The Lutsk City and District Court of Volyn oblast has fully granted the claim of the municipal company Lutsk School and University Catering Plant against Konkurent chief editor Andriy Luchyk. The court found the reported information to be inaccurate, ordered the news website to retract it and pay the plant 15 thousand hryvnias in moral damages, Andriy Luchyk reports to Maya Holub, the Institute of Mass Information representative in Volyn oblast.
The claim concerned the 24 May 2024 article which discussed the plant inflating the prices for food products for schools and universities. The article cited Andriy Luchyk, who is also a Lutsk City Council deputy.
In a comment to the IMI representative, Andriy Luchyk called the court’s ruling “extremely odd” and said that he strongly disagreed with it.
“I stressed that this is a first instance court verdict and it would be challenged on appeal. That is, it has not entered into force and there will only be something to discuss after the trial on appeal,” said Luchyk.
He addd that most of the points in the lawsuit have already been clarified or corrected on the website after the company first addressed them, and another one is an official statement by a deputy made during a public event.
“The first statement of claim contained a demand to retract 16 points. During the hearing, the plaintiff clarified their claims and cut them down to 4 points. By doing so, they essentially admitted that the other 12 points were true and did not warrant a refutation,” he emphasised.
Andriy Luchyk also said that an investigation into the company’s purchasing food products at inflated prices had been opened. The initial probe was closed and another one opened later.
“The administrative court and the appellate court have ruled that the company’s inaction was recognised as unlawful in that they did not answer questions related to the prices, which this verdict is about,” Andriy Luchyk remarked.
According to YouControl, the court ordered the news outlet to refute four paragraphs of the article concerning the allegedly inflated food prices (for potatoes, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, buckwheat, sugar).
The first paragraph concerned Luchyk’s Facebook post and the other three were about the Konkurent article.
“The claims are very strange because they does not say who should refute what. One paragraph refers to me as a deputy, and three paragraphs concern the news story on the Konkurent website. Konkurent was quoting an official who spoke during a standing deputy commission meeting and his words were spoken at a public event. And, contrary to the requirements of Article 117 of the Law of Ukraine ‘On Media’, the court concluded that the media outlet reported inaccurate information,” he said.
According to Luchyk, by the time the lawsuit was filed, the information on the website had already been corrected in accordance with the company’s comments.
“By the time the lawsuit was filed, and the lawsuit was filed a month after these events, everything had been corrected and aligned with the position that the company is defending now. So their stance regarding the retraction of this information also looks strange. How can it be retracted if this information has already been retracted a long time ago?” he said.
Andriy Luchyk stressed that Article 117 of the Law of Ukraine “On Media” stipulates that a journalist is not liable for the words of public figures if they are reported verbatim and without distortion.
IMI representative Maya Holub tried to reach out to the Lutsk City and District Court judge Lyudmyla Prysiazhniuk to ask follow-up questions regarding the ruling, such as how exactly the news outlet is supposed to retract the information if some excerpts had already been edited out of the article. The judge was not immediately available.