#5
gazeta.ru
October 26, 2001
Jordan Has Sights Set on NTV Ownership
By Denis Skorobogatko
NTV’s director general Boris Jordan has been appointed director general of Gazprom-Media and replaces Alfred Kokh who resigned two weeks earlier. Jordan will retain his post as head of the NTV channel.
At the meeting of Gazprom-Media shareholders on Wednesday, apart from Jordan’s election to the post of company general director, Alexander Dybal was elected chairman of Gazprom-Media’s board of directors. Dybal replaces Alexander Kazakov who resigned together with Kokh.
Alexander Dybal will thus be in charge of coordinating the prospective sale of Gazprom’s media assets. The management of the gas giant Gazprom recently decided to get rid of its “non-profile” businesses.
The most important of Gazprom’s “non-profile” businesses is, undoubtedly, the NTV television company, taken over from Vladimir Gusinsky’s Media-Most empire earlier this year.
Boris Jordan has made no secret of his ambitions, not only to manage the NTV channel, but also to become its co-owner. And his new appointment takes him a step closer to realising his ambition.
Having resigned from Gazprom, Alfred Kokh is now working on forming a consortium of investors to buy NTV. There is no formal evidence to Boris Jordan’s involvement in that process, however, there is almost no doubt that he to has designs on the channel.
Thus, acting as both a seller and as a buyer, NTV chief Boris Jordan has quite high chances of becoming a new media tycoon.
On Thursday US born Boris Jordan and Alexander Dybal held a news conference to give a prognosis of the prospects for NTV and Gazprom’s media companies following the new appointments in Gazprom-Media. Both were keen to stress that Jordan will not be involved in the evaluation and sale of the company’s media outlets.
At the news conference Boris Jordan did not deny that he might take part in the purchase of NTV together with his predecessor Alfred Kokh.
Alexander Dybal, as the new Gazprom Media chairman will supervise the evaluation of Gazprom’s media assets and will be the key negotiator with potential buyers.
Before moving to Moscow, Alexander Dybal was the commercial director of St Petersburg’s Baltika radio station. Later he headed the North-Western branch of the Strategic Research Centre, founded by German Gref (now, the Minister for Economic Development and Trade), and after the so-called St.Petersburg team came to Gazprom (with the appointment of Alexei Miller Putin’s friend from St Petersburg as general director,) he was invited to work at Gazprom as the head of the department for information policy.
At the news conference Alexander Dybal confirmed to reporters that the new management of Gazprom-Media was planning to put the media assets on sale after 15 January 2002. Their price will be determined by independent consulting companies, Dybal said.
Dybal said that the only purpose of the sale was to maximum profits for Gazprom-Media thus the media holding would be sold either as a single holding, or in parts according to variant fetches the highest price.
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