Primorye Businessmen Go on Hunger Strike

VLADIVOSTOK. October 14. VOSTOK-MEDIA – The owners and management of a major Primorye company will gather at Revolution Square in Moscow today to stage a hunger strike to protest against the illegal corporate raid on their company.

An official, who did not want his name published, said the owners and managers of a Vladivostok-based shopping mall claim they have been subject to an illegal corporate raid, and now they are going to rally against the actions of the local law enforcement agencies. The company’s trade union representatives are expected to join the hunger strike.

The company represented by the strikers owns one of the largest shopping malls in Vladivostok.

“It’s been more than a year now since our company has been subjected to the outrageous attack from representatives of the so-called “law-enforcement” authorities of out city,” said Alexei Sorokin, a co-owner of Selkhozrynok. “At first, they ruled that our building had been constructed illegally despite of the fact that we had had all the necessary permits and documents. Then the Prosecutor’s Office began tormented us with interminable audits and investigations. And now they are staging provocations against us.”

Eduard Bondarenko, the Commercial Director of Selkhozrynok, has served two months in jail this year for slandering the public prosecutor Dmitry Romanchenko, of Vladivostok. According to the investigators, Selkhozrynok had organized a smear campaign defaming the public prosecutor.

“That fact that a suspect has been arrested for slander is unprecedented in modern Russian law,” said the Selkhozrynok’s lawyer Alexander Kormiltsyn. “Clearly, this goes contrary to President Dmitry Medvedev’s initiative to humanize Russia’s criminal justice system.”