In mid-March Yandex, the Russian online search giant — also running a variety of other digital services — announced it intended to sell its news aggregation service and infotainment platform ‘Zen.’
The move was possibly linked to the government’s crackdown on free expression. Amid the war on Ukraine, a new law had banned what the authorities consider to be “false” information or just inadequate wording about the Russian military, making news aggregation a politically sensitive business.
Now rumor has it that such transactions could not take place due to instructions coming “from above,” as two Yandex managers told The Moscow Times.
A source at VK Company concurred: “It was obvious from the very beginning that no one would let them sell these services. But this has nothing to do with the war, they couldn’t have made such a deal before,” this source was quoted as saying.
Controlled indirectly by the the authorities, VK Company (ex-Mail.ru Group) was seen as “a leading contender” to acquire the assets.
According to Yandex, there is no such ban on selling these assets: “This information is incorrect,” Polina Pestova of Yandex’s international PR service stated in an exchange with East-West Digital News.
She did not provide any update on the potential deal.
This story was corrected on April 20 to include Yandex’s denial.
