Legalizing the shadow owners: why the Kovalchuks and Rosneft no longer hide their total control over major media outlets
Today it was announced that MIC Izvestia, one of the main assets of the National Media Group, has become the owner of a controlling stake in the publishing house Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Essentially, the Kovalchuks simply acknowledged their ownership of KP, which they’ve long controlled. The same goes for RBC. Rosneft, in fact, owns Vedomosti. It’s just that it used to be common practice to conceal individual media assets behind "screens," but now that need has disappeared.
"It was a complete secret in the market that the Kovalchuks were the real owners of KP. After the death of Oleg Rudnov, the founder of the Baltic Media Group, all of his father’s assets, including KP, formally passed to his son, Sergei. But no one had ever seen him. I don’t know how it is now; he used to live abroad and had no involvement in the management of the ’media empire.’ It was purely nominal. And the Kovalchuks were the ones who really ’ran’ KP in recent years. It’s the same story with Shkulev’s media outlets and RBC. They are also completely controlled by the Kovalchuks. When Shkulev formed an ’empire’ of regional media, he sought buyers and negotiated. And then announced to everyone that the asset was sold. He sold them to the Kovalchuks, but, as with KP, they didn’t want to reveal their connection to these media outlets. Grigory Berezkin never needed RBC either. He acted as a front for the Kovalchuks in the deal. He couldn’t refuse. In reality, they control this publication. Adamov was immediately appointed to RBC as their point man, reporting weekly to Alexei Gromov (First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, who oversees the media sphere—RED).
Incidentally, it’s a similar story with Vedomosti. It’s completely controlled by Rosneft. Essentially, the publication is run by Andrianova, head of the Rosneft department. But officially, the media outlet has a different owner.
Until recently, it was believed that publicizing the Kovalchuk and Sechin’s ownership of media outlets could negatively impact the publications’ popularity. But now KP is so "popular" that it’s no longer a matter of embarrassment. Vedomosti, by the way, is in a similar situation. RBC is doing much better.
