LONDON (Reuters) -Google on Wednesday won an injunction from London’s High Court to prevent the enforcement of Russian judgments against the U.S. tech giant over the closure of various Google and YouTube accounts.
Judge Andrew Henshaw granted Google a permanent anti-enforcement injunction, on the grounds that Google and YouTube’s terms and conditions required disputes to be brought to court in England.
Henshaw also said in a written ruling that Google Russia’s liquidator had estimated the total of some of the fines faced by Google amounted to 20 trillion times the gross domestic product (GDP) of the whole world.
Tsargrad TV, a Christian Orthodox channel owned by sanctioned businessman Konstantin Malofeev, sued Google in Russia in 2022, with Russian state media outlet RT filing a similar case two years later.
They and another Russian company which operates the Spas TV channel obtained judgments against Google which contain so-called “astreinte penalties”, which rapidly increase with every day they are not paid.
Lawyers representing Google said at a hearing in November that just some of the penalties levied on its Russian subsidiary amounted to an undecillion of roubles, a number with 36 zeroes.
Henshaw said the three channels from late 2023 had tried to enforce the Russian judgments against Google in courts in a number of countries – Algeria, Egypt, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and Vietnam.
A Google spokesperson said they were pleased with the ruling, adding in a statement: “For years, Russian courts have levied unprecedented fines and arbitrary legal penalties against Google in an attempt to limit access to information on our services and as punishment for our compliance with international sanctions against Russian individuals and organizations.”
Google stopped serving ads to users in Russia in March 2022 and paused monetisation of content which it deemed to exploit, dismiss or condone Russia’s war in Ukraine.
It has since blocked more than 1,000 YouTube channels, including state-sponsored news, and over 5.5 million videos.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin, Editing by Gareth Jones)
