Russian-Uzbek billionaire Usmanov wins lawsuit against German newspaper, documents show

MOSCOW, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov has won a legal complaint against German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung over an article it published about him, court documents obtained by Reuters show.

In a ruling dated January 23, a Hamburg court prohibited the FAZ from disseminating several statements, including allegations about Usmanov’s links to top Russian officials, from an April 2023 article titled “On the Kremlin’s instructions”.

Usmanov has a net worth of $18.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and is subject to European Union and U.S. sanctions and a travel ban that were imposed after the start of the war in Ukraine.

He has launched multiple lawsuits in Europe with the ultimate goal of having the sanctions lifted. In some, his lawyers contested statements in the media that were used as the grounds for sanctions.

Usmanov’s lawyer, Joachim Steinhofel, said in remarks about the Hamburg court’s decision that the statements banned from further dissemination “repeated essential parts of the reasoning behind the sanctions against Mr Usmanov.”

“This (the court decision) allows for the legally substantiated assessment that the EU sanctions’ reasoning is nothing more than an accumulation of defamatory, groundless, and thus illegal allegations,” he added.

The FAZ is considering appealing the ruling, a spokesperson for the newspaper said.

The criteria applied by the Hamburg court would make reporting on individual actors under authoritarian rule extremely difficult, the spokesperson said in an emailed statement, adding: “This cannot be in the interest of press freedom.”

Last month, Germany agreed with Usmanov to close an investigation into alleged foreign trade law violations, provided that he pay 10 million euros ($11.98 million). In 2024, German prosecutors dropped a money laundering investigation against him.

(Reporting by Gleb Bryanski, Editing by Timothy Heritage)