MOSCOW, January 25 (RAPSI) – Moscow’s Basmanny District Court will hear a defamation lawsuit lodged by ex-chief of Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin against Russia’s Novaya Gazeta on February 8, the court’s spokesperson Yunona Tsareva has told RAPSI.

On Friday, the court granted the parties’ motion to give them more time for reading case papers and postponed the hearing.

According to the newspaper’s spokesperson Nadezhda Prusenkova, Yakunin is dissatisfied with journalists’ wording in a publication concerning the murder of the Interior Ministry Transport Department’s major case investigator Yevgeniya Shishkina.  The plaintiff claims that phrases written in the article about his son and a fund of his friend are false and discredit him, she said.