Turlov Files Defamation Lawsuit Against David Llada
By Douglas C. · Sun, 20 Sep 2026
Timur Turlov has announced that he filed a civil lawsuit against chess journalist David Llada.
Timur Turlov announced that he filed a civil lawsuit against chess journalist David Llada on September 18, in the Circuit Court for Kent County, Michigan, over Llada's public claims that Turlov still holds a Russian passport and never actually renounced his Russian citizenship.What the lawsuit is actually aboutThe dispute traces back to claims Llada made earlier in the campaign, that Turlov's Russian citizenship remained intact despite his public statements to the contrary. Turlov's complaint characterizes those statements as "false and defamatory." According to his own account, his lawyers sent Llada a written retraction demand on August 17, giving him the chance to correct the record before any court filing. No retraction followed, and the lawsuit was filed roughly a month later.His reasoningTurlov leaned heavily on his role as CEO of Nasdaq-listed Freedom Holding Corp to explain why he's treating this as more than ordinary campaign friction. He described the SEC's disclosure and internal-controls standards as exceptionally demanding, noted that he personally certified the company's quarterly report on August 10 in line with those requirements, and argued that operating under that level of scrutiny "shapes the way you think about your own name and reputation." His framing: a false public claim about his citizenship doesn't just affect him personally, it touches a public company's shareholders, employees, clients, and partners, which is why he says he can't treat it as routine electoral noise.He was direct that he doesn't consider ordinary campaign criticism a problem. "People are free to challenge my program and publicly oppose my candidacy. I consider that a normal part of an election," he wrote, drawing a line between that and what he calls "the spread of false factual claims," which he argues carries greater weight, not less, when made during a campaign where federations are actively deciding how to vote.The timingThe lawsuit becomes public six days before FIDE's General Assembly convenes in Samarkand to elect the federation's next president. Turlov closed his statement by pointing past the vote itself: "In a few days, the campaign will be over. My name and the reputation of the company will remain. So will my responsibility to the people who place their trust in us."What isn't resolved by any of thisThis is Turlov's own account of the dispute and his reasons for pursuing it, and it hasn't yet been independently corroborated through court records or a public response from Llada. Filing a defamation suit doesn't settle the underlying factual question, Turlov's actual citizenship status has been a recurring point of scrutiny throughout this campaign, and a lawsuit is the start of a legal process to test that claim, not a resolution of it. It does, however, mark a genuine escalation from where this dispute stood earlier in the summer, when Freedom Holding's own communications chief threatened legal action over the same underlying claim without, as far as is publicly known, actually filing suit at the time.