Apparently Oleg Deripaska does not hold the belief that bad publicity is better than no publicity.  After Vedomosti published an article on October 26 claiming that the company had debts of just under $6 billion for last year, journalists at the business daily apparently found their inboxes flooded with harassing emails and relentless calls made to their cell phones from RusAl’s communications henchmen.  With an upcoming attempt to woo foreign investors to the United Russia company’s debt-laden portfolio with a somewhat shaky-looking IPO, it is no wonder Deripaska is fuming.  

Whilst the editor-in-chief of the paper, Elizaveta Osetinskaya, believes that the intimidation is fundamentally a revanchist attempt to locate the source of the leaked information, the campaign is nonetheless also a direct attack on the right of independent journalists to publish any information they garner.  The Moscow Times reports on the subject, although it too has been denied access to the Rusal Press Office since an April article, quoting directly from workers at a Rusal plant, rather than seeking official info from the company’s spokespeople, incurred the aluminum giant’s wrath.

 
Vedomosti editor-in-chief Elizaveta Osetinskaya said RusAl accused the newspaper of breaking the law by publishing commercial secrets and was now waging a “war” to force it to reveal its source and prevent it from writing about the company again.

“UC RusAl and its lawyers from Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners have triggered an information terror [campaign] against Vedomosti,” Osetinskaya wrote in an unusually sharp post on her LiveJournal blog late last week. “Their goal is to make us stop writing fairly and objectively about one of the most closed companies in Russia, as we have done for the past 10 years.”