Posted on February 8, 2010 - by Venik

Trial hears Boris Berezovsky suffered ‘savage libel’ over Litvinenko murder

Oligarch sues Russian TV channel for claim he was involved in polonium poisoning of former Russian agent

The Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky was the victim of a “savage” libel that aimed to “muddy the waters” of the investigation into the death of the former secret agent Alexander Litvinenko, a court heard today.

Berezovsky, who has lived in the UK since 2001 and was granted asylum two years later, has taken legal action over a claim that he was complicit in Litvinenko’s poisoning with polonium, a radioactive element.

On the first day of a libel trial at the high court in London, his barrister, Desmond Browne QC, said the allegation had been made on RTR Planeta, a Russian state-owned TV channel that can be picked up by satellite viewers in the UK.

The broadcaster is not appearing in the proceedings and has not sought to argue the truth of the allegations, made in April 2007 by a silhouetted figure referred to on air as Pyotr. Browne said Pyotr was Vladimir Terluk, described in court papers as an asylum seeker from Kazakhstan, and RTR had left him to “face the music” on his own, without any legal assistance.

Terluk, who listened to a translation of the court proceedings through headphones, denies that he is Pyotr. He tried to get the trial adjourned to allow him to gather funds and find lawyers to take on his case, but the judge, Mr Justice Eady, insisted it should proceed.

“The story that your lordship will hear in this trial is the story of how Russian TV journalists, Russian diplomats and Russian prosecutors, in conjunction with a man who has been a longstanding collaborator of the KGB and its successor, sought to blacken the name of a vociferous critic of the present Russian regime by suggesting he had knowingly been behind the murder of Mr Litvinenko,” Browne told the judge, who is sitting without a jury.

“The name of that critic is Mr Berezovsky; the name of that collaborator was Mr Vladimir Terluk.

“The motivation for this savage libel was doubtless not merely to undermine the security of the asylum Mr Berezovsky had been granted in 2003 – granted, I should add, over a well-found fear of political persecution in Russia – but also to muddy the waters of the murder investigation and deflect attention from what the programme itself called the Russian trail leading back to Moscow.”

He said the libel was “as vicious as can be imagined”. “That was because not only did it accuse Mr Berezovsky of being a party to a terrible murder, but the defendants knew that the victim of that murder had been a long-standing friend of Mr Berezovsky’s. Indeed the evidence shows that Mr Litvinenko was a man who had saved Mr Berezovsky’s life on more than one occasion and thereafter become a long-standing and trusted friend.”

The court was told Pyotr alleged on air that he had been offered as much as £40m by Berezovsky to make a false confession that there was a plot against Berezovsky’s life, the idea being to prevent any possibility of the oligarch’s being extradited to Russia. Pyotr claimed to have been drugged when he refused to be bribed, the court heard. Litvinenko was killed because he had witnessed this scheme take place, Pyotr allegedly suggested.

Pyotr’s allegations were featured on a news magazine programme and would have reached an audience “likely to have been in the tens of thousands, quite likely in six figures”, Browne said.

Litvinenko’s death in November 2006 caused a major diplomatic row between London and Moscow, leading to the Russian authorities blocking the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, the man British prosecutors accuse of killing him.

Russian prosecutors have long been seeking to extradite Berezovksy, who fell out with the Kremlin in the early days of Vladimir Putin’s presidency and faces criminal charges in Russia.

Berezovksy was present at the high court in London, as was Litvinenko’s widow, Marina. The trial is expected to last around two weeks.

Original article

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