NEW YORK, February 11. /TASS/. Sides and witnesses gave their testimony in the New York court as part of the ongoing litigation between Russian heavyweight Alexander Povetkin and US boxer Deontay Wilder, a TASS correspondent reported from the courtroom.
On Monday, the nine jurors will start to deliberate on whether Povetkin used the performance enhancing drug meldonium starting from January 1, 2016, after this substance was put on WADA’s (World Anti-Doping Agency) updated list of banned substances.
Povekin’s lawyer Alexei Karpenko, a Senior Partner at the Forward Legal company, expects the jury to announce the verdict on the same day.
"I believe the jury will deliberate for several hours and will pronounce its decision in the afternoon or evening," he told TASS.
Povetkin told the jury in the US District Court in New York’s Manhattan earlier this week he did not use meldonium since it was banned, but took it on prescription of his physician during a training session in Kazakhstan in the autumn of 2015.
Povetkin (30-1, 22 KOs) and US WBC Heavyweight Champion Deontay Wilder (W36-L0, 35 KOs) have been locked in a legal dispute over the title bout that was to take place on May 21 last year in Moscow, but was cancelled after the Russian boxer’s doping Sample A had tested positive for meldonium shortly before the fight.
The US side called off the bout and publicly accused the Russian boxer of violating anti-doping rules, without waiting for a decision from the World Boxing Council (WBC). Povetkin and his lawyers responded with a counter-claim of libel.
Wilder, who was scheduled to make almost $4.4 million for the fight, is seeking a compensation of about $5 million for the cancelled event. The Russian side is seeking damages of $34.5 million to compensate for the harm done to Povetkin’s reputation, moral damage and costs of the cancelled fight.