The Oktyabrsky District Court of Yekaterinburg satisfied the Ministry of Justice's claim to liquidate the charitable 'Roizman Foundation', reported the local publication It's My City. Judge Zhanna Stekolnikova, who had previously fined Yevgeny Roizman himself, agreed with the agency's arguments.
At the beginning of the session, the Ministry of Justice's representative petitioned for the case to be heard in a closed session because the materials contain personal data and diagnoses of minors.
Lawyer Kaloy Akhilgov, representing the interests of the foundation, petitioned for the claim to be dismissed. "The evidence base presented is not sufficient to liquidate the foundation," he told RusNews. In his opinion, all the violations identified by the Ministry of Justice are remediable. The lawyer also noted that the Ministry of Justice is asking to liquidate a charitable foundation in a social state. "It is surprising to me that essentially a foundation, which is an assistant to the state in solving social problems of citizens, is being attempted to be liquidated by the same state," added Akhilgov.
The foundation's general director, Svetlana Kosolapova, proposed reconciliation of the parties, but the Ministry of Justice was against it.
On March 4, the main department of the Ministry of Justice of Russia for the Sverdlovsk region filed a lawsuit demanding the liquidation of Yevgeny Roizman's foundation due to the results of an inspection conducted at the end of 2024. The Ministry of Justice accused the 'Roizman Foundation' of misappropriating collected funds. Inspectors and law enforcement studied information about fundraising for the drug Zolgensma for spinal muscular atrophy for two children, but the organization stated that the collected 222 million rubles were not spent because the foundation did not have the right to do so.
During this fundraising, the government allowed the state fund 'Circle of Kindness', recently created by Putin's decree, to purchase orphan drugs, and the procedure for prescribing such medications changed. Yevgeny Roizman said that after this, his foundation could no longer spend the collected 'people's money' as intended.
In response to the Ministry of Justice's claims, Kosolapova told the court that the fundraising for Zolgensma was closed in April 2022, after which donors could request a refund. Since then, the foundation received only six refund requests. The mother of one of the boys for whom the fundraising was conducted asked to transfer the collected 88 million rubles for the construction of a dispensary for the rehabilitation of cancer patients at the 1st children's hospital in Yekaterinburg. The remaining money stayed in the foundation's accounts 'until donors' statements'.
The 'Roizman Foundation' was established in 2015. In 2021, the foundation was able to raise over 150 million rubles for a dose of Zolgensma for a boy named Misha Bakhtin for the first time.
The founder of the foundation, former mayor of Yekaterinburg and opposition politician Yevgeny Roizman, was fined 260 thousand rubles in 2023 in a criminal case for 'discrediting' the army. Roizman was fined three times for 50 thousand rubles under a similar administrative article. In November 2022, the Ministry of Justice included Roizman in the register of 'foreign agents'.
* Recognized as a 'foreign agent' in Russia.
Photo: It's My City