MOSCOW, September 12 - RAPSI. The Moscow City Court rejected an appeal launched by opposition leader Alexei Navalny of a lower court's decision to impose against him a 100,000 ruble ($3,170) compensatory judgment in favor of businessman Vladlen Stepanov in the latter's defamation lawsuit, Navalny's attorney Ramil Akhmetgaliyev told the Russian Legal Information Agency (RAPSI/rapsinews.com).

The attorney clarified that they had only just been informed of a mistake in Navalny's name in the appeal they filed in early July. Furthermore, the documents have not been returned to them.

Akhmetgaliyev believes this may have been due to a mistake made by the court's registry.

The Moscow district court ordered Navalny to pay Stepanov 100,000 rubles ($3,170) for defamation on October 17, 2011.

The plaintiff sought over 1.1 million rubles ($34,880) from the blogger based on an entry he had posted on Live Journal. Stepanov's attorney Andrey Muratov told RAPSI that Navalny had posted an article and a video concerning the theft of public funds and Stepanov's alleged involvement in the affair on his Live Journal page.

Muratov said the article in question also mentioned the controversy surrounding Sergei Magnitsky, a consultant for Hermitage Capital Management, who died in a pretrial detention center on November 16, 2009.

The trial court declared that the blogger's article which alleged Stepanov's involvement in corrupt dealings and the video on his Live Journal page were unfounded.

The court partially upheld Stepanov's lawsuit and order Navalny to pay moral damages to him.

Navalny is a minority shareholder in several major Russian state-owned companies. In 2010, he filed several lawsuits against these companies for access to corporate information. The companies, however, argued these claims were nothing more than an abusive fishing expedition for harmful information against them. The minority shareholder revoked his lawsuits against Inter RAO UES and Sberbank after the organizations submitted him the data he requested. The Moscow Commercial Court upheld Navalny's lawsuits against Rosneft and Transneft, ordering them to provide him with the protocols of the directors' board meetings.