By Natalia Zotova, Novaya Gazeta, 22.05.2014

For the first time since foundation of the party there was a search in the party Moscow headquarters – and in connection with the events taking place 18 months ago. In November 2012 Andrei Rudomakha, a well-known environmentalist in the Krasnodar Territory and YABLOKO activist, was arrested for several days. A party press release quoted his comment on this, he allegedly had called a judge “a travesty of justice”.

A [criminal] case under Article [of the Criminal Code] “Slander Against the Judge” was raised a year after the event. Andrei Rudomakha is the defendant in the trial, but, as it was explained in YABLOKO, there had been a technical error: the words about the judge belong to YABLOKO Chair Sergei Mitrokhin.

“I said the phrase belonged to me: we can not find out who said this – well let it be myself, 18 months have passed,” Mitrokhin explained. Yesterday he went to an investigator for interrogation, but refused to testify. And today, the investigator came to the [YABLOKO] office to impound a computer which for used to write the press release. The investigators will try to identify the author of the press release with the help of this computer. Head of YABLOKO Press Service Igor Yakovlev went to furnish explanations to the interrogator.

Sergei Mitrokhin gave the following commentary on what had triggered the criminal case, the investigation of which had been several times stopping and then resuming again, “Maybe this is the long arm of Mr. Tkachyov [Krasnodar Territory governor – Natalia Zotova], which has been trying to grab us. Obviously, he is the protagonist of justice in the Krasnodar region. I already had a collision with him: I accused Tkachyov in embezzling a large plot of land on the [Black Sea] coast and applied to the Public Prosecutor’s office about his nationalistic statements”.

Andrei Rudomakha has not been the only environmentalist prosecuted in the Krasnodar region: in 2013 environmentalists and YABLOKO members Suren Gazaryan and Yevgeny Vitishko were convicted for damaging the fence around an unlawfully built (according to the activists) cottage of Governor Tkachyov. Both received probation but in December 2013 probation was replaced for Vitishko by three years in a penal colony.

The original publication http://www.novayagazeta.ru/news/1682433.html