Bihus.Info wins Supreme Court lawsuit against Hladkovsky Sr., who demanded 2 million hryvnias

Oleh Hladkovsky. Photo – screenshot from the video by Nashi Hroshi

The Supreme Court rejected the cassation appeal by Oleh Hladkovsky, the subject of a Bihus.Info investigation who demanded that the information featured in the investigation be declared unreliable and retracted and the journalists pay 2 million hryvnias in moral redress.

The judgement, passed on March 14, 2024, is final and not subject to appeal, reports Bihus.Info.

The investigation "Army. Friends. Dough" was released in 2019; Hladkovsky Sr. sued in August 2020, having missed the legal statute of limitations.

The trial in the first instance court lasted until the spring of 2023, when the Vinnytsia City Court ruled in Hladkovsky's favor, satisfying his demands on retraction. The journalists' lawyers appealed this judgement, and in June 2023 a board of judges canceled it completely.

Hladkovsky then filed an appeal. His complaint was dismissed on March 14, 2024, and the Vinnytsia Court of Appeal ruling from June 19, 2023 was upheld.

The Supreme Court judgement states that, seeing as Oleh Hladkovsky was the deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, he was a public figure and played a certain role in the state's defense system, and therefore should have been open to severe criticism and public scrutiny. The disputed information did not concern his private life, but his work.

The court also considers that reporting on the possible embezzlement in the defense sector was of significant public interest, because it concerned the state's defense capability at a special time. The information which Hladkovsky was asking to retract, according to the content of the journalistic investigation, was public criticism in the mass media.

The court agreed that Hladkovsky could have considered the way the material was presented as annoying or provocative, but concluded that, in essence, the featured information is the journalists' own assessment of certain events and of the data they received, which, moreover, was aimed at drawing attention to the issues of state procurement deals in the defense industry and gave the viewer the opportunity to analyze all the information independently.

In 2019, Bihus.Info released the investigation "Army. Friends. Dough", which dealt with corruption schemes in the defense sector. In particular, the story discussed Ihor Hladkovsky's (the son of Oleh Hladkovsky, the then deputy secretary of the NSDC) role in these schemes.

The authors of the investigation claimed that Oleh Hladkovsky (who used to be a business partner of the ex-President Petro Poroshenko), the former Ukrspecexport CEO and the head of the State Concern Ukroboronprom Pavlo Bukin, as well as company directors and other officials of the state concern were involved in the embezzlement.

After the release, Ihor Hladkovsky filed a defamation lawsuit against the "Nashi Hroshi" journalists Denys Bihus and Lesya Ivanova in the Podil District Court of Kyiv. He demanded that the investigation be declared unreliable and that the program be retracted in its entirety. However, the journalists won the case in the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.