The Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeals in Moscow declared legal the agreement to sell the Russian version of Forbes magazine to businessman Magomed Musaev. They write about it RBC And Vedomosti .
“From the start, we had no doubt that we were right. Forbes Russia’s team of lawyers were confident the deal was legal – the court has now upheld it. Initially, we viewed this case as an attempt to illegally seize a media asset,” writing Dmitry Ozman, director of development Forbes, on the Telegram channel.
Background
In 2018, FAF Media, owned by Alexander Fedotov, sold shares of Russian publishing company Forbes AS Rus Media to Musaev for 500,000 rubles. After that, Fedotov was declared bankrupt, FAF Media has been following the same procedure since 2021.
FAF Media’s trustee in bankruptcy, Valentina Chuprinskaya, sought to have Forbes’ sale agreement declared invalid, arguing that the magazine had been sold below market value.
In August 2022, the Moscow Arbitration Court declared the agreement invalid and ordered that FAF Media be referred to Forbes. According to the text of the court decision, the nominal value of the shares of AS Rus Media JSC was almost 69 million rubles.
Forbes development director Dmitry Ozman called the court ruling wrong, the editors appealed. Ozman noted that Musaev repaid debts to Forbes employees and contractors from his own funds, and also assured that by the end of 2021 the company would start making a profit.
According to the expert opinion presented at the hearing on March 28, 2023, at the end of August 2018, the shares of AS Rus Media were worth one ruble, and the company’s net assets were “minus 245 million rubles”.
Conflict with Forbes editors
Shortly before selling the publication to a new owner, Alexander Fedotov fired Forbes editor Nikolai Uskov over “dissatisfaction” with the quality of his work and “systematic” breaches of discipline work.
Uskov himself announced attempts to pressure the editorial staff and the interference of the owner in the work of the newspaper. Nikolai Mazurin, appointed editor-in-chief of Forbes in place of Uskov, also did not last long in this position.
In July 2018, he filed a petition with the prosecutor’s office after an article about the cases of the Magomedov brothers, accused of embezzling 2.5 billion rubles, disappeared from the paper version of the magazine. Shortly after, Andrei Zolotov was appointed acting editor of Forbes instead of Mazurin.
After the change of ownership of Forbes, Nikolai Uskov returned to the magazine, he is now the editorial director of the publication, and Mazurin is the editor-in-chief.
