Tax authorities initiate bankruptcy of the ‘Arguments of the week’ publishing house

Tax authorities initiate bankruptcy of the ‘Arguments of the week’ publishing house

Tax authorities initiate bankruptcy of the ‘Arguments of the week’ publishing house
On March 3, tax authorities of the capital applied to the arbitration court, demanding that publishing house ‘Arguments of the Week’ JSC be declared bankrupt (case ¹. A40-40808/2022).  The company is the owner of a media outlet with a similar name.  What exactly was the reason for the appeal and what amount of financial claims was demanded from the organization by the Moscow Federal Tax Service No. 10, has not yet been disclosed.

According to the information from open sources, the ‘Arguments of the week’ publishing house has previously won government contracts worth 8.5 million rubles.  In 2020, the company ended the year with a loss of 28 million rubles, despite revenue of 316 million rubles.

Recently, the media outlet has already been on the news agenda in connection with a lawsuit to protect business reputation filed at the initiative of Transneft (case No. A40-219682 / 21-12-1547).  Along with the publishing house, the defendant in this lawsuit was Nikita Krichevsky, the author of an article in which the court found the presence of false information that caused reputational damage.
As a result, Transneft won the lawsuit, and the corresponding decision was published on the website of the arbitration court on January 25, 2022.
The court was convinced by the linguistic conclusion made by the linguists M.A.  Osadchiy and O.M.  Grunchenko.  The experts considered that there were no opinion markers in the fragments of the article disputed by the plaintiff, and the very nature of the publication was recognized as discrediting the reputation of Transneft.

The oil company jointly demanded to recover 10 million rubles from the defendants, but the court limited the amount of compensation to 300 thousand.  The case file contains a number of statements that were found to be untrue.

At the same time, the publication itself, explaining the events that took place in the spring of 2019 related to the Druzhba oil pipeline, pointed to the reputational damage caused by Trasneft to the state.  It is curious that earlier the head of the company, Nikolai Tokarev, met with President Putin, and during the meeting discussed the issue of contamination of the pipeline with low-quality oil (with a high content of organochlorines).

05.03.2022