On 29 October, three well-known bloggers from the Volga town of Samara, Dmitry Begun, Oleg Ivanets and Natalya Umyarova were arrested on suspicion of blackmail. The police also seized 1,200,000 roubles from Begun and Umyarova, a bribe they received from Sergei Shatilo, head of a local medical equipment company.
Indeed, the Samara regional police department announced that the bloggers’ blackmailing activities were of epic proportions. Allegedly, Begun, Ivanets and Umyarova had taken three million roubles from Shatilo in return for not spreading incriminating information about his company, which, along with the regional government, was the main investor in the construction of a new cardiac centre in Samara.
This is the first time that bloggers have been arrested in Russia for blackmailing the people they write about online.
