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bne October 2020
(LDPR) and the Communist Party of the
Russian Federation (KPRF).
The votes followed Navalny’s poisoning with Novichok following his visit to Tomsk on August 20, where he went to help organise voting in the elections.
Official early results showed pro-Kremlin politicians backed by Putin coasting
to landslide wins to serve as the governors of the regions of Komi, Tatarstan, Kamchatka and more than
a dozen others.
But Navalny’s supporters scored rare victories in city council votes in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third city by population, and the student town of Tomsk where United Russia, which dominates regional power, appeared to have lost its council majority.
“People are sick of the authorities. You can’t sit on the throne for 20 years, grab, steal endlessly, do all of this and go unpunished,” said Ksenia Fadeyeva, who won a council seat in Tomsk, as cited by Reuters.
Navalny supporter Andrei Fateev, 32, also won a seat in Tomsk, while Boyko looked set to win council seats in Novosibirsk.
“This completely destroys the whole myth about the 2% of liberals and that their “support is only among hipsters inside the Garden Ring road [in Moscow]”,” said Leonid Volkov, a close ally of Navalny, as cited by Reuters.
More than a thousand politicians, who were believed to be well placed to beat ruling party candidates, were included in the smart voting campaign, and the opposition mounted campaigns on their behalf.
In Tomsk, Fateev said United Russia appeared to have won only 12 out of 37 seats on the council after many candidates backed by the smart voting strategy had gone on to win.
Tatiana Doroshenko, a local election official, said she could not remember United Russia ever performing so badly
Eastern Europe I 49 early voting was used, allowing voters to
vote online for two days before physical voting on September. The change in
the rules is considered to offer an easy way to rig votes. An early voting system was also introduced in the massively falsified presidential election in Belarus, where incumbent Alexander Lukashenko claimed to have won by a landslide, sparking nationwide protests.
“As I suspected – and this was only logical, really – the authorities seem to have used whatever tricks they could to prevent second rounds in any of the 18 gubernatorial elex,” tweeted
bne:Tech
Contents
Top stories
Russia’s top retail and tech companies
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March 2020
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join forces to hunt for innovations in rest of the world
Ukraine-born startups raised more than half a billion dollars in 2019 Russian video streaming platforms gain speed
Cloud services take off in Russia SEMrush to SEO success
Leaders
Russia’s internet giant Yandex announces growing and more diversified revenues in 2019 Russian telecom major Rostelecom misses on earnings in 4Q19, cash flow solid
Investment
the
2
4
5 6 8
9
10 12
13
Russia’s top retail and tech companies
join forces to hunt for innovations in
the rest of the world
BAs Russia’s retail and tech sectors consolidate, the leading companies are turned their gaze outwards to hunt for
World Bank approves $35mn project
to modernise Kyrgyz tax administration and statistical system 13 Romanian online home decoration
retailer raises €3.5mn in bonds 14 Russian billionaires Abramovich, Gutseriev, said to invest in Telegram
crypto project TON 14 Russian fund Da Vinci Capital gets
€30mn from Germany’s DEG to invest
in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan 15
Fintech & E-commerce 16
Russian e-commerce major
Wildberries to add self-employed
vendor products to offering 16 Russian Dixy retailer to launch online sales with Ozon 17 Valuation of Sistema’s e-commerce
asset Ozon boosted to $1.8bn 17
Telecom 19
Makedonski Telekom’s net profit
up 6% y/y in 2019 19 Romanian telco Digi grows by double
digit rates in 2019 19 Russia could postpone 5G rollout
from 2022 to 2024 20
NIBs 21
bne:Tech
new technology and innovation.
See page 2
Ukraine-born startups raised more
than half a billion dollars in 2019
In 2019, the venture capital and private equity funding volume for Ukrainian and Ukrainian-founded tech startups reached $544mn (up from $323mn in 2018 and $265mn in 2017), says AVentures Capital’s latest industry report ”DealBook of Ukraine”,
reports Adrien Henni of Ukraine Digital News. See page 4
“People are sick of the authorities. You can’t sit on the throne for 20 years, grab, steal endlessly, do all of this and gounpunished”
in her 15 years as chairwoman of
a district election commission in Tomsk.
“This is an awesome case example ... you can actually engage in politics and it’s not futile as it had seemed just so recently,” said Fateev, Reuters reported.
Andrey Turchak, United Russia’s general secretary, said the party had scored
a “confident victory” in votes seen as
a dry run for the even more important 2021 parliamentary elections.
The regional election was the first time
political analyst Andras Toth-Czifra. “This has been a consistent policy since the surprise electoral upsets in 2018 and even more so now with the pro- [Khabarovsk governor] Furgal protests. There was a lot of administrative meddling, disqualification, bribes, etc. Still there were rumours about possible 2nd rounds... These elections will further erode the "electoral legitimacy" that the Russian governing system
has been based on. But this the Kremlin can still take if it doesn't lead to protests & those have been triggered
by specific issues.”
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