The District Court of Hamburg has ruled that allegations made about Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov by Forbes US that were used to justify sanctions against him are false.

In February 2022, the American business magazine published an article that quoted an anonymous “expert” claiming that “[Alisher] Usmanov has repeatedly fronted for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin” and “solved his business problems.”

The allegation was part of the evidence published in the EU official journal that were used as grounds to imposed sanctions on the metals and tech business tycoon. Usmanov has always denied that he has any sort of close relation with Putin or earned any money from any sort of “special relations” with the Kremlin.

Usmanov’s lawyer reacted to the article by issuing a cease-and-desist declaration, but Forbes refused to sign it. Usmanov then initiated legal proceedings against the magazine in the District Court of Hamburg, which has now ruled in his favour.

The court in Hamburg said it was satisfied that Usmanov’s claim that the allegation is unsubstantiated and prohibited the further dissemination of the allegations contained in the Forbes article.

In particular, the phrase that Usmanov allegedly “fronted for Putin,” was singled out for the ban on dissemination as well as the magazine’s claim that Usmanov owned “property in Munich.” The court also found that Forbes’ claim that Usmanov had acquired stake in the Russian mobile phone operator MegaFon from the former Russian Minister of Communications and Information Leonid Reiman was false.

The Hamburg-based lawyer Joachim Nikolaus Steinhöfel, representing Usmanov, said in a statement emailed to bne IntelliNews: “It is sobering to realize that a globally respected media outlet like Forbes publishes serious allegations but is unable to present even a single piece of evidence in court.”

“However, it is completely unacceptable for the EU Council to copy these articles verbatim in its sanctions justification without checking their accuracy. This total institutional failure, which has become the rule rather than the exception, became the starting point for a witch hunt against Mr. Usmanov. It turns out that the EU Council is justifying sanctions with fake news, whose dissemination has now been prohibited by a court of law,” he added.

Usmanov has been under investigation by the German authorities but has won a string of legal cases against them. In September last year, the district court of Frankfurt declared the search of the offices of Usmanov’s Munich lawyers unlawful, handing the Uzbek-born tycoon another legal victory in his efforts to clear his name.

The same investigation team already raided a villa on Tegernsee in the German spa town of Rottach-Egern last September to gather evidence against Usmanov, but another German court ruling found that several search warrants were improperly issued as they were based on hearsay and rescinded them, making the search illegal.

In October the same court ruled that all items seized during the search must be returned to their owners, including documents as well as expensive pieces of art, including a painting by Marc Chagall.

Usmanov also successfully persuaded the UK publisher HarperCollins to remove several accusations of his close ties to the Kremlin in Catherine Belton’s highly successful book “Putin’s People”. Several of the oligarchs mentioned in the book, sued HarperCollins and won their cases, although Usmanov reportedly persuaded the publisher to make the changes without bring a case. In the end the publisher had to make major revisions to the book as many of the claims could not be substantiated.

“In 2022 and 2023, a significant number of German and European media outlets and public figures admitted that they were unable to prove numerous allegations against Mr. Usmanov and signed statements pledging to cease the unlawful dissemination of inaccurate information,” Usmanov’s representatives said in a statement. “So far, about 20 such statements have already been made in favour of Mr. Usmanov. A number of media outlets have also voluntarily corrected or removed articles after receiving letters from Mr. Usmanov’s representatives regarding inaccurate claims contained in the texts.”

Usmanov has been battling to have the sanctions on him overturned without success. He has since left Russia and spends most of his time in his country of birth, Uzbekistan.

His sister, Saodat Narzieva, was also included in the EU sanctions after the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) linked her to a number of bank accounts containing hundreds of millions of dollars that belonged to her brother’s companies. However, An investigation by bne IntelliNews found that the bank accounts in question were all openly majority owned by Usmanov himself, according to banking documents seen by bne IntelliNews, and that Narzieva was briefly a shareholder in the company for one year in 2013-2014, before Russia’s annexation of Crimea and any sanctions were imposed.

However, the OCCRP report did not provide any solid evidence of Narzieva participation in her brother’s business, something the investigative publication went as far as to allude to in the title of the report: “Sanctioning an Oligarch Is Not So Easy: Why the Money Trail of Alisher Usmanov, One of Russia’s Wealthiest Men, Is Difficult to Follow.”

However, after The Guardian and BuzzFeed pick up the reports and made much more concrete allegations, the EU again used these press reports to justify sanctions against Narzieva.

Narzieva successfully challenged her inclusion by the EU and in a rare climbdown her name was removed from the sanctions list in September 2022. His other sister Gulbakhor Ismailova, however, remains on the sanction’s lists.

 

In addition to the recent ruling of the District Court of Hamburg in the case against Forbes, Usmanov’s lawyers have obtained several injunctions prohibiting the dissemination of inaccurate information by European media following litigation.

One of the most significant cases was an injunction issued by the District Court of Hamburg in favour of Usmanov against the Austrian newspaper Kurier in August 2023 for publishing the allegation that Usmanov “has the reputation of being Putin’s favourite oligarch, as Putin himself called him.”

In September 2023, the EU Council dropped the term “oligarch” from Usmanov’s sanctions reasoning.