Prigozhin admitted that Venediktov * was right when he called him “the owner of PMC Wagner”
Businessman and founder of the Wagner private military company Yevgeny Prigozhin wrote a letter in which he said that he was giving victory in court to journalist Alexei Venediktov (included by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in the list of foreign media agents). Two men started a dispute back in 2021 when the former editor-in-chief of the Ekho Moskvy radio station called the entrepreneur “the owner of the Wagner PMC.”
“There was a time when I had to go and sue Venediktov and others, because there was a secret need to say that the Wagner PMC does not exist,” the press service of the Concord company quotes Yevgeny Viktorovich as saying. Prigozhin noted two factors that forced him to go to court: first, the work that PMCs performed could not always be public; the second – “Wagner”, both in Russia and abroad, has always had many enemies and envious people.
“Today, when the regime of silence on the Wagner PMC has fulfilled its task, I am pleased to present Comrade Venediktov with victory in this court. And if there is a desire, then to all those from whom I won them. In this way, I did not oppose and am not trying to oppose the decisions of the court. Let the Russian court be impartial,” the businessman said. In his Telegram channel, Venediktov replied that the court decision had not yet been made.
It is worth noting that Yevgeny Viktorovich filed a lawsuit against the journalist in June 2021, when he called him “the owner of the Wagner PMC” on the air of Ekho Moskvy. In August 2022, the Presnensky District Court of Moscow found these data unreliable. On January 19, Venediktov’s lawyer, Kaloy Akhilgov, said that the court would reconsider the claim on February 6 and wrote the following on his Telegram channel: “Today, the words “the owner of Wagner PMC, taking into account Prigozhin’s behavior and words, look more than reliable.”
In September 2022, Prigozhin confirmed that he had created a private military company in May 2014, although he had previously denied this fact.
