The National Corps party filed a lawsuit against LASMAK LLC, which owns the Strana.ua media resource, and Ilya Kiva, a People’s Deputy from Opposition Party For Life Party for spreading false information.
“On November 6, a lawsuit was filed with the Pechersk District Court of Kyiv to protect business reputation and refute unreliable information. The defendants in this case are the online publication Strana.ua and the People’s Deputy of Ukraine Ilya Kiva, who have repeatedly disseminated unreliable information about the National Corps,” the lawyer of the National Corps Yevhen Komisar stated.
These are publications that reported searches of the offices of the National Corps and party representatives. Strana.ua news site published relevant information on 23.10.2020, 24.10.2020. and 02.11.2020 under the titles such as “Security Service of Ukraine secretly from Avakov searched National Corps and Azov”, “Searches in Azov and National Corps. Weapons and drugs found. Provocations in the elections were being prepared. Also MP Ilya Kiva additionally spread the above false information on Facebook on 24.10.2020.
“Neither the Security Service of Ukraine nor the police conducted any search or other investigative action against the representatives of the National Corps party. No member of the party was informed about the suspicion of committing criminal offenses”, mentioned in the claim of National Corps.
The document also states that no law enforcement agencies conducted searches and other investigative actions in the premises owned by the National Corps.
That is why we ask the court to declare the information disseminated by Strana.ua news site and Ilya Kiva unreliable and damaging the party’s business reputation, and to oblige them to refute it in the same way it was disseminated.
We also would line to note the publication of inaccurate information took place the day before the next local elections, which were attended by candidates nominated by the National Corps. Therefore, we are convinced that this indicates “the intent of such actions and the clear intention to cause the most significant damage to the party’s business reputation.”
It will be recalled that in the local elections, representatives of the National Corps became deputies of local councils in fourteen united territorial communities of Volyn, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Kherson, Vinnytsia, Zakarpattia, Rivne, Kharkiv, Cherkasy and Chernivtsi regions.