Moscow, 15 October. The Tverskoy District Court in Moscow accepted the Russian Prosecutor General's Office's withdrawal of its claim against Freedom Holding founder and International Chess Federation (FIDE) president Timur Turlov, terminated the proceedings and lifted the interim measures that had frozen the defendants' assets.
The claim reached the court on 24 September and became known on 1 October. The prosecutors asked the court to turn the property of Turlov and related structures over to the state and to declare the Freedom Holding group an extremist organisation. Besides Turlov, the defendants were Freedom Holding Corp., Freedom Finance Europe Ltd., W-Empirical Holding Corp. and Turlov's business partner Arkady Shchukin.
At the hearing the judge read out a statement by Deputy Prosecutor General Tkachev withdrawing the claims. The court explained to the claimant that it cannot file a new claim against Freedom Holding on the same grounds.
When the claim became known, Freedom Holding's press service said the holding has no operations or assets in Russia and sees no significant risks for its business. The holding exited its Russian assets in 2022; Turlov himself gave up Russian citizenship the same year and received Kazakh citizenship.
Turlov was elected FIDE president on 26 September at the General Assembly in Samarkand. Later Vadim Rosenstein, the second candidate, applied to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) asking it to clarify whether Turlov, who has been under Ukrainian sanctions since 2022, could take part in the election. We could not find information on a CAS decision in open sources at the time of writing.
