Editors
at Russia’s RBC media group sacked after Putin article
Kremlin
denies involvement as tensions burst into the open at last remaining
independent news group
18-5-2016 by: Max
Seddon in Moscow
At an awards
ceremony late last year, Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian oligarch,
joked that the hard-hitting investigations by his RBC media group
into President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle were causing him more
trouble than they were worth.
“I read RBC every
morning and think, ‘Who am I going to get angry phone calls from
today?’” he joked, according to several who were in attendance.
On Friday tensions
at the heart of Russia’s last remaining independent news
organisation burst into the open with the sacking of RBC’s three
top editors under what employees say was pressure from the Kremlin.
Their dismissal,
which prompted more than a dozen journalists to quit in protest, is
the latest incident in a long erosion of media freedom under Mr Putin
as he tightens the screw on dissent.
The trigger for the
departure of the highly respected Elizaveta Osetinskaya,
editor-in-chief of RBC group, Maxim Solyus, editor of its newspaper,
and Roman Badanin, web editor, was an article — still available
online — about plans for an oyster and mussel farm next to a
billion-dollar Black Sea estate popularly known as “Putin’s
Palace”.
Before that months
of investigations into how Mr Putin’s family and friends
accumulated their vast fortunes — including his daughter — had
led even RBC reporters to question how long it would be before it
became the latest Russian media outlet to be brought to heel.
Nikolai Molibog, RBC
chief executive, says he and the sacked editors “failed to reach a
shared opinion on a number of important issues” but declined to
comment further. Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, says the idea
that the Kremlin put pressure on Onexim, Mr Prokhorov’s holding
company, to fire the trio is “absurd”.
But storm clouds had
been gathering since last month when RBC became the only significant
Russian outlet to cover the Panama papers — including Mr Putin’s
ties to Sergei Roldugin, a classical musician who was revealed to
have funnelled $2bn through a web of offshore accounts.
Russian special
forces raided Onexim’s offices not long after the story ran. Police
later opened a criminal probe against unnamed members of RBC’s
management.
“The publication
became a red rag because of the offshore [Panama papers] coverage,”
Ms Osetinskaya says in her first interview since her sacking.
RBC reporters say
the Kremlin took particular offence at Mr Solyus’s decision to
accompany the story with a picture of Mr Putin — even though the
president was not named in the leaked documents.
St Petersburg
International Economic Forum 2013 Day Two...Russian billionaire
Mikhail Prokhorov speaks with the media before a conference session
on day two of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2013
(SPIEF) in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Friday, June 21, 2013.
President Vladimir Putin is battling investor skepticism to woo
foreign executives descending on his hometown today as Russia's
economy faces a risk of recession and a crackdown on critics scares
off intellectuals. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
Under Mikhail
Prokhorov, RBC was transformed from a clickbait factory to a
respected independent news organisation © Bloomberg
“In a way we’ve
become the victim of our own success,” says Derk Sauer, a veteran
Dutch journalist who is Onexim executive in charge of RBC. “It’s
clear the type of journalism they set out to do is not possible in
Russia these days.”
Through most of its
history, RBC’s disparate, if well-read, outlets were best known for
copying news from other publications, “exclusives” that had to be
retracted and for taking money from advertisers to publish articles.
Embarrassed by the
organisation’s poor reputation, the liberal-minded Mr Prokhorov,
who also owns the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, brought in Mr Sauer
to overhaul it.
If you look at the
major investigations we did, they are all based on the same
principle: follow the money
Mr Sauer, who
co-founded Vedomosti, the FT’s former Russian sister paper, hired
Ms Osetinskaya, previously Vedomosti editor-in-chief, with a mandate
to build a modern digital newsroom. They hired investigative
reporters whose stories were unlikely to be published elsewhere.
The improved
journalism raised RBC’s profile, while the website’s past as a
clickbait factory meant it could reach a much larger audience than
rivals. But their output ruffled feathers.
One investigation
centred on Mr Putin’s youngest daughter, Ekaterina, who runs a
Silicon Valley-style project at Russia’s top university. Another
focused on her husband, the beneficiary of a sweetheart $1.75bn state
loan to buy a stake in a petrochemicals producer.
Mr Sauer became the
target of public ire, and nationalist lawmakers and demonstrators
held signs outside RBC’s office calling him an “enemy of the
people” — prompting his move to an executive role.
“If you look at
the major investigations we did, they are all based on the same
principle: follow the money,” says Ms Osetinskaya, who will take up
a fellowship at Stanford University.
Sanctions and a
falling oil price threaten to derail economic progress amid fears of
a return to the chaos of the 1990s
Readers’ appetite
for their stories, she says, convinced her she was doing the right
thing — even when one official was quoted in Vedomosti talking of a
“war” with RBC.
When the Panama
revelations broke “I told my reporters to dig stuff up on” Mr
Roldugin, she says. “And the traffic just kept going up.”
RBC appears
outwardly unchanged since the events of Friday, though many reporters
tell the FT they plan to quit.
The motives of Mr
Prokhorov, whose spokesman did not return a request for comment,
remain unclear. Some in Moscow say he sacrificed the editors to avoid
being forced to sell RBC to a more Kremlin-friendly oligarch.
Others say the man
who ran for president against Mr Putin in 2012 may be at risk. “They
don’t trust Prokhorov any more,” says a senior figure at RBC.
“The whole process
[of intimidation] is as indirect as possible,” the insider adds,
mimicking the classic mafia threat: “Nobody ever comes and says,
‘Oh, what a nice publication you have, it would be a shame if
anything happened to it’.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário