Owner of ‘Russia’s Google’ pulls out of dwelling nation

The proprietor of Yandex, sometimes called “Russia’s Google”, has mentioned it can pull out of its nation of origin.

Its Dutch-based mother or father firm offered the operation in Russia for 475 billion roubles ($5.2bn; £4.2bn), a lot decrease than its estimated market worth.

The sale to a consortium of traders means Yandex’s Russian enterprise is now a totally Russian-owned entity.

The agency has beforehand been accused of hiding details about the battle in Ukraine from the Russian public.

Moscow has welcomed the most recent deal which the corporate mentioned was “the product of an extensive period of planning and negotiation over more than 18 months”.

“This is exactly what we wanted to achieve a few years ago when Yandex was under threat of being taken over by Western IT giants,” mentioned Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Russian parliament’s committee on info coverage.

“Yandex is more than a company, it is an asset of the entire Russian society,” he added.

Set up within the dotcom increase within the late Nineties, Yandex developed its personal search engine, mapping and promoting companies. Other providers embody taxis and meals supply.

The $5.2bn deal is believed to be considerably decrease than Yandex’s market worth, which was estimated to be virtually $30bn in 2021.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many foreign-owned companies have exited the nation, usually promoting property on unfavourable phrases.

Russian president Vladimir Putin additionally ordered the seizure of others, corresponding to property belonging to Western manufacturers Danone and Carlsberg.

Yandex’s co-founder, Arkady Volozh, is considered one of only a few prime Russia-linked businessmen to have publicly spoken out towards Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He left the agency in 2022.

The firm and Mr Volozh have been hit with sanctions by the European Union, which in 2022 mentioned Yandex is “responsible for promoting [Russian] state media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine”.

Mr Volozh is looking for a European Union court docket to take away sanctions as he says he was by no means near the Russian president Vladimir Putin.

To adjust to the Russian authorities’s calls for over its content material, Yandex offered a few of its on-line sources to state-controlled rival VK in late 2022.

Even although Yandex presents itself as unbiased of the authorities, experiments by BBC Monitoring in 2022 confirmed that its search outcomes did not report Russian atrocities in Ukrainian metropolis of Bucha.