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Newspaper apologises to Russia’s richest woman

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Summary of story from Guardian, October 20, 2011

British newspaper, The Sunday Times, has apologised in court to the Russian businesswoman it falsely claimed had secretly bought a £50 million mansion in London.

In a statement read out at the high court on Thursday, Hannah Ready, the lawyer acting for Times Newspapers, said the organisation had agreed to pay Elena Baturina an “appropriate sum” of damages plus legal costs.

The Sunday Times acknowledged at the weekend that two September 2009 stories were incorrect.

They had wrongly claimed that Russia’s richest woman, whose husband Yuri Luzhkov was mayor of Moscow at the time, had purchased Witanhurst mansion in Highgate and suggested she had broken official rules by not publicly declaring the deal.

Baturina said on Monday: “I was astonished that an obvious lie about me could be printed by a British newspaper.

“It sparked a wave of negative press attention directed towards me by European and Russian media which was extremely unpleasant.”

The statement marks the formal end of the two-year legal battle.

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