Page 21 - bne IntelliNews Georgia country report November 2017

Eastern Europe
November 11, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 21
What the “Paradise Papers” missed:
the Kremlin tech investment portfolio
Adrien Henni in Moscow
According to leaked documents examined by the International Consortium of Investigative Journal- ism (ICIJ), the hundreds of millions dollars used by Yuri Milner’s fund DST (Digital Sky Technolo- gies) to invest in Facebook and Twitter in 2009- 2011 came “from the Kremlin.”
“Obscured by a maze of offshore shell companies, the Twitter investment was backed by VTB, a Rus- sian state-controlled bank often used for politi- cally strategic deals,” writes the New York Times, a member of the ICIJ.
“A big investor in Mr. Milner’s Facebook deal received financing from Gazprom Investholding, another government-controlled financial institu- tion,” the US journalists note.
According to records from the Panama Papers, Gazprom Investholding provided hundreds of mns of dollars in loans to Kanton, a company based in the British Virgin Islands which owned one of the DST investment vehicles used to buy shares of Facebook.
Milner’s companies sold those holdings several years ago, and “no one has suggested that Mr. Milner or his companies had any connection to the propaganda operation,” concedes the US newspaper, but the Russian billionaire “retains investments in several other large technology companies and continues to make new deals.”
Russian tech whizz Yuri Milner got Kremlin money to invest into Facebook, Twitter
These deals illustrate “how the Kremlin has ex- tended its long financial arm not only to [DST] but to some of America’s technology giants,” conclude the US journalists. Citing pundits from US think tanks, they underline the Kremlin’s ties with VTB and Gazprom and the use of these vehicles “for politi- cally important and strategically important deals.”
Russian money everywhere?
It is hardly deniable that DST’s historic
backer Alisher Usmanov has ties with the Russian government — especially with Prime Minister and former President Dmitry Medvedev — just like any Russianbnaire still living in Russia. A
key shareholder of Mail.Ru Group, an LSE-listed company which controls most of Russia’s social networks, Usmanov has “numerous ties” with Kanton, reports the ICIJ.
It is also likely that Milner — even though he moved a long time ago to Silicon Valley, where spent about $100mn on a 25,000-square-foot house — has kept ties with his native country’s business and political elite.
Meanwhile, the ICIJ journalists did not say much about a plethora of other powerful tech companies from the US or elsewhere which have received Russian state money, directly or indirectly. Exam- ples range from such digital superstars as Uber, Shazam and Spotify, to, oh my God, major US play- ers in the field of data storage and online media.