Court obliges MoF to pay 100,000 roubles to compensate Sochi pensioners for criminal case

Today, the court ruling of May 24 has come into force, according to which the Russia's Ministry of Finance (MoF) has to pay 100,000 roubles to Klara and Valentin Donchi-Ool, a pensioners' family couple from Sochi, in compensation for moral harm suffered from a criminal case unlawfully opened against them. The amount awarded by the court is ten times smaller than the spouses had claimed in their lawsuit; however, they will not challenge the ruling.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the Donchi-Ool spouses from Sochi were charged with illegal tree felling. The pensioners asserted that they had nothing to do with deforestation – on the contrary, they fought for the preservation of green spaces and, having filed an application against illegal felling, unexpectedly became themselves suspects of this offense. In December 2016, Sochi police closed the case against the Donchi-Ool family due to the absence of corpus delicti.

After the closure of their criminal case, Klara and Valentin Donchi-Ool lodged a suit demanding to collect compensation for their moral harm and material damage. They demanded from the respondents a compensation for illegal criminal prosecution in the amount of 500,000 roubles to each of them.

The court has decided to satisfy the Sochi pensioners' claims in part and obliged the MoF to pay 50,000 roubles to each of the spouses.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.