On 30 September, the Limassol District Court dismissed Alexey Gubarev’s application against journalist Boris Demash. The judge announced the decision at a court hearing, with Boris Demash present in the courtroom. He represented himself in these proceedings and defended his position in court on his own.
In their application, Gubarev’s lawyers asked the court to hold Boris Demash in contempt of court and to sentence him to up to one year in prison. On 30 September the court dismissed the application.
The legal battle began after Cyprus Daily News published the article «Gubarev’s importation: Putin’s IT guys take over Cyprus», about Alexey Gubarev and the activities of the companies and Russian IT businesspeople connected to him in Cyprus. After the article came out, Gubarev sued Boris Demash, asking the court to declare the article defamatory, to order him to remove it from all platforms and to bar him from publishing any further material concerning the claimant.
Without examining the facts set out in the article on their merits, the court granted the claim in full. Gubarev used the ruling to destroy the Cyprus Daily News website and its extensive archive of unique material, even though the dispute concerned one specific article.
The editorial team restored the website and carried on working, publishing new material about Gubarev. Gubarev then filed a new application against Demash, seeking to have the journalist held in contempt of court for failing to comply with the earlier ruling.
Throughout the proceedings, Gubarev’s lawyers pushed for the harshest possible sanctions against Demash, including imprisonment of up to one year. Demash consistently rejected the accusations and maintained that there was no evidence of contempt of court.
During the proceedings, Demash was detained after he did not appear at one of the hearings, even though he had notified the court in advance that he could not attend for health reasons. Despite this, a warrant for his arrest was issued at the request of Gubarev’s lawyers. The journalist considers the measure unjustified and excessive and sees the episode as one example of the pressure he was subjected to during the trial.
After Demash was detained, a number of Russian-language and English-language media outlets belonging to the Russian network of influence in Cyprus controlled by the Russian special services reported that the journalist had been arrested for contempt of court. Demash considers these reports defamatory, since they created the impression that contempt of court had already been established.
On 30 September the court brought these proceedings to an end by dismissing Alexey Gubarev’s application against Boris Demash.
The story does not end there, however. The Limassol court is still hearing a similar application against Boris Demash brought by Oleg Reshetnikov, a Russian citizen close to Gubarev.
Cyprus Daily News will keep its readers informed about the progress and outcome of this case.