Who owns the Yandex search engine. History of the Yandex company

The founder of the Yandex search engine, Arkady Volozh, as it turns out, is not its largest owner. They, according to the prospectus issued by Yandex the day before The IPO is Baring Vostok Capital Partners, which invested $5.28 million in the search engine in 2000.

The largest Russian Internet search engine will begin pre-marketing of its initial public offering with a listing on the American NASDAQ exchange early next week. Meetings between the organizing banks and investors will begin on May 3, reports Reuters. The organizers of the placement are Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Revealed the structure

Now this fund is the largest shareholder, its share is 22.6% (23.89% of voting shares), it reported in its prospectus for the IPO. Volozh’s economic share is 14.67% (19.77% of votes), as follows from the prospectus, Segalovich’s is 3.07% (4.14% of votes). The American fund Tiger Global has 20.5% of shares, and UFG has another 5.13% of shares, the document states. The prospectus names Ben Cole, John Boynton, Al Fenoti, Esther Dyson, Alexander Voloshin and Alexander Shulgin as minority shareholders. Former head of the presidential administration Voloshin is on the company's board of directors.

Until now, economic shares only affected the distribution of dividends. It began paying them in 2006, transferring $15 million to shareholders. In 2007, the company paid $10 million in dividends, in 2008 - $19.5 million, and in 2010 - $30 million. If it continues to pay dividends in the future , then holders of shares of classes A and B will receive them in proportion to the number of securities they hold, the prospectus says. However, the company has no such plans yet.

In the first quarter of 2011, revenue amounted to 3.9 billion rubles, profit - 820 million rubles. Almost all revenue came from advertising sales - 3.8 billion rubles. Of these, 3.47 billion rubles. brought contextual advertising, 328 million rubles. - media.

It is worth noting that foreign co-owners of the company may have difficulty increasing their share. Since 2008, Russia has had a law on foreign investment in strategic enterprises, which prohibits foreigners from owning more than 50% of the voting shares of such enterprises, the placement prospectus recalls.

This law does not say anything about Internet companies, but companies that own data encryption technologies automatically fall under its scope, and its 100% subsidiary, Yandex.Money, just recently acquired such a license, the prospectus says. does not rule out that on this basis the parent company may also be classified as a strategic enterprise. The decision on this matter is made by a government commission chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. His press secretary Dmitry Peskov is not aware of plans to include him in the list of strategic companies.

In November 2010, the IPO was conducted by the Internet holding Mail.ru Group of Yuri Milner and Alisher Usmanov. The company was placed at the upper end of the price range and was valued by investors at $5.7 billion. Previously, Usmanov had negotiated the purchase of a stake in, but they did not lead to a deal. Mail.ru Group shares on the LSE yesterday fell by 3.3% to $30.7 per share.

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Yandex is the most popular among Internet users search engine in Russia. In addition, Yandex is also an Internet portal that contains more than 30 services. You can not only find a topic or site that interests you, but also use services such as Yandex. Money, Yandex. Mail, Yandex. Pictures, Yandex. Work and many others. Yandex has become such a familiar search engine that many of us don’t even think about who invented and created Yandex.

How was Yandex created?

In 1988, entrepreneur and programmer Arkady Volozh - in the future, one of the creators of Yandex - founded the company CompTek. The company was selling personal computers and workplace automation.

In 1989, Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky, a specialist in computer linguistics, founded the Arcadia computer company. A few years later, the company’s employees wrote two information retrieval systems - “Classifier of Goods and Services” and “International Classification of Inventions”.

In 1993, CompTek was merged with Arcadia. Another creator of Yandex, programmer Ilya Segalovich, came to CompTek shortly before the merger, It was he, together with another creator of Yandex, Arkady Volozh, who came up with the word Yandex. Initially, Yandex was the name given to the program written by CompTek executives. Yandex program was intended to search for information on a computer's hard drive.

Collaborating with the Institute for Information Transmission Problems, CompTek employees have created a Russian language dictionary with search and a Bible computer reference book.

But those who invented and created Yandex - Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich did not stop there. The creators of Yandex in 1995 decided to introduce their search program to the Internet. Software application At first it worked with limited resources, but a little later it covered the entire Russian-speaking part of the Internet.

In 1997, the Yandex search engine was officially launched.

In 1999, when the number of Runet users increased significantly, the creators of Yandex introduced a new search robot that optimizes the process of searching for the required information.

In 2000, the founders of CompTek created new company Yandex. Arkady Volozh becomes the General Director, and Ilya Segalovich takes the position of Director of Technology and Development. In the same year, the Yandex search engine expanded its capabilities. There are such specialized services as Yandex. News, Yandex. Mail, ascetic Yandex, Yandex. Postcards, Yandex. Bookmarks, Yandex. Guru.

By 2010, Yandex became the most popular Internet portal in Russia, and reached the international level after the opening of the English-language version of the search engine. A portal is also opening in Belarus, making searches in Tatar and Ukrainian languages ​​possible. In the same year, Yandex expanded its range specialized services. Yandex appears. Work, Yandex. Maps, Yandex. Real estate and others.

Yandex's net profit is impressive; in 2011 it amounted to $179.3 million. so those who created Yandex - Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich - did a tremendous job to ensure that their software brainchild was a colossal success on the Internet.

Today I will describe the success story of Yandex founder Arkady Volozh. And this is right after the article about the founder Google.

Although for me Yandex has always been in first place, since this search engine is more convenient for me to use . What do you think? Share in the comments. Yandex - you can find everything! A well-known slogan and probably deservedly so. On at the moment Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia, in the world Yandex is in twentieth place. Yandex, created by our compatriots, Arkady Volozh And Ilya Segalovich in 1997, quickly gained love and popularity among Runet users.

And a huge number of services, currently more than 50, make Yandex almost irreplaceable for Internet users.

Each of us has used Yandex Market or Yandex Traffic, Yandex Search or Yandex Maps at least once. Co-founder of Yandex Ilya Segalovich no longer with us, he died in 2013 at the age of 48 from cancer.

Yandex. The beginning of a success story

So, where did Yandex begin and, in general, where did the name come from? Yandex was born in the late 80s, early 90s.

These were the times of perestroika, times when the world became more open to us, and it became possible to communicate with specialists from other countries, and everything new and progressive was easily developed and promoted.

At that time, Arkady Volazh, a programmer and mathematician working at the Institute of Management Problems, at the same time became a co-founder of a cooperative that was engaged in automation of workplaces. From this moment begins the story of Arkady Volazh as an entrepreneur.

Founder of Yandex. Arkady Volozh. Biography

A little about the biography of Arkady Volazh. Arkady comes from Kazakhstan, from the small town of Guryev, now called Atyrau. Born in 1964.

His father worked as a geologist and was a doctor of geological and mineral sciences. Mom taught at a music school. Arkady Volazh received his higher education in Moscow at the Russian State Institute of Oil and Gas, graduating from the Faculty of Applied Mathematics.

After graduation, he began working at the State Institute of Management Problems. Here he first began to deal with the problems of electronic automated processing of large volumes of information.

Here he meets an American Robert Stubblebine from whom I took lessons English language. They come up with the idea of ​​creating a company selling computers.

CompTec and Arcadia. How Yandex was born

This is how CompTec is born. However, while doing business, Volazh continues to create a program for processing large amounts of information.

He comes to the conclusion that the program must take into account the peculiarities of the Russian language, due to the fact that words can have many forms.

Helps him in solving this problem Arkady Borkovsky, who at that time was working on the problems of computational linguistics. Together they organize the Arcadia company.

Volazh invites his friend, programmer Ilya Segalovich, to his new company. Their first project was an invention classifier with advanced internal search capabilities.

This program could be used by institutions that need to work with patents. But, unfortunately, Arcadia did not have large orders and the question arose about its closure.

But the far-sighted Volazh decides to join Arcadia with all its developments to his other company, which was then successfully developing. CompTec. And you were right!

Work on the Yandex search engine

Ilya Segalovich and other programmers began to work further on their search system. All that's left is to come up with a name.

Gradually Yandex was born, which means “yet another indexer” (another indexer). Then, Volazh suggested replacing the combination of letters Ya with the Russian letter Ya, and Yandex was born.

The name suited everyone, especially since it could also be understood as a language index, which emphasized the features of the new indexer.

However, it was still far from the familiar and beloved Yandex. It was just a smart search engine that was tied to a particular product.

But the highlight of it was that it took into account the morphology of the Russian language, so if the search engine encountered a word that was not in its dictionary, it could predict what forms it might have of this word, based on changes in words in your dictionary.

It was 1996, the Internet in Russia was actively developing and ComTec employees could not help but take advantage of it. In 1996, at the Netcom exhibition, ComTec presented its new product for Internet sites Yandex.site, which later turned into Yandex.

The server is still in use. The company faces the question of creating its own search engine. At that time, the AltaVista system was used on the Russian-language Internet.

So, in 1997, on September 23, at a Moscow exhibition dedicated to computer technologies Softtool, there was a presentation of Yandex as a new search engine Yandex.ru.

From this moment on, Yandex’s triumphal march across the Russian-language Internet begins. Yandex is constantly developing, introducing more and more convenient functions.

Already in 1998, contextual advertising appeared on Yandex. And finally, in 2000, the Yandex company was created, with Arkady Volazh becoming its CEO.

Yandex Direct

And in just one year of the existence of the Yandex Direct service, about 2,500 users used this service.

Each of us, this applies, of course, to Runet entrepreneurs promoting affiliate programs, information businessmen selling information products, resellers, can use contextual advertising to advertise their Internet business.

This is the course of information businessman Alexey Polevsky “Powerful Direct”, a free auto-webinar on setting up a campaign in Yandex Direct by Alexey Polevsky and his free video tutorials on working in the Yandex Direct system .

Another famous customizer advertising campaigns systems Yandex Direct- This is an information businessman.

It has an automated webinar on earnings in affiliate programs, where he introduces the basics of Yandex Direct, a free course on information business and free pdf book on Yandex Direct.

Also, Konstantin Zhivenkov’s book “Secrets effective advertising to Yandex Direct."

Of course, in addition to this, there are other authors, information businessmen, who issued information products related to working with Yandex Direct - Vasily Tatarkin, Dmitry Pecherkin, but they went through Yandex Direct on a tangent, since they are specialists in the promotion of Internet projects, affiliate sales of information products and reselling.

There is also a specialist in Runet who is focused on teaching affiliate marketing through sales through Yandex.Direct. This is Alexander Aristarov.

You can download it free webinar“How to earn 224,000 rubles per month on affiliate programs” or go through Aristarova training“Earning money from affiliate programs in Yandex.Direct.”

Since 2002, Yandex begins to generate profits for its shareholders. The next step in the development of Yandex is its expansion beyond Russia.

Along with the offices in St. Petersburg and Kazan, a Ukrainian representative office of Yandex is opening, with offices in Odessa, Simferopol (then still Ukrainian), and Kyiv.

And then also in Belarus and Kazakhstan. During these years, in a regime of fierce competition with foreign competitors, Yandex has managed to maintain its position.

Largely thanks to the introduction of new services, such as Yandex Maps, Yandex Poster, aimed not only at Russian users in general, but also specifically for residents of a particular city.

I personally really liked it. In 2008, Yandex went beyond the borders of the immediate foreign countries and opened its representative office in California.

Yandex supports Russian science, creating the basis for the development of new technologies in our country. Organizes Olympiads for students and schoolchildren.

Organizes free courses, designed for two years, which were called the school of data analysis. New search principles, Matrixnet and Spectrum, introduced by Yandex, make the search even more accurate, even in the absence of a clearly formulated query. Since 2011, Yandex shares have been traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Yandex in Turkey

An interesting and very important step in the development of the Yandex company can be considered its Turkish project. In 2011, the portal yandex.com.tr was opened.

Turkish users were able to use Yandex services: Yandex Mail, Yandex Maps, Yandex Search in Turkish. When I'm parsing keywords In Yandex Wordstat, using the program, Turkish words are sometimes found.

The next milestone in the history of Yandex is the launch of Yandex Browser. It is used in Russia, Ukraine and Turkey. Well, let's wait for more news from Yandex!

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Arkady Yurievich Volozh, currently the CEO of Yandex, was born on February 11, 1964 in the city of Guryev (now Atyrau), Kazakh SSR. In 1986, he graduated from the I.M. Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow with a degree in applied mathematics. Subsequently, Volozh worked at the Institute of Management Problems (IPU) of the USSR Academy of Sciences and conducted research on processing large amounts of information.

In 1988, Volozh founded CompTek and remained its CEO until 2000. CompTek is still successfully operating in Russian market, being a distributor software and equipment in the field of telecommunications.

In parallel with the leadership of CompTek, Volozh was writing a program that could search for information in large volumes of text. In 1989, together with Arkady Borkovsky, a specialist in computer linguistics, he founded the Arcadia company, which developed the information retrieval systems “Classification of Goods and Services” and “International Classification of Inventions”.

In 1993, Arcadia was merged with CompTek, and in the same year a program for searching information on a hard drive, called Yandex, was developed. In 1995, it was decided to use software development companies on the Internet, although the Yandex.ru search engine was officially announced only on September 23, 1997 at the Softool information technology exhibition.

The capabilities of the Yandex.ru search engine expanded as the Russian segment of the Internet grew. In 2000, the shareholders of CompTek founded the Yandex company, with Arkady Volozh becoming its CEO. Also in 2000, the following services were opened: Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Bookmarks, Yandex.News, Yandex.Products, Yandex.Guru, Yandex.Postcards and.

In 2009, Yandex launched the Snezhinsk search program, which is based on Matrixnet, a machine learning method. This enabled users of 1,250 Russian cities to receive local search results. In 2010, Yandex's share in search queries RuNet exceeded 60%, and on May 19, 2010 the company entered the international level by launching the English version of its search engine on the yandex.com domain. In the same year, one of the key services– Yandex.Maps, and in 2011 another service was launched – Yandex.Factory.

Arkady Volozh constantly combines management of Yandex (he owns 19.77% of shares with voting rights) with work in various areas related to information technology. In 1998 he headed the Committee wireless networks access of the Russian Association of Documentary Telecommunications, also known as RANS.RU. In this position, Volozh took part in frequency deregulation wireless access and made a significant contribution to the legalization of IP telephony in our country.

Since 2007, Arkady Volozh has been the head of the Department of Data Analysis, based on the Yandex company, at the Faculty of Innovation and high technology Moscow University of Physics and Technology. In 2010, the Kommersant newspaper placed Volozh in first place in the ranking of top executives in the Media Business category.

Arkady Volozh is married and has three children.

Yandex, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Mail.ru are the largest resources on the Runet. But in practice, the “National Search System” and “Russian” social networks are controlled by owners who are not of Russian nationality.

Who owns VKontakte?

VKontakte LLC was created on January 19, 2007. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founders were son and father Vyacheslav and Mikhail Mirilashvili (60% and 10% of the authorized capital, respectively), Lev Leviev (10%) and Pavel Durov (20%).

Reference. Durov’s profile was registered first in the Vkontakte.ru system, his third former classmate Vyacheslav (Yitzhak) Mirilashvili, then moved to Israel due to threats, graduated from Tufts University, USA in 2006.

Lev Leviev - born in Volgograd in 1984, studied at the same school with Mirilashvili in Tel Aviv.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Mirilashvili (Misha Kutaissky) - born in 1960 in Georgia. He has lived in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) since 1978. A pediatrician by training. Married, two children. Religion: Judaism. This “authoritative entrepreneur” ran a gambling business in Moscow and St. Petersburg and was the president of the company Russian video, sponsored the elections of Starovoytova, replaced the President of the Russian Jewish Society Vladimir Gusinsky (from Mirilashvili dual citizenship Russia and Israel). Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Petromir holding (pharmaceuticals, chemistry, medicine, furniture production, construction, real estate, new technologies, restaurant and hotel business); President of CONTI Corporation (entertainment, gambling and club business); co-owner of the St. Petersburg Open tennis tournament (ATP-Tour series, the largest in the world). He was a member of the management of LUKoil-North-West Oil Products.

In 2001, Mirilashvili was accused of kidnapping two people who kidnapped his father. The murder charge was later dropped, and the prison term was reduced from 12 to 8 years. In his first interview given after his release, he stated that he had become “even more Jewish than before.”

In 2013, together with M. Freeman, G. Khan and other Jewish oligarchs, he went on a journey along the “road of Moses”. Member of the board of the Russian Jewish Congress.

News 2013: The caravan of Russian billionaires will pass the roads of Moses

A dozen famous Russian and foreign businessmen, many of whom are worth billions of dollars, will make a walking pilgrimage through the desert with a final stop in Jerusalem. It will symbolize the exodus of the Jewish people from the land of Egypt under the leadership of Moses, the press service of the Russian Jewish Congress reports.

Among the pilgrims will be co-owner of Alfa Group Mikhail Fridman, executive director of TNK-VRGerman Khan, co-owner social network“VKontakte” Mikhail Mirilashvili and many others.

To simulate the passage of Jews through the desert, businessmen will be deprived mobile communications and other benefits of civilization. At the same time, they will be wearing the clothes of the ancient Jews - tunics and sandals.

Participants in the pilgrimage will carry a supply of food and water on camels, and prepare kosher matzo along the way.

Financial indicators

VKontakte is Russia's largest social network, with a monthly audience of 31.5 million, according to TNS estimates. The company's revenue in 2012 amounted to 4.8 billion rubles.

Leviev and Mirilashvili separately enriched themselves by creating the Selectel company in 2007 and opening a data center to meet VKontakte’s needs for data processing and storage. The social network completely switched to it by 2009 and, until the launch of its own data center in 2012, depended on a single service provider. This allowed Selectel to become a large company with 11% of the data center market by number of server racks by the end of 2011.

In 2010, Leviev and Vyacheslav Mirilashvili created the Vaizra Capital venture fund with representative offices in New York, Israel and St. Petersburg to invest in technology companies at any stage of development, investing in a number of other people’s projects: video hosting Coub, hotel booking service Ostrovok.ru, publishing house "Committee" (includes a publication about the IT industry "Zuckerberg Will Call", social media TJournal and startup community Spark), online consultant for Livetex sites, community for extreme sports enthusiasts Riders. At the end of 2014, the general fund portfolio included about 30 projects. In August 2014, Leviev announced a personal investment of €500 thousand in a startup jointly with Boaz Behar - an API platform for Bitcoin developers BlockTrail.

Leviev and Mirilashvili are investors in Yuri Milner's funds DST Global II and DST Global IV

Transfers of ownership

As of February 1, 2008, 100% of Vkontakte was transferred to the Doraview Limited offshore company, registered in the British Virgin Islands.

The first external investor was the Digital Sky Technologies fund of Yu. Milner (son of Boris / Benzion Milner, who ruined the world's first computer network, developed in the USSR by the remarkable Russian academician Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov) who bought a quarter of the social network in 2007 and later transferred it to the balance of Mail.Ru Group. Gradually, Mail.ru Group began to buy back shares of the VKontakte network. By purchasing another 7.5% of shares. So both Mirilashvili sold Mail.ru - 30%, Leviev - 4%, and Durov - 8% of the company's shares.

In 2011, Mail.ru Group increased its share in the VKontakte social network from 32.49% to 39.99%. The company exercised an option to buy out 7.44% from the founders of the network at a price of $111.7 million. By the end of the year, Mail.ru Group already owned 39.99% of the social network, and the remaining 60% was divided between Durov (12%), Leviev (8 %) and the Mirilashvili family (40%). The transaction was carried out through JPMorgan, which describes the shareholder structure.

In April 2013, Mirilashvili’s share was purchased by the United Capital Partners fund, which is headed by Ilya Sherbovich, who is on the board of directors of such large companies, like Rosneft, Transneft, Federal Grid Company. Forbes devoted a special article to how he circumvented legal restrictions and sold Gazprom shares to foreign companies. At the same time, it is shown that Shcherbovich is a long-time partner of the Russian government, while engaging in raiding and money laundering through offshore companies.

On January 25, 2014, Durov announced that he sold all his remaining shares (12%) to his friend Ivan Tavrin, director of Megafon.

In September 2014, the VKontakte company sold the remaining 48.01% stake in the social network Mail.ru Group for $1.47 billion.

Thus, Mail.ru Group became the owner of 100% of the shares of the VKontakte social network, since both Megafon and Mail.ru, in turn, belong to the oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who was convicted of extortion and rape in 1980.

The son of the Tashkent city prosecutor, Usmanov, was sentenced in August 1980 by the Military Tribunal of the Turkestan Military District to eight years in a forced labor camp. And in 1986, Usmanov was released on parole, and subsequently, through the family of President Islam Karimov, he cleared his criminal record. In 2000, the billionaire was officially rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of Uzbekistan, and at the same time, the Uzbek archives stopped storing documents compromising Usmanov.

As a result, Usmanov's past has changed over the years. Earlier in Uzbekistan, according to the British Ambassador to Tashkent Craig Murray, most of his Uzbek interlocutors were well aware that Alisher Usmanov was convicted under several episodes and several articles of the Criminal Code, including for gang rape that occurred during an alcoholic party of the children of senior republican officials.

According to data that was constantly published in the press before the cleanup of Usmanov’s past, the second episode had military specifics - the future businessman, together with his friend, the son of the deputy chairman of the KGB of the Uzbek SSR, the detective of the special departments of the KGB Bakhadyr Nasymov, extorted 30 thousand rubles from army officer Andrei Mayorov.

The arrest of the son ended in the collapse of the career of the father of one of the convicts, KGB Major General, Deputy Chairman of the KGB of Uzbekistan Muhammad-Amin Nasymov. Another close friend of the current billionaire, with whom they spent their lives together in Tashkent, was the son of the future first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan and chairman of the Council of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Rafik Nishanov, Sobir Nishanov. Now he is employed by Usmanov on the board of directors of OJSC Telecominvest, through which the oligarch controls mobile operator"Megaphone".

Alisher Usmanov now claims that he was convicted only of “fraud and theft.” The convict promised to publish a copy of the court verdict, even in its newest version, but he never dared to do so. In addition, the oligarch says that he became a victim of political repression in the totalitarian USSR, since his father, being the prosecutor of Tashkent, fell under the “wheel of checks of Gdlyan and Ivanov.”

Usmanov’s wife, born into a family of Samarkand Jews, Irina Viner-Usmanova, who was in charge of the Russian gymnastics team, brought V. Putin together with A. Kabaeva. After which Usmanov actively began buying up all media resources of any importance. It got to the point that even Habrahabr was under his control for some time.

Oppenheimers are the biggest owners of Yandex

A company registered in Russia as Yandex LLC, but 100% of the authorized capital of which is owned by a company registered in the Netherlands joint stock company"Yandex N.V."

Ownership structure of the company "Yandex N.V." as of March 31, 2013 (as a percentage of total shares) is shown as follows:

The company's two halakhic founders:

Arkady Volozh (10.5%);

Ilya Segalovich (2.5% - passed to the heirs after his death in 2013).

In addition to them, the remaining shares are owned by:

- “Baring Vostok” - 9.9% (Dutch bank ING Group, part of the Inter-Alpha group, Rothschild);

Other directors - 2.1%;

Other employees - 4.7%;

Other “Pre-IPO” shareholders - 3.3%;

- “public investors” - 67%.

On the website of the American exchange Nasdaq.com, it is not difficult to find information about who these “public investors” are - or rather, the main owners of the Yandex search engine, which many perceive as a “Russian” search engine:

The Openheimer Foundation - the foundation of the old clan of moneylenders and stone dealers, in which Amschel Moses "Bauer" (who later took the pseudonym "Rothschild") learned the "basics of business" - from Jacob Oppenheimer; whose uncle Joseph ben Isaac Suess Oppenheimer (1698-1738), who became a “court Jew” under the Duke of Wüttemberg Karl Alexander, having dragged his accomplices into the “elite”, printed inferior coins, sold privileges and stole to such an extent that he was hanged and exhibited in in an iron cage until the birds ate him.

Total: 56.51%. Those. controlling stake. How did global bankers end up with them?

By official version in April 2000, the ru-Net Holdings fund (Leonid Boguslavsky-Kagan associates) acquired 35.72% of Yandex shares.

In 2009, the then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev initiated the purchase by Sberbank of a “golden share” of Yandex “in order to avoid an enterprise of national importance falling into the hands of foreigners.”

However, already in 2011, Yandex entered the American NASDAQ exchange and sold about 16.25% of shares.

In May 2012, a bill “on amendments to the law on foreign investment” appeared in the State Duma. It envisioned expanding the list of strategic enterprises through Internet companies that provide socially significant services and are recognized as national transmitters of information.

The criterion was at least 20 million users per month for six months, and “socially significant” services meant: searching for information on the Internet, e-mail, services for downloading, storing and viewing audio and video, help services, file sharing services and “other communication services on the Internet. Therefore, when dealing with shares of large Internet companies, a special procedure was provided for the purchase of more than 10% of voting shares by a foreign investor and should be possible only with the permission of the government commission on foreign investment and the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS).

However, the law was never adopted...

In April 2014, at the ONF media forum V.V. Putin publicly scolded Yandex for selling shares to foreigners. Meanwhile, the silent purchase of Yandex shares by the Oppenheimer fund took place in the 1st quarter of 2014.