On Tuesday, 20 September, Riga City Vidzeme District Court cleared kompromat.lv representative Leonid Jakobsons of all charges in relation to the publishing of the e-mail correspondence of Riga Mayor Nil Ushakov.
In his commentary, Jakobsons expressed his surprise about the ruling, adding that ‘the freedom of speech truly does exist in Latvia’. He expected the pressure on the court to be big. Fortunately, the case was reviewed objectively.
The full text of the court ruling will be available on 4 October.
Previously, the prosecutor asked Jakobsons to be sentenced to 200 hours of community service and an enforcement of EUR 14,000 compensation in favour of Nil Ushakov.
Jakobsons had previously explained that prosecutor Vita Ozolina had decided to clarify the charges without changing the applicable section of the law. Kristine Sutugina, press-representative of the prosecutor’s office says charged had been changed for Jakobsons without changing the classification of the crime.
As previously reported, Jakobsons was accused of breaching Part 1 of Section 144 of the Criminal Law – violation of confidentiality of correspondence and information transmitted over telecommunications networks.
The criminal process was launched on 23 November in relation to the hacking of Ushakov’s e-mail. In December 2011, State Police performed a search in the apartment of kompromat.lv representative Leonid Jakobsons. Multiple data storage devices and two computers were confiscated by authorities.
Kompromat.lv had published e-mail messages from Ushakov’s e-mail address from 2008. Those e-mails were sent to Aleksandr Hapilov, then the advisor to the Russian embassy in Latvia. At the time, Ushakov was a member of the 9th Saeima. Hapilov was an advisor to the Russian embassy; he left his job and Latvia in 2009.
