Billionaire businessman Alexander Lebedev, a shareholder in Aeroflot who nominated Navalny to the board of the state-controlled Russian airline, described the case as "completely ridiculous" and likened it to tactics used against Soviet dissidents during the Cold War era.
Aeroflot
State-run OAO Aeroflot deprived minority owners of dividends by ceding revenue of about $1 billion in overflight fees to the Russian government during the past nine years, billionaire shareholder Alexander Lebedev said.
When I texted Alexander Lebedev -- the KGB spook turned banker and media mogul -- explaining the conceit of this feature, he wrote back: "I don't have anything, not even money." The billionaire (estimated assets, according to Forbes: $2.1 billion) added a smiley face.
Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, owner of the U.K.s Evening Standard and Independent newspapers, is asking Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to intervene after Moscow police raided his National Reserve Bank last week.
Alexander Lebedev, the Russian owner of Britain's Independent and London Evening Standard newspapers, suffered another bruising blow to his business empire today after police carried out a raid on his luxury hotel in Ukraine.
Photographs of three murdered journalists line the glass cabinet at the entrance of Alexander Lebedevs Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Moscow, below a shelf with a computer Mikhail Gorbachev once used.
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