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Yandex N.V. (NASDAQ: YNDX), often described as “Russia’s Google,” sought Vladimir Putin’s permission to sell its operations in the country, spin off its main international projects and appoint a longtime confidant of the Russian president to manage its relationship with the Kremlin.
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Yandex informally enlisted top economic official Alexei Kudrin to win the Russian president’s approval, in principle, for the restructuring plan, Financial Times reports.
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The changes would lead to Yandex’s Dutch holding company exiting the Russian market by selling its entire business apart from the international divisions of four critical units.
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Yandex aimed to spare itself from the disastrous consequences of Putin’s war in Ukraine, which has prompted several thousand Yandex staffers to flee the country.
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Yandex hopes the restructuring plan will save its most promising new international ventures, including self-driving cars, cloud computing, education technology, and data labeling, by ending their ties to the toxic Russian market.
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Yandex also hopes Kudrin will secure a future for its far larger Russian business when the Kremlin is vastly increasing the state’s control over the economy and the internet amid a mass exodus of foreign companies.
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Kudrin and Putin have worked together since their days in the St Petersburg mayor’s administration.
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Like many of Russia’s top economic officials, Kudrin privately opposes the war.
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Arkady Volozh, the company’s founder who lives in Israel, is also horrified by the war and has not returned to Russia since it began.
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Yandex’s Russian business reportedly needs the new deal to ensure it remains in private hands.
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Kudrin and Yandex have discussed the official assuming a small equity stake and taking on an undefined role heading up Yandex’s governance.
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Yandex’s Russian management will retain control of the company’s day-to-day operations but delegate the company’s increasingly sensitive relations with the Kremlin to Kudrin.
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Several Kremlin-friendly Russian oligarchs have expressed interest in a stake in Yandex.
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