After the elections the relations between the Kremlin and Media-Most did not improve. The Kremlin did not enjoy the fact that in February 2000 Gusinsky declared that NTV would not support Putin’s candidacy on the presidential elections of March 26th 2000. Neither did the Kremlin enjoy the informational policy of NTV about the covering of the Chechen campaign. The position of the Media-Most media was strikingly different from the official interpretation of the second Chechen war and for Gusinsky at the time it was the only possibility to give blow after blow to the Kremlin and to Vladimir Putin personally, whose rating depended largely from successes in the war in Chechnya.
Gusinsky’s conflict with Putin’s group could not have finished in his favor. On June 13th 2000 Gusinsky was arrested and sent to the Butirka prison. The formal reason of the arrest was the case opened back in 1998 on charges of fraud. The NTV owner was accused of fraud and money laundering, supposedly two billion rubles. On the third day the Prosecutor General calmed the public with the following statement: “Vladimir Gusinsky’s cellmates are intellectuals. They both have a higher education degree.” The Prosecutor General also said that the case was opened for violations in the privatization of Russian video-11th channel. According to the Prosecutor General back in 1996 Gusinsky “joined a criminal conspiracy with the head of Russian video Rozhdestvensky. In result he received the rights to someone else’s property by way of fraud and breach of trust by a group of people who abused their functions.”
This was the first arrest of the greatest businessman; the owner of the biggest TV channel, a media-magnate, and it caused a choc in the whole world. Suddenly two weeks later the Prosecutor General released Gusinsky and allowed him to go abroad. According to Gusinsky, when he was in prison he was forced to sign an agreement about selling Media-Most shares. As it is known the media-magnate left for Spain, but the Spanish police arrested him on December 12th 2000 on a new order of the RF Prosecutor General. Why such a radical turn: they released him and then asked to arrest him? Because Gusinsky refused to fulfill the agreement about the shares. In April 2001 the Spanish court refused to extradite Gusinsky on the RF demand, judging the reasons of the Russian investigators insufficient. Then the Prosecutor General brought new charges against Gusinsky and arrested Most finance director, Anton Titov. When in April 2001 I was sent to the Lefortovo prison Anton Titov was already there. He was charged with a conspiracy with Gusinsky to “steal over five billion rubles”. According to the investigation Titov worked out a scheme on transferring Gazprom credits abroad in 1998-99.
On July 9th 2002 Gusinsky surrendered: he finally got rid of his media empire in Russia and was forced to surrender. We (me, the media, the public) do not know what became the last drop that forced him to sell his media holding. On July 2002 the holding Gazprom-Media acquired Gusinsky’s media assets. Gazprom received blocking shares of all the largest structures of Gusinsky’s former media empire. The cost of the deal was declared a commercial secret but everybody agrees that Gazprom paid far less than their real market cost. Gazprom’s head Alexey Miller declared that this “acquisition increases the investing attraction of Gazprom-Media assets and creates more favorable conditions for further negotiations with potential investors.” But since then none of these media was transferred to a private company. It is interesting that on December 24th 2002 Cheremushkinsky court of Moscow condemned Anton Titov to three years of prison but amnestied him and released him in the courtroom. Apparently his release was a condition Gusinsky fixed to sell the assets of his media empire. From the moment NTV was transferred to Gazprom few traces were left of its former greatness. A crisis of the NTV team followed: Evgeny Kisilev left with a large group of journalists. Part of the journalists stayed and continued to fulfill their informational work more or less decently. Although doubtlessly NTV changed its position about the war in Chechnya and the opposition was given far less coverage. But even such a channel did not satisfy the Kremlin for long. In the end of 2004 NTV was destroyed once and for all. One after another the programs Freedom of Speech and Namedni were closed down and the channel’s leadership was changed again. From now on NTV does not differ of the State channels Russia and ORT that have gotten into the Kremlin’s hands long ago.
However the vindictive Kremlin (i.e. the vindictive president Putin) did not leave the former media-magnate Gusinsky alone. In August 2003 he was arrested again, now in Athens. On August 29th the Athenian court bailed him out and later decided like Madrid’s court: there are not enough grounds for an extradition.
I can conclude the story about NTV by a reminder that Putin and his group did not fight against the TV oligarch but were destroying a multitude of opinions, views on our reality and this is freedom of speech. The State oligarch, Putin’s associate, Miller bought our freedom of speech for Putin. Now he owns it.
2. How the Kremlin got ORT
I have already mentioned the fight between the media empires of Gusinsky and Berezovsky on the eve of the parliamentary elections of 1999, the TV killer Sergey Dorenko, the victory of ORT, and the fact that Berezovsky accumulated a media empire in his hands. Berezovsky started to accumulate it in 1993. It is in the end of 1993 that Berezovsky has created his advertising agency LogoVAZ-Press and the contacts with the former leader of the TV company A. Yakovlev helped him to organize his airtime. In April 1994 Berezovsky expressed his desire to initiate the creation of a “popular television”, obviously he was orienting himself on the initiative of his eternal enemy-friend Gusinsky who has registered NTV in July 1993. In November 1994 Berezovsky obtained the president’s order about the creation of ORT. With that he concentrated the direction of the financial side of the company in his hands.
At this time Berezovsky became the holder of 8% of ORT from the name of the United Bank while LogoVAZ also had 8% of ORT. These 16% allowed him to become first deputy chairman of the ORT board of directors. In 1995 Berezovsky became chairman of the ORT directors board. Since he practically headed a group of businessmen who controlled about half of the ORT shares. (16% of shares were supposedly acquired for $320 thousand. After the death of Vladislav Listiev Berezovsky became the owner of 36% of the actions. Berezovsky’s business partner Boris Fedorov had 2% of the shares and Oleg Boyko 5%.)
According to most political experts the entire project of the ORT creation was directed at the ideological provision of B. Yeltsin’s future presidential campaign, however Berezovsky also pursued a concrete business profit – after Listiev’s death he tried to seize the advertisement on ORT. He appointed his partner Sergey Lisovsky general director of ORT-advertisement and his other partner and friend Badri Patarkatzishvili chairman of the Board of directors.
In October 1997 Xenia Ponomareva became the ORT general director. This appointment was the confirmation of Berezovsky’s solid positions on the channel, which Anatoly Chubais tried to “nationalize”. Berezovsky even managed to organize a meeting between Ponomareva and president Yeltsin. It was Berezovsky who proposed the new formula “ORT with the transfer of 51 percent shares to the State” and he acquired the rest share holding at a low price.
Apart from ORT Berezovsky tried to acquire other channels as well. In 1995 he acquired 26% of shares of TV-6 Moscow. According to Berezovsky it was Edward Sagalaev who did all the work for him (“an absolutely professional man”), Berezovsky trusted him. Subsequently, when he lost ORT Berezovsky used TV-6 as a mean of his further promotion as the leader of a political movement. It is on TV-6 that Kisilev’s team went when they left NTV.