A legal dispute has knocked the BBC’s Russian service off the air in Moscow, officials said on Thursday, although the corporation insisted all its licenses were in order.
Konstantin Eggert, Moscow bureau editor for the BBC’s Russian service, said the company which broadcasts the corporation’s programs had lost its license, causing it to lose its medium wave transmission in the Russian capital. “We officially have a right to broadcast. We were not the ones who lost the right to broadcast, it was the service provider,” he was quoted by Reuters as saying.
Grigory Kliger, head of the Oktod operating company, said the license for the frequency had run out and that the documents needed to renew it had not been ready in time.
According to the Russian agencies reports, the service provider, which broadcasts the British Broadcasting Corporation’s news in Russian along with English-language programming, did not have a license from the federal agency that regulated programming, Rosokhrankultura.
An official of the agency said “the BBC only had a technical license from the Communications Ministry, but it did not have a license from (our agency).”
But other officials said the problem arose from a mix-up rather than from any desire to halt the broadcasts. http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/12/23/bbcknockedoff.shtml
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