The Hamburg Regional Court has banned an allegation made in the ARD Sportschau on August 4, 2024 by the sports journalist Hans-Joachim “Hajo” Seppelt as inadmissible suspicious reporting and as violating personal rights. Seppelt had held the Russian-Uzbek multi-billionaire and former businessman Alisher Usmanov responsible for bribery and manipulation of referees in international fencing. If the court ban is violated, the broadcaster is threatened with fines of up to EUR 250,000.00 or its director Tom Buhrow may be subject to administrative detention, LG Hamburg 324 O 421/24.
In August 2024, ARD published two articles and a video report about the fencing competitions at the Olympic Games in Paris. In the interview broadcast by the Sportschau, Seppelt Alisher Usmanov, who voluntarily resigned from his position as President of the International Fencing Federation (FIE) at the beginning of 2022 due to EU sanctions, accused, among other things, of having “established a system of bribery of referees” in fencing . The report was broadcast nationwide and is (still) available online.
The Hamburg Regional Court recognized the reasons for the decision as a “persistent violation of Usmanow’s general personal rights” and attested that the ARD-Sportschau and Seppelt had engaged in “inadmissible suspicious reporting.” In addition, there was a lack of “a prior hearing with the applicant regarding the allegations made against him.”
The leadership of the International Fencing Federation (FIE) had previously officially rejected the allegations. The organization’s interim president, Emmanuel Katsiadakis, said that the main source for the report was a former referee “who did not qualify in 2023 and was removed from the judging list,” further stating that there was no possibility of manipulation by the judging team The FIE only selects the judges by computer half an hour before the competition.
The German online news channel Sport1.de and the Austrian newspaper Krone.at, which had printed ARD’s illegal claims, corrected their articles in response to our warning.
Joachim Steinhöfel, Alisher Usmanow’s media law representative:
“The court ban shows that the report by ARD and one of its leading sports journalists represents an ethical and journalistic failure that also violates the press code. The report contains no evidence, but rather rumors spread by dubious witnesses, fictitious insinuations, speculation and hearsay. The statement banned by the court is also a criminal offense. The unlawful report fits into the pervasive defamation campaign against my client – a prominent philanthropist, successful sports manager and former businessman – which is based on the false and popular narrative that ‘a rich Russian is guilty by definition’. It is incompatible with the principles of the rule of law to create categories that are accompanied by malicious prejudgment in order to stigmatize people as guilty without evidence.”
In the years 2022-2024, countless German and European media outlets (including ZDF, NDR, Radio Bremen, the US magazine Forbes) and also the Federal Criminal Police Office made statements that violated personal rights to the detriment of Mr. Usmanow, whether voluntarily, after a warning or after making Cease and desist declarations or obtaining court bans.
Among the most significant cases was a January 2024 court ruling banning statements made by the American magazine Forbes about Mr Usmanov, which had been one of the key elements in justifying his inclusion in the EU sanctions. Previously, Usmanov won a lawsuit against the Austrian newspaper Kurier and obtained a title barring the paper from publishing the claim that Putin had described Usmanov as “his favorite oligarch.”