Mamut left for the West and wants to create a “liberal mass media”
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Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut, former co-owner of “Rambler” and owner of Gazeta.ru and Lenta.ru, left Russia after the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, where he has practically no known assets left. “Meduza” reports about this with reference to four sources.
One of Mamut’s acquaintances, who was not named, told the publication that Mamut now lives alternately in Great Britain and France. According to a Meduza source in Mamut’s entourage, the businessman “doesn’t really want to fall under the new sanctions” and in this regard, as the source put it, “he wants to become a “good Russian”, to purify himself as much as possible — and for this purpose he decided to create media that will advance the liberal agenda.” It is confirmed that he consulted on the possibility of creating a new structure with the economist Sergey Guriev, the provost of the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), which is part of the Anti-War Committee of Russia. Guriev told “Medusa” that he met with Mamut, but did not discuss the media creation project with him. Meduza was unable to contact Mammoth himself.
Alexander Mamut has been under US sanctions since 2018, but was not included in European sanctions lists – even after the start of a full-scale war. Mamut is included in the so-called list of 6,000 corrupt and warmongers compiled by the Anti-Corruption Foundation (Alexei Navalny’s associates accuse him of “political corruption”).
At the same time, “Meduza” points out that Mammut actually has no known profitable assets left in Russia. He sold 45% of the Rambler holding to Sberbank back in 2020.
“Meduza” prefaces its material with a disclaimer about the conflict of interests, since in the spring of 2014 it was Alexander Mamut who fired Halyna Tymchenko from the post of editor-in-chief of Lenta.ru after the publication of critical reports about the annexation of Crimea. The former journalists of “Lenta” headed by Timchenko subsequently created “Meduza”.
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