ICU CALLS ON THE MEDIA NOT TO DISTRIBUTE FALSE AND DEFAMATORY INFORMATION

ICU and its affiliates do not have and never have had any affiliation with Elliott Broidy or his company. We regret that Al Jazeera published an article based on falsified documents claiming otherwise. ICU had warned the broadcaster of the fraud in response to its request for comment. We can only guess at the reasons for proceeding to publish untruthful information, and we believe that it could become part of new, sponsored misinformation campaign against ICU in the Ukrainian media.

The same falsified documents were previously circulated by the representatives of the Institute of Law and Society (“The Institute”), a public organization co-founded and led by Yuriy Karmazin, mentioned in Al Jazeera's article.

Within the framework of a pre-trial settlement of dispute, on February 20, 2018, ICU sent a request to The Institute to obtain a copy of the so-called legal opinion, drawn up by the "experts" of the Institute on the basis of forged documents. Thus far no response has been received from the Institute. In this regard, ICU is preparing a statement of claim demanding a refutation of libellous information.

We urge the media not to distribute this false and defamatory information. Below are the key points from our response to Al Jazeera's request for comment about the fake documents:

These documents (referenced in Al Jazeera’s questions to ICU) are fake and their assertions are false.

We believe they are part of a malicious fraud against us and we intend to report this fraud to law enforcement authorities.

ICU and its affiliates do not have and never have had any relationship with Elliott Broidy or his company. ICU and its affiliates also have never had any contractual arrangement with Broidy or his company. The management of ICU has never met Broidy and has never worked with him or his company. ICU has no contract with Broidy dated in 2014 or in any other year, and has never paid him. Broidy has never lobbied for ICU nor has he worked on ICU’s behalf.

There has never been a memorandum of understanding between ICU, Broidy and Al Bashayer (an Abu Dhabi based company named in the Al Jazeera request and not included in the final article unlike our own name which was prominently featured) or an arrangement of any kind between these entities. There is no private equity fund connected to ICU that is associated with the entities you (Al Jazeera) mention.