26 November 2024 , 21:15
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Russian basketball player Nadezhda Grishaeva, who was married to the son of the late LDPR leader Igor Lebedev, has been trying to have the "Project" investigation about the family and associates of Vladimir Zhirinovsky removed from various online platforms since 2022.
Grishaeva appealed with such a request to the international consortium of journalists OCCRP and the "Project". Later, unknown individuals began seeking the removal of the investigation from Google’s search results. Moreover, publications featuring Grishaeva have disappeared from other sites, including Baza.
In December 2022, Grishaeva personally approached OCCRP and the "Project", offering to "share information or make a donation to a charitable foundation" in exchange for the removal of her name from the article, explaining that "her role was nominal and any other woman could have been in her place". In January 2023, unknown individuals offered material support to the database on Russian officials rupep.org in exchange for the removal of Grishaeva’s page (which also cited the "Project" investigation), as the creators of the database told the "Agency". All projects refused to delete the information.
In July 2023, attempts to remove publications continued: Google received 14 requests in just two days (July 18-19) for the removal of the English version of the "Project" investigation about Zhirinovsky’s family published on the OCCRP website from its search results. This is evidenced by data from the Lumen service, which aggregates complaints about online platforms. Complainants insisted that they were the authors of the "Project" article and that the publication on the OCCRP site violated their copyrights.
It appears the complainants were seeking to remove the publication specifically from the OCCRP site’s search results, as the English version of the investigation published there appears higher in Google’s search results than the material on the "Project" site.
The complainants had different first and last names, but the messages they sent were almost identical. One of these users similarly attempted to remove articles about Zhirinovsky’s daughter-in-law from the search results on the rupep.org website. It seems Google rejected all the complaints: the texts are still available through the search system as of September 22.
Other attempts to delete information about Zhirinovsky’s family were more successful. For instance, the publication Baza deleted an investigation about the Lebedev and Grishaeva property, noted by the "Agency".
Baza did this following a pretrial claim, as Baza co-founder Anatoly Suleimanov told the "Agency". Currently, only the archived version of the investigation is available. Suleimanov could not recall from whom and when the claim was sent, clarifying only that it happened a year and a half to two years ago. In the Baza telegram channel, archived publications about the Lebedev and Grishaeva property are still accessible. Some other publications have also disappeared: for example, as of mid-August 2023, publications about Grishaeva were removed from the Zurich Weekly News Review (the archived version of the page is preserved in the publication site referred to the "Project" investigation) and MoscowPost (a description of the page is preserved in Google’s cache).
Zhirinovsky (before his death) and his son Igor Lebedev fell under EU sanctions, however, sanctions do not apply to Zhirinovsky’s wife Galina Lebedeva and Igor Lebedev’s second wife Nadezhda Grishaeva (according to Baza, Grishaeva and Lebedev registered their marriage in 2016 and divorced in 2019, a month after the publication of the investigations about the basketball player.
Baza considered this divorce fraudulent). It was the wives who held luxury property and hotels in Spain, which was discussed in the "Project" and Baza investigations published in February-March 2019. This property could have been bought on illegal earnings of the Zhirinovsky family in the LDPR.