Who owns the social network VKontakte

Today, a failure was recorded in the work of the social network "VKontakte". Also, the Snapster photo application, released by the developers of VKontakte two weeks ago, did not work. Earlier it was reported that VKontakte is trying to restrict users from going to the Instagram photo service. Now some users have links to photos from Instagram in posts and private messages are published inactive.

Meanwhile, in general, Russian social networks are beating social networksZuckerberg and Brina. Last year, the audience of Vkontakte grew by 19% and exceeded 66 million, while the number of Odnoklassniki users amounted to 45.6 million people, which is 9% more than in 2013. Vkontakte also saw an increase in the share of mobile users, from 57% in 2013 to 71% last year.

The network membership is interesting. We have previously noted that .

WHO OWNS VKONTAKTE?

Vkontakte LLC was established on January 19, 2007. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founders were the 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, the third - his former classmate Vyacheslav (Itskhak) Mirilashvili, then moved to Israel due to threats, graduated in 2006 Tufts University, USA.

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

Mikhail Mikhilovich Mirilashvili (Misha Kutaissky) - was born in 1960 in Georgia. Lives in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) since 1978. A pediatrician by training. Married, two children. Religion: Judaism. This "authoritative entrepreneur" kept the gambling business in Moscow and St. Petersburg, was the president of the Russian Video company, sponsored the elections Starovoitova, replaced the president of the Russian Jewish Society Vladimir Gusinsky(Mirilashvili has dual citizenship of 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 the 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 the company LUKoil-North-West-nefteprodukt.

In 2001, Mirilashvili was accused of kidnapping two people who kidnapped his father. The murder charge was later dropped, and the sentence was reduced from 12 to 8 years. In the very first interview given after his release, he declared that he had become "even more than before, a Jew."

Together in 2013 M. Freeman, G. Khan and other Jewish oligarchs. Included in .

FINANCIAL INDICATORS

According to Alberta Popkova, co-owner of the site Odnoklassniki.ru, the cost of such projects is millions of dollars a year, the investment will pay off through advertising. And Vkontakte.ru makes money with the help of a subsidiary recruitment agency.

Mikhail Ravdonikas, the public relations coordinator for Vkontakte.ru, said at the time that the agency's revenue had doubled monthly to $50,000 a month. Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki became a phenomenon in 2007. According to the TNS Web Index report, in January 2007, the Moscow daily audience of Yandex amounted to 2.097 million visitors, Mail.ru 2.06 million, Odnoklassniki 1.653 million and Rambler 1.032 million. Gallup does not evaluate the audience of Vkontakte.ru .

Leviev and Mirilashvili separately benefited from the fact that in 2007 they created the Selectel company and opened a data center to meet the needs of Vkontakte in 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 the number of server racks by the end of 2011.

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

Leviev and Mirilashvili are fund investors Yuri Milner DST Global II and DST Global IV

As for the social network itself, today VKontakte is the largest Russian social network, whose monthly audience, according to TNS, is 31.5 million people. The company's revenue in 2012 amounted to 4.8 billion rubles.

PROPERTY TRANSFERS

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

The first external investor was the fund Digital Sky Technologies Y. Milner(son) 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 shares in the VKontakte network. In redeeming the next 7.5% of the 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 social network VKontakte 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% were divided between Durov (12%), Leviev (8 %) and the Mirilashvili family (40%). The transaction was carried out through JPMorgan bank, where the shareholder structure is described.

In April 2013, Mirilashvili's share was bought out by the United Capital Partners fund, which is headed by Ilya Shcherbovich, a member of the boards of directors of such large companies as Rosneft, Transneft, Federal Grid Company. Forbes devoted a special material 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-term partner of the Russian government, while engaging in raiding and money laundering through offshore companies.

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

In September 2014, VKontakte 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. Usmanov's wife - born in a family of Samarkand Jews Irina Viner-Usmanova, which was given oversight of the Russian national gymnastics team, brought V. Putin with A. Kabaeva. After that, Usmanov actively engaged in buying up all the media resources of any importance. It got to the point that even Habrahabr was under his control for some time.

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

It should be noted that at the same time, oddly enough, but VKontakte - especially in comparison with Facebook - still gives relative freedom to its users - and does not block users for harsh criticism of the regime, the Jewish coup in the former Ukraine, the Kremlin's betrayal of Donbass, etc. .

Apparently they haven't arrived yet.