The seller of Komsomolskaya Pravda to Alina Kabaeva’s media holding turned out to be Vladimir Putin’s nominee. The Regnum agency was also transferred to the holding

The seller of Komsomolskaya Pravda to Alina Kabaeva’s media holding turned out to be Vladimir Putin’s nominee. The Regnum agency was also transferred to the holding

The former owner of the controlling stake in the Komsomolskaya Pravda publishing house, whose acquisition was announced last week by Alina Kabaeva’s National Media Group (NMG), turned out to be Vladimir Putin’s nominee Sergei Rudnov. This is indicated by data from the register of legal entities, Verstka noted.

According to a Unified State Register of Legal Entities entry, on September 9 the Izvestia multimedia information center, which is part of NMG, gained control of 75.1% of LDV Press. Since 2016, this stake had been controlled by Sergei Rudnov, the son of Oleg Rudnov, founder of Baltic Media Group.

That LDV Press owned the controlling stake in the Komsomolskaya Pravda publishing house was stated back in 2016 by one of the company’s then shareholders, Sergei Orlov. LDV Press’s share in the publishing house’s capital may have been about 60.5%, wrote Adindex, based on its own calculations.

NMG announced the acquisition of a controlling stake in the Komsomolskaya Pravda publishing house on September 3. However, NMG’s statement did not disclose either the transaction amount or the seller of the stake. It only said that the stake in the publishing house would be controlled through the Izvestia multimedia information center, which is part of NMG.

In addition to leaving the shareholders of LDV Press on September 9, Rudnov lost three more companies connected to media assets: Regnum, Ikar, and Development of Media Technologies. All of them also came under the control of the Izvestia multimedia information center.

Regnum is the legal entity of the propaganda news agency of the same name. According to data from the Medialogia service, in August Regnum ranked 25th in citations among censored online media.

Ikar, in turn, owns the former legal entities of publications that were part of Baltic Media Group, such as Radio Baltika and the newspapers Nevskoye Vremya and Vecherny Peterburg.

Most of these publications were closed in 2015, after Oleg Rudnov’s death and Baltic Media Group’s transfer under the control of Aram Gabrelyanov. Now Ikar’s only operating asset is the 78 television channel, 25% of which has belonged to NMG since 2017.

🩵Oleg Rudnov was a St. Petersburg media manager. He met Vladimir Putin in 1996, during Anatoly Sobchak’s election campaign, which the future president headed. In the following years he became the nominal owner of assets belonging to Putin’s family. Rudnov died in 2015, and his assets were re-registered to his son Sergei. The younger Rudnov also became the president’s nominee.

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