By Mariko OiBusiness reporter2 hours agoImage source, Getty ImagesThe owner of Yandex, often referred to as “Russia’s Google”, has announced that it will pull out of its country of origin. The sale of Yandex’s Russian business to a consortium of investors means that it has now become a fully Russian-owned entity. The company has faced accusations of concealing information about the war in Ukraine from the Russian public.Moscow has welcomed the latest deal, which the company stated was the result of over 18 months of planning and negotiation. Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Russian parliament’s committee on information policy, commented, “This is exactly what we wanted to achieve a few years ago when Yandex was under threat of being taken over by Western IT giants. Yandex is more than a company; it is an asset of the entire Russian society.”Established during the dotcom boom in the late 1990s, Yandex developed its own search engine, mapping, and advertising businesses. Other services offered include taxis and food delivery. The $5.2bn deal is believed to be considerably lower than Yandex’s market value, which was estimated to be almost $30bn in 2021.Despite being dubbed ‘Russia’s Google,’ Yandex has no connections to the US search engine giant or its parent company, Alphabet.Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, numerous foreign-owned businesses have exited the country, often selling assets on unfavorable terms.Yandex’s founder, Mr. Volozh, has been subjected to sanctions by the European Union. In 2022, the EU claimed that Yandex is “responsible for promoting [Russian] state media and narratives in its search results, and deranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.” He is currently seeking to have the European Union court remove the sanctions, asserting that he has never been close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.In order to comply with the Russian government’s content demands, Yandex sold some of its online resources to state-controlled competitor VK in late 2022. Despite presenting itself as independent from the authorities, experiments carried out by BBC Monitoring in 2022 revealed that its search results failed to report Russian atrocities in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
