MOSCOW, October 2 (RAPSI) – The Lyublinksy District Court of Moscow has granted a defamation lawsuit filed by businessman Sergey Mikhailov against Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, RAPSI correspondent reports from the courtroom on Monday.

The court found information contained in the article “After all Putin did gift watches to S. Mikhailov” defamatory and ordered Navalny to delete the article within a week and to compensate legal costs in the amount of 16,000 rubles (about $277). Mikhailov was called “a head of Solntevsky organized criminal group” in the article.

This was not the first legal dispute between Mikhailov and Navalny. On August 7, the court dismissed his lawsuit against Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation regarding the “Chaika” article, published on the Foundation’s website, calling Mikhailov a gangster.

The court refused to declare this information libel and to oblige Navalny and the Foundation to publish refutation as well as to collect 250,000 rubles (about $4,200) in moral damages and 20,000 rubles (about $330) in court expenses from each defendant.

On September 19, the court granted a defamation lawsuit filed by the Foundation for support of socially relevant government projects (Sotzgosproject) against Navalny. The court ordered Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation to retract information stating that businessman Alisher Usmanov gave a bribe to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev by gifting the latter’s charity foundation. In addition, the defendants were also ordered to retract claims stating that the plaintiff was involved in a criminal scheme and that it is not conducting actual charity.

On May 31, the Lyublinsky District Court granted a defamation lawsuit filed by Usmanov against Navalny. The court recognized information about Usmanov distributed by the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Navalny as discrediting and untrue and ordered the defendants to refute the statements.