While it's not forbidden to delete a topic containing a Merit Source application, I consider it a sign of disrespect for the forum and for the user himself. Based on that topic Ratimov earned a ton of sMerit, which he used to feed his army of minions. Then he deletes his application, making a mockery from his Merit Source statute. There is no other Merit Source which did that.
I think it would be ok to remove the thread if he requested theymos to un-merit-source him... which I don't think he did, given that we've had 109 sources with 33940 smerits for a while now and I doubt that he was replaced with an equivalent merit source. Anyway, this is neither here nor there. Sending or receiving merits is not evidence of anything, particularly when a merit source needs to dump 500+ merits every month... trust me, I know