President Vladimir Putin declined Tuesday to involve himself in the dispute over Russia's independent television station NTV as the station's embattled journalists went to court to challenge a change of management.
"I do not think I should get involved in this mess and clean up all that has been done wrong over the past year. There is only one way to solve this, and that is through the courts," Putin told a press conference in Saint Petersburg after a two-day summit with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
The NTV network is currently fighting a takeover bid by Gazprom, the state-controlled gas giant, which last week imposed new management in what the station's staff saw as a boardroom coup.
Though Gazprom representatives have presented the takeover as purely a business affair, civil rights groups and foreign governments have expressed concern over the prospect of NTV, a vocal critic of government policy, effectively coming under state control.
Putin commented that "all the particpants in this difficult debate are trying to get the head of state and public opinion on their side" and said he would prefer not to take sides.
"We should distinguish between an economic dispute and the question of freedom of speech," he said.
NTV lawyers meanwhile contested the change of management in two appeals to a court of arbitration due to be considered next month, the Interfax news agency reported.
Alexander Polozok, for NTV's parent group Media-MOST, said lawyers were challenging the legality of last Tuesday's shareholders' meeting at which the change was approved, and also the vote itself which approved the change.
The Moscow arbitration court will consider the first case on May 10 and the second on May 17, Interfax said.
The shareholders' meeting took place hours after a court decided it could not proceed until a complex voting rights issue was resolved, only to reverse its ruling a few hours later.
At dispute is the validity of an earlier legal ruling that froze a 19-percent Media-MOST shareholding in NTV, enabling Gazprom to obtain a majority at last week's shareholders' meeting.
Last week the station's ousted director, journalist Yevgeny Kiselyov, said the NTV journalists were calling on Putin to ask the Supreme Court to suspend earlier rulings in the legal dispute between Media-MOST Gazprom.
On Monday former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who heads NTV's supervisory council, said Putin had told him the dispute should be settled "through legal channels" at the highest level, implicitly by the Supreme Court – MOSCOW (AFP)
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