A close friend of Vladimir Putin, Alexei Kudrin, announced on Monday that he had joined the Yandex group, a Russian gem of new technologies, at a time when the Kremlin is strengthening its control over the digital sector amid the conflict in Ukraine. .
This sector has been strongly affected by the Western sanctions adopted against Moscow. Since then, the Russian government has sought to replace the products of the Western giants that left the country.
Former Finance Minister (2000-2011), Alexei Kudrin, 62, is one of the country’s most renowned liberal economic advisers. He announced last week that he would leave the Court of Accounts, which he has presided over since 2018.
“I accepted an offer from Yandex to become a business development adviser,” he said on Telegram on Monday, adding that one of his tasks would be “to ensure the long-term development of the company, in all markets, including internationally.” .
The appointment of Alexei Kudrin is “proof that the state has decided to speed up the process of creating purely Russian services and increasingly limit the access of Russians to foreign services,” said Sergei Khestanov, economic adviser at the investment company Otkrytie Broker.
Russia’s other online services giant, Sber, is already controlled by state-owned Sberbank.
key business
Alexei Kudrin began his career in the 1990s in St. Petersburg, like Vladimir Putin, whom he has known for a long time, and was finance minister from 2000 to 2011. He remained close to the Kremlin head after leaving government.
His appointment in Yandex illustrates the importance that the Russian government attaches to this jewel of new technologies and its desire to better control it.
Visibly aware of the questions posed by their arrival, Alexeï Koudrine assured Monday that his helper Yandex would preserve his culture manager and technology unique for the company to remain “independent” and “la meilleure des hautes technologies” in Russia”.
Yandex is registered in the Netherlands and has European, British and American subsidiaries, but most of its business is in Russia and Russian-speaking countries.
It created Russia’s leading search engine and is a dominant player in taxi and delivery services in much of the Russian-speaking world.
In recent months there have been several changes in Yandex. At the beginning of June, its co-founder Arkadi Voloj resigned from the leadership of the group after being individually sanctioned by the European Union in relation to Ukraine.
20,000 employees
Last week, the board of directors had indicated that it was working on the restructuring of the “shareholders and the government of the group in the face of the current geopolitical situation.”
In fact, the group will be visibly divided into two entities, one managing the activities in Russia and the other abroad.
At the beginning of November, Yandex, which employs around 20,000 people, announced a strong increase in turnover in the third quarter (+46%), taking advantage of the exit of many competitors in the wake of international sanctions.
But the group also pointed to “uncertainty” and “an exceptionally difficult environment for our activities and our teams”, despite these satisfactory results.
In August, Yandex had already announced that it would sell its media activities to VK, the “Russian Facebook”, which the Russian state took control of several years ago.
Source: BFM TV
