London Evening Standard owner makes cash move during Independent negotiations, but talks of Russian investments
Luke Harding in Moscow | Wednesday 27 January 2010 15.54 GMT
Alexander Lebedev Photograph: Sergey Pyatakov/AFP
Lebedev reached agreement with Aeroflot's board late on Tuesday night, he told the Guardian today. The board agreed to purchase Lebedev's 25.8% share of Aeroflot, which is held by his National Reserve Corporation. Lebedev was Aeroflot's biggest private shareholder.
Independent News & Media confirmed last month that it was in exclusive non-binding talks with Lebedev over the sale of the Independent and Independent on Sunday.
Talks over the future ownership of the two London-based papers are due to conclude by 15 February. The company's pension deficits and printing deals appear to be the final negotiating points.
Speaking to the Guardian today, Lebedev dismissed any link between the sale of his Aeroflot shares and a possible imminent purchase of the Independent and the Independent on Sunday. However, he joked: "With that kind of money I could probably buy all of the newspapers [in Britain]."
Instead, Lebedev said he had reached a "gentleman's agreement with the Russian government to invest the money in various social and development projects".
These included low-cost housing, a building society for ordinary savers, and factories for his agricultural businesses that grow high-quality, low-cost potatoes.
Lebedev said he had also agreed to order and buy new Russian-made aircraft for his budget airline, Red Wings. He said he would also boost the capital of his National Reserve Bank and make it more "transparent". According to the Russian financial newspaper Kommersant, he is also selling his 26% in Ilyushin Finance, an air leasing company, to the Russian state bank VEB for $175m.
The sale of Lebedev's Aeroflot stake is likely to dispel lingering questions about his liquidity and his ability to buy the Independent, following a bruising 18 months in which Russia's oligarchs have seen their fortunes shrink dramatically. Lebedev suggested today that his assets and investments are worth around $3bn.
Last year Lebedev was briefly unable to pay salaries for journalists working on his Novaya Gazeta newspaper after his German-based airline, Blue Wings, was temporarily grounded. The airline has recently encountered fresh financial problems and was grounded again this month by the German regulator.
The price paid by the government for the stakes in Aeroflot and Ilyushin was at a 20% discount to their current market valuation by Ernst & Young, Lebedev said.
He acknowledged that he had clashed in the past with Aeroflot's board of directors, and said that one government director had told him last night "with a laugh" that it would now be easier to take decisions without him.
The website of Novaya Gazeta – known for its fearless criticism of the Kremlin – was inaccessible for much of today following a "powerful and pre-planned" attack by unknown hackers yesterday. The title, which Lebedev co-owns with Mikhail Gorbachev and its editorial team, is the latest in a series of liberal publications in Russia to come under DDOS attack.
Staff today would not speculate on the identity of the hackers. But they said that the sheer scale of the attack – with more than a million hits a second on the server – suggested this was done by a "highly sophisticated" state agency unhappy with the paper's editorial direction.
"We are not talking about a couple of students here," Nadezhda Prusenkova, spokeswoman for the paper, said.
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