The indictment for embezzlement, money laundering, and using false documents against former Media-MOST Chief Financial Officer Anton Titov was read in a Moscow municipal court on 26 July, gazeta.ru and other Russian news agencies reported.

According to RIA-Novosti, the indictment charges that Titov deceived Media-MOST's creditor Gazprom concerning the company's assets and liquidity. Prosecutors allege that part of the 5.1 billion rubles that Gazprom lent Media-MOST in 1998-99 ($244 million at that time) ended up in the personal accounts of Media-MOST managers.

Specifically, the indictment reads that former General Director Dzhavanfar Zamani received $300,000, as did former company Vice President Andrei Tsimailo, who died in London on 24 July. It further alleges that Media-MOST's former first deputy chairman of the board of directors, Igor Malashenko, received $280,000. Titov has been held in prison since his arrest on 16 January 2001.

...as Court rules against ‘Limonka’.

A Moscow municipal court on 26 July ruled in favor of a Media Ministry petition to close the nationalist newspaper "Limonka," the organ of the National Bolshevik Party, Interfax reported. The court agreed with the ministry that a number of the newspaper's publications inflamed nationalist intolerance and called for the violent overthrow of the Russian state. The newspaper's founders, Sergei Aksenov and writer Eduard Limonov, are currently on trial in Saratov on charges of terrorism and creating an illegal armed formation.

(RFE/RL 26.vii.02)