ST. PETERSBURG, May 16 - RAPSI. The St. Petersburg and Leningrad Regional Commercial Court will hear on June 27 a case of antitrust law violation by major city museums, which denied an individual entrepreneur the right to conduct excursions.

The State Museum of St. Petersburg's History filed a lawsuit against the Federal Antimonopoly Service, while the Saint Isaac's Cathedral, Pavlovsk, Tsarskoye Selo (Tzar's Village) and the Peterhof Palace museum preserves have been involved in the case as third parties.

The museum is suing the watchdog for its December 2011 ruling that the museums violated competition law.

The case was initiated by a businessman whom the museums prevented from entering into excursion services contracts. The denials were partially made because the museums' contractual campaigns had ended for 2011, they said. The museums added that the businessman could not be a party to such contracts and had to act as a tourist agent under an agreement with a tour operator.

The watchdog considered the arguments groundless as the law does not ban entrepreneurs from conducting excursion activities. The regulator also holds that the entrepreneur was unable to learn through open sources the timeframe of the museums' contractual campaigns, which was one reason for the denials.