On Wednesday, January 10th, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office made an undisguised attempt to disrupt Media Most’s negotiations with media mogul Ted Turner on the sale of a stake in the holding’s NTV Channel.

On Wednesday, January 10th, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office made an undisguised attempt to disrupt Media Most’s negotiations with media mogul Ted Turner on the sale of a stake in the holding’s NTV Channel. A search of Media Most’s office was conducted and Most’s chairman questioned the day he was due to attend the negotiations. Thousands of documents were seized from Andrei Tsymailo’s office, while Tsymailo himself had to spend most of his day in the Prosecutor General’s Office answering investigators’ questions. Media-Most has released a statement saying that Wednesday’s events were connected to Gazprom’s relentless campaign “to monopolize the process of selecting a respectable Western investor for NTV”. “We…. see a link between the actions taken by the Prosecutor’s Office and Gazprom,” the holding’s statement said. Andrei Tsymailo arrived for questioning at the General Prosecutor’s Office at 10:00 am on Wednesday. At 5:15 pm the same day he was due to fly to London with a team of the holding’s lawyers and economists for talks with Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, about the sale of NTV shares. Media Most lawyer Pavel Astakhov said on Wednesday evening that the prosecutors deliberately protracted their questioning of Andrei Tsymailo in order to prevent him from flying to London.