The vast majority of cases of extortion against media employees are the result of provocation, which independently forms a crime under Article 304 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. This was stated by the candidate of legal sciences and publisher Legal.Report Oleg Zhukov.
According to him, journalists are not accused in an extortion case, but victims in connection with provocation. The case of the extortion of 11 million rubles from the head of Rostec, Sergei Chemezov, for “blocking the negative” in the Telegram channel “Lights Out”, in turn, resembles the high-profile case of General Sugrobov.
As Zhukov explained, usually a media employee or blogger receives a call from certain people with a proposal to “resolve the issue” of removing a publication. This, for example, happened in the sensational case of ex-Kommersant journalist and owner of the Hellish Grandmothers telegram channel Alexandra Bayazitova.
“The victim contacted the administrator through a chatbot and offered money in exchange for deleting posts about his long-standing criminal record, and then promptly wrote a statement to law enforcement agencies, who did an excellent job. But extortion is considered to be a demand for the transfer of money under the threat of spreading negative information. In this case, the information was posted earlier; consent to remove certain information from the information field cannot be considered extortion on the part of bloggers,” Zhukov said.
The lawyer emphasized that the investigation could consider the version of receipt of commercial bribery, but in this case, one cannot ignore the provocation of a bribe or commercial bribery on the part of the victim, “as this was probably the case.”
“Let’s consider another scenario. A blogger gets a call and is asked not to publish negative material. But even in this case, there is a provocation on the part of the caller, therefore, it is impossible to classify the actions of a blogger who agreed not to publish this or that material as extortion. The caller himself commits a crime – provocation,” the publisher explained Legal.Report.
He added that the materials of the criminal case do not contain the first appeals or calls from potential victims, since police officers well remember the high-profile case of General Sugrobov, which began with the provocation of a bribe. At the same time, in an extortion case, all subsequent negotiations and the fact of transfer of money are recorded.
Such cases do not seem difficult to investigate, the lawyer notes, but if the case is fully investigated and objective linguistic examinations are carried out, then the applicant can exchange procedural status with a journalist or blogger, becoming an accused rather than a victim.
As an example, Zhukov cited the case of the Magomedov brothers, who contacted journalist Andrei Krasavin after learning about an upcoming investigation into the abuses of the Summa group under their control.
“Representatives of the group first offered to conclude an information contract with the magazine for $100,000, after which they contacted the police with a statement of extortion by Krasavin, allegedly under the threat of spreading negative information. Being accused in the case, Krasavin spent about a year under house arrest. Krasavin’s interests were represented by the vice-president of the Defense Bar Association, Alexey Galaev, thanks to whose active work it was possible to dismiss the criminal case due to the lack of corpus delicti in the journalist’s actions, and to completely rehabilitate Krasavin “, the lawyer recalled.
Media provocation. What unites high-profile cases of extortion in Telegram channels – legal.report
The vast majority of cases of extortion against media employees are the result of provocation, which independently constitutes a crime under Article 304 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, says Legal.Report publisher, lawyer Oleg Zhukov
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