant Prosecutor Tarasova asked for detailed written explanations. In response to a request from a colleague Levontina – acting. Director of the Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution “Institute of the Russian Language. Vinogradov RAS” Corresponding Member of the RAS F.B. Uspensky – wrote that “the official seal of the institute was put on the linguistic conclusions not in order to certify the text of the conclusions, but in order to verify the authenticity of her personal signature.”

However, the prosecutor’s office was not satisfied with this answer – they decided to conduct an audit anyway. “They began to find out about me, called the institute, asked for my personal data.

But my colleagues said that they can provide information only upon official request, and not by phone. They began to intimidate in every possible way. For some reason, a district police officer came to seize documents. Quite a trifling matter, but furnished as a serious process. At first it was not clear what they wanted. Whether to intimidate me, or that I refused the conclusion. At the last meeting in court, it became clear that all this was done in order to reject my conclusion as inadmissible evidence, ”Levontina believes.

In a conversation with Novaya Gazeta, Venediktov’s lawyer, Kaloy Akhilgov, confirmed that Prigozhin’s lawyers tried to exclude Levontina’s conclusion from the case, stating that the expert was closely connected with the radio station and that she was biased in carrying out the research. In addition, the plaintiff’s representatives reported that the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Khamovniki district had initiated an administrative case against Levontina “on the fact of the illegal use of the seal of a leading linguistic state institution in preparing the opinion.”

According to Akhilgov’s lawyer, Prigozhin’s lawyers did not provide any evidence of initiating a case against the linguist, so the court sent a request to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. At the same time, the judge did not exclude Levontina’s linguistic conclusion from the case. The meeting was adjourned to December 15.

“It is clear that the whole process has nothing to do with the content of the conclusion. Instead of challenging the conclusion on the merits, they write some kind of complaint. Find excellent linguists who will prove that I have some nonsense written in my conclusion. It will look more convincing, – Lewontina believes. – It’s not about me, it’s, in principle, a big problem. The situation is such that the rights of state bodies and the rights of ordinary participants in the process are unequal.”

The linguist noted that a judge or an investigation can appoint an official examination. A lawyer does not have such powers, at most he can invite a specialist to court. But the status of a specialist does not imply that he is warned of criminal liability for giving an unreliable opinion. And the courts on this basis refuse to attach expert opinions of specialists to cases.

The lawyers interviewed by Novaya Gazeta agreed that in practice the role of specialists in the judicial process is limited. For example, a specialist is not entitled to study the original materials of a criminal case and material evidence. Specialists involved by lawyers, as a rule, prepare reviews of the expert opinion already available in the case. Therefore, it is very easy for the courts to reject such conclusions, referring to the fact that the authority of a specialist does not include verification of the conclusions of the examination. Defenders face such problems in almost every case.

“Recently, judges have begun to refuse to question specialists, they refer to official expertise, and this is enough for them, they trust it. And the specialist is told that he has no experience. It comes to the ridiculous, as it was in the case of Yegor Zhukov (the court sentenced him to three years probation for allegedly public calls for extremist activities during protests against the exclusion of independent candidates from the elections to the Moscow City Duma in 2019. – Ed.). The examination was made by a person who does not have a special education. In this examination, he referred to a manual developed by linguists.

Candidates, doctors of sciences, came to the court, but the court took them all away as people who did not have sufficient qualifications.

Moreover, the author of the manual was also taken away, ”Lewontina recalled.

She also gave an example of how they put pressure on experts, bringing them to justice. Such a story happened in 2011 with the head of the chemical analytical laboratory of the Penza Research Institute of Agriculture, Olga Zelenina. She was accused of aiding a criminal community and exceeding her official powers after she gave an opinion on the “poppy case”. As a result, the Bryansk Regional Court acquitted all the defendants in the case, including Zelenina.

And so, on November 8, the prosecutor’s office issued a submission to the institute where Lewontina works, demanding that they take measures to eliminate “revealed violations”, bring all those involved to disciplinary responsibility and notify the supervisory agency of all results. The Institute is currently undergoing an internal audit. Note that there is no talk of any administrative case, and there is not a word that the conclusion was prepared in violation of the law. According to Levontina, no one from law enforcement agencies contacted her regarding the initiation of an administrative case.

“Lawyers, especially in high-profile cases, find it difficult to find a specialist, because people are afraid to get involved. Many institutions do not allow their employees to participate in expert activities: they want to avoid trouble, because we see that we receive an asymmetric response for such participation. The expert gave an opinion, and in response – unpleasant consequences, ”added the linguist.