Dear Supporters and Potential Supporters
Today I have two great pieces of news that I want to share with you.
Firstly, with your help, for which I am very grateful to all of you, my petition today passed the very important milestone of 15,000 signatures and thus became one of the most signed petitions on change. I am really very grateful to all the Supporters and kindly ask for further support, as this is very important to me.
Secondly, today I appeared on the main page of one of the most famous news resources (Orato World) which published an article describing some of my unusual "adventures" with Putin's oligarchs:
- attempts to kill me;
- extortion with the help of a fabricated criminal case;
- flight from Russia and asylum in Europe;
- regular death threats with demands that I drop the English lawsuit against the oligarchs
- and much more.
Many thanks to the journalists (and especially Pamela Say) for their interest and incredible promptness! The article has links to this petition and my fundraising pages.
Now about news related to my English litigation with these oligarchs.
On 13 January, a court hearing will be held in my case, which will consider my applications for contempt of court against four persons on the part of the defendants-oligarchs. In this court case, I am alone confronted by three law firms and dozens of their lawyers, as well as four Russian experts, two of whom are professors.
Among the lawyers (and he plays the main role at the hearings) is Mr Swainston KC, who is known for representing the Russian Federation in international courts, including in disputes related to Ukraine. In these litigations, Mr Swainston KC, for example, states that Russia did not annex Crimea and accuses Ukraine and Western countries of providing fake evidence.
Three of the four applications for contempt of court were filed in connection with deliberately false (in my opinion) information provided to the court by the following representatives of the oligarchs:
- Partner of the respectful firm PCB Byrne, Mr Riem (text of the application is here)
- Partner of respectful Simmons & Simmons and former head of the London Solicitors Litigation Association, Mr Crosse (text of the application is here)
- Russian expert-professor Mr Yarkov (the text of the application is here).
Strictly legally speaking, the court will consider whether, in principle, it will consider these applications on their merits (this is the procedure).
The fourth application was filed against one of the oligarchs, who submitted a forged document to the court as the main evidence. What makes this story even more comical is that this document has been forged in a fatally defective form (it doesn't contain my signature and date that are mandatory for such documents). At my request, Elena Lukyanova, a well-known Russian human rights activist, professor, founder and rector of the Free University, member of the Anti-War Committee of Russia, kindly agreed to comment on this issue (along with other aspects).
I gave links to my applications, as in a normal situation, anyone could read them on the court's website, but, unfortunately and surprisingly, my case on the court's website is completely and inexplicably classified (there is not a single document available to the public in the case card).
Before filing these serious applications (for contempt of court, one can be held liable for up to 2 years in prison), I applied directly to the lawyers of the oligarchs and asked them to correct their false statements without bringing the case to court, but, unfortunately, they have ignored my requests.
I must also say that I submitted my applications six months ago and asked the court to consider them as soon as possible (as there are appropriate grounds for this), but the court, unfortunately, did not respond to my letters about the fate of these applications for a long time.
I am struck by the primitiveness of the lie. I'll give you two examples.
Mr Riem, a partner at the firm PCB Byrne, tells the court in all seriousness that there is no difference between the two statements made by Russian oligarchs in different years. These statements (applied to the same thing) are as follows:
- this has never been part of Sychev's (my) work duties
- this has always been part of Sychev's work duties.
I think that it is very obvious to anyone (whether they are lawyers or not) that these statements are directly opposite in meaning, and are not the same, as Mr Riem insists.
But most of all, I was struck by the expert Professor Yarkov, who seriously tells the court that the phrase "subject to the UK law”, written in black and white in a contract, means “subject to Russian law". But the main icing on the cake is that the professor attributes the authorship of this strange version not to himself, but to me. This is so strange that I do not even know how to react to such statements from a respected professor. I could at least somehow understand if such a statement came from an illiterate schoolboy (for example), but we are talking about a professor!
The hearing will be public (at least formally), so I invite everyone interested to attend it and hope that it will really be public (there were precedents earlier, on 11 October 2022, when a formally public hearing was actually closed, see, for example, my previous update).
Thank you again so much for your support!
Kind regards,
Igor Sychev