Mind.ua won in Supreme Court against key figure of a story

Mind.ua (owned by Future Media LLC) won a case in the Supreme Court against the key figure of an article they had published on its portal, Alyona Shevtsova. Businesswoman and wife of the Deputy Chief of the Investigation Department of the National Police, Alyona Shevtsova (birth surname Degrik) demanded to refute the information about business relations of companies related to her and the Tyme payment system, as his was reported by Mind.ua.

The plaintiff assured the court that she has never been head of the legal entity Mossada Investments Limited (previously Frugifera Investments Limited). At the same time, the edition noted that the documents evidenced that the head of the company was Alyona Degrik, whose domicile was the same as the domicile of Alona Shevtsova (birth surname Degrik) in the city of Odessa. Shevtsova's lawyers tried to prove in court that they were different people and that Shevtsova had nothing to do with Alyona Degrik. The main argument of Shevtsova's representative was that she changed her last name from Degrik to Shevtsova whithin marriage in 2016, while the company was registered in 2017.

On July 30, the Supreme Court, composed of a panel of judges of the First Judicial Chamber of the Civil Court of Cassation, dismissed claim of Alyona Shevtsova and upheld the decision of the Kyiv Court of Appeal.

The Court of Appeal concluded, and the Supreme Court confirmed, that most of the information published by Mind did not concern the plaintiff and, accordingly, did not violate her personal non-property rights; some of the information are evaluative judgments that cannot be refuted,as it is the subjective opinion of the author, not the facts, and the reliability of the rest of the information is confirmed by the written evidence available in the case.

As IMI reported, on October 27, 2020, journalist Lyubov Velychko said she had been threatened after an investigation she made into illegal casinos involving the company of wife of Deputy Chief of the National Police Investigation Department of the National Police of Ukraine Yevhen Shevtsov. 

The Brovary City District Court of Kyiv Region has scheduled for February 9, 2021 the first court hearing in the case of Alyona Shevtsova's libel claim against journalist Lyubov Velychko and Future Media LLC with demand to compensation for non-pecuniary damage in the amount of UAH 1 million.