The Inter-District Civil Court of the city of Astana, in the person of judge Doszhan Dzhumayev, has partially upheld the claim of the director of the Research and Production Centre for Grain Farming (NPTsZKh) named after A.I. Barayev, Bauyrzhan Kalibayev, against the founder of FBRK Kirill Pavlov and the chief accountant of the Centre, Gulnar Kabdina. The second claimant, the deputy chairman of the management board for science, Yuri Dolinny, was refused in full by the court. The decision has not entered into legal force, and the FBRK editorial team will appeal it. But first it is worth understanding what this decision rests on, since the questions it raises turned out to be no fewer than those raised by the expert examination on which it is based.
WHAT THE COURT DECIDED
The decision was issued on 20 October 2026. Judge Dzhumayev found two statements from FBRK's Telegram publications to be untrue and defamatory of Kalibayev: that he “demanded the creation of a fictitious electronic invoice in order to distort statistical reporting”, and that he had still not signed the act of transfer and acceptance of assets, but was already proceeding with their sale.
The editorial team was ordered to delete two posts in the Telegram channel and publish retractions. Kabdina and Pavlov were ordered to pay 100,000 tenge each in moral damages instead of the claimed 2 million. In addition, they are ordered to pay, in shares, the costs of the expert examination (311,000 tenge), the services of the claimant's representative (350,000 tenge) and the state fee, almost 337,000 tenge from each.
The court dismissed Dolinny's claims in their entirety, stating that the claimant had not proved the dissemination of information capable of defaming his honour and dignity. Of the three groups of information listed in the claim, the court found only one to be untrue.
Recall that in May FBRK published a piece on the situation at the Barayev Centre, based on Kabdina's letter to state bodies. In September we reported on the claim filed, and in October we examined the findings of the psychological and philological expert examination by Forensic.KZ LLP.
WHY THE COURT ORDERED THE DELETION OF THE POST ABOUT THE KARAGANDA STATION
The decision states that the disputed information was disseminated in the article “Who is turning off the lights on Kazakh agricultural science?” at two addresses on Telegram. However, these are two different publications. The first, from 20 May, does indeed preview that article. The second, published in June, is devoted to a different story – the Karaganda Agricultural Experimental Station named after A.F. Khristenko, which is also part of the system of NAO “National Agrarian Scientific and Educational Centre” (NANOTs).
The Barayev Centre is mentioned in it only in connection with the pre-trial claim received, and the phrases about the fictitious invoice, the act of transfer and acceptance and the sale of assets, which the court found untrue, are not in it. What it does contain is the response of the Ministry of Agriculture (MSKh) to the editorial team's request. The state audit confirmed that the station's records reflected the shipment of 1,144,780 kg of grain to individuals who, by their own account, bought and removed nothing. The violations exceeded 10.1 million tenge. Unlawful bonuses paid from budget funds were also confirmed, for which the former head was given a strict reprimand.
The expert did not examine this post: the entire analysed fragment in the report is taken from the first publication. Nevertheless, the decision orders the deletion of the second in its entirety, together with the facts confirmed by a state agency and with the story of another organisation within the holding.
WHERE THE WORDS “ACCORDING TO KABDINA” DISAPPEARED TO
The disputed phrase in the post reads: “According to Kabdina, Kalibayev also demanded the creation of a fictitious electronic invoice in order to distort statistical reporting”. And the post itself opens with the statement that the editorial team had obtained Kabdina's letter to state bodies and that it is she who describes the violations.
The expert Banu Sagidanova acknowledged that “according to Kabdina” is a marker of the source of information. But in the same section she concluded that there are no markers of opinion in the fragment, and, in paraphrasing the phrase, she omitted these words. The introductory paragraph of the post was not included in the context analysis: the context in the report begins with the arrival of the new director.
In the operative part of the decision the disputed phrase is cited without the qualifier. Thus the attribution that stood at the beginning of the sentence was lost first on the way from the publication to the expert examination, and then from the expert examination to the decision. Meanwhile, it was precisely the difference between a retelling of someone else's version and the editorial team's own assertion that was the essence of the dispute.
Separately, on the phrase about the act of transfer and acceptance. In the post it follows immediately after the words “The service refused”, that is, as a continuation of the retelling of Kabdina's letter. Whether it relates to the version of the author of the letter was not analysed by the expert: both sentences were examined together as assertions about Kalibayev himself.
WHY THE COURT DID NOT ACCEPT THE ARGUMENTS ON THE EXPERT EXAMINATION
On 24 September the representative of the defendants filed a motion to find the report inadmissible as evidence and for a repeat expert examination at the state Centre for Forensic Examinations of the Ministry of Justice. There were seven grounds: a fragment was examined rather than the whole text; the introductory part was omitted from the context; the conclusion on “according to Kabdina” contradicts itself; the same applies to the conclusions on Dolinny; a 1992 decree that had lost force was applied; the court's questions were arbitrarily combined; the dates in the documents do not match.
Judge Dzhumayev rejected the motion in one paragraph. The grounds: the expert has a relevant qualification, a state licence dated 27 August 2022, and she was warned of criminal liability for a knowingly false report. None of the seven grounds is addressed on its merits in the decision, and nothing is said about a repeat expert examination. The court assessed the defendants' remaining objections in a single phrase: they cannot serve as grounds for refusing the claim.
It is telling that the court itself refers to Normative Resolution of the Supreme Court (NR SC) No. 3 of 20 May 2026. Yet the report on which the decision rests is built on a 1992 decree which that act replaced. It is precisely the new resolution that requires the examination of the entire text of a publication, not a fragment.
The examination was declared as psychological and philological, but it was conducted by a single expert with a philological education, and only linguistic types of analysis are listed among the methods. It cost 311,000 tenge, and these costs have now been recovered from the defendants.
There are plenty of careless errors in the decision itself. The claimant's surname in the description of the disputed information is written as “Dolinsky”. The publications are in one place called “video clips”. The amount of costs is stated as 673,812 tenge, although the components add up to 673,815. And the point refusing Dolinny in the operative part breaks off without ever reaching the word “refuse”. Each detail could be put down to a typo, but for a document that obliges the media to delete publications, rather a lot of them have accumulated.
DID THE EDITORIAL TEAM MANAGE TO RESPOND TO THE CLAIM
The pre-trial claim from Kalibayev and Dolinny reached the editorial team on 10 June. FBRK was preparing a response within the period established by law and publicly reported this in that very post about the Karaganda station which is now ordered to be deleted. The response was sent on time, but by the time it reached the addressee, the claim was already before the court at the stage of acceptance.
The purpose of the pre-trial procedure is to enable the parties to settle the dispute without a court. In this case it effectively did not work: the claimants did not wait for the response, yet the claim was nonetheless accepted for proceedings. The editorial team believes that the claim was accepted with procedural violations. This question is not considered at all in the decision.
WHAT NEXT
The decision has not entered into legal force. The FBRK editorial team is filing an appeal and intends to send an official address to the Minister of Culture and Information (MKI): this story raises the question of how, in practice, the guarantees of the Law “On Mass Media” work when the media reports on an appeal to state bodies.
The court has the right to decide which information is to be considered true, and we will dispute this decision in the established manner. But that is precisely why we are also addressing the MKI: the consequences of this case go beyond a single dispute. If a journalist's retelling of an appeal to state bodies, where the source is named in the very first sentence, can be recognised as an assertion by the editorial team simply by omitting the words “according to the version of”, then any media outlet reporting on employees' complaints becomes a defendant by default. And the expert examination, which was supposed to separate fact from retelling, has erased precisely that distinction.
At the same time, the main question about the Barayev Centre itself has been left unanswered. The MSKh confirmed that an inspection was carried out and that the working group prepared its conclusion as long ago as 28 May, but did not disclose its contents. The court established which two phrases about Kalibayev are to be considered untrue. What the state inspectors actually found at the Centre, society still does not know.
