Finnish Sanoma sells stake in independent Russian daily

Finnish media company Sanoma said Thursday it had sold its stake in top Russian media titles, including respected and critical daily Vedomosti, to a Russian entrepreneur.

Sanoma’s 33.3 percent stake in Vedomosti, as well as a portfolio of glossy magazine titles including the Russian-language version of National Geographic, and the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times, was sold to two firms, Ivania Ltd and Moscow Times LLC, Sanoma said.

They are fully owned by former journalist and media executive Damian Kudryavtsev, according to Vedomosti.

The sale is expected to yield “around eight million euros,” Sanoma said in a statement.

Chief executive Harri-Pekka Kaukonen said he was confident the publications were “in good hands” and Sanoma would now focus on its “core markets.”

Kudryavtsev is a long-time media entrepreneur and consultant who ran several Internet media projects in Israel and Russia.

For several years he was chief executive of the Kommersant publishing house, which publishes the Kommersant daily — Russia’s top business daily that was especially influential during the 1990s.

He was reportedly a friend of deceased oligarch and power broker Boris Berezovsky who owned the paper at the time.

He quit in December 2011 however, after the editor of Kommersant magazine was sacked by new owner Alisher Usmanov over critical coverage of the parliamentary elections in Russia.

Vedomosti, which regularly publishes reporting and analysis critical of the Kremlin, has been jointly owned by Sanoma, Dow Jones and Financial Times. According to Vedomosti’s sources, the two other owners do not plan to sell their stakes.

Under a recent Russian law capping foreign media ownership, the paper must cut its foreign ownership to under 20 percent before 2016.