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Post by Admin on Jan 30, 2021 19:25:39 GMT
Russian oligarch Arkady Rotenberg says he is the owner of an opulent Black Sea mansion, not President Vladimir Putin, as the leaders' critics had alleged. A video report about the vast palace, by Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, went viral across Russia and has now been watched more than 100m times. The Russian president rubbished reports he owned the resort earlier this week. Mr Rotenberg, a billionaire with close links to Mr Putin, went public claiming to be the owner on Saturday. The revelation came in an interview posted on the pro-Kremlin Mash Telegram channel, before being confirmed to the Interfax news agency. "I have managed to strike a deal with creditors a few years ago, and I became a beneficiary of this site a few years ago," Mr Rotenberg's press office quoted him as saying.
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Post by Admin on Feb 26, 2021 3:30:35 GMT
Amnesty International has stripped the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny of his "prisoner of conscience" status after it says it was "bombarded" with complaints highlighting xenophobic comments that he has made in the past and not renounced. A spokesman for the human rights organisation in Moscow told the BBC that he believed the wave of requests to "de-list" Navalny was part of an "orchestrated campaign" to discredit Vladimir Putin's most vocal critic and "impede" Amnesty's calls for his release from custody. But on review, Amnesty International concluded that comments made by Navalny some 15 years ago, including a video which appears to compare immigrants to cockroaches, amounted to "hate speech" which was incompatible with the label "prisoner of conscience". Alexei Navalny, who was almost killed in a nerve agent attack last year, is now serving a prison sentence widely seen as punishment for his opposition activism and big-splash investigations into the corrupt lives of Russia's rich and powerful. "We had too many requests; we couldn't ignore them," spokesman Alexander Artemev told the BBC, explaining that the team initially discounted Navalny's previous statements - which he has not repeated - as "not relevant" in the light of his current, political persecution.
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