Google’s Russian subsidiary bankrupted, company assets to be auctioned off

A Moscow arbitration court has granted the bankruptcy petition filed by Google’s Russian subsidiary, OOO Google.

Google’s Russian bankruptcy trustee Valery Talyarovsky says that the LLC has 53.6 billion rubles (or close to $578 million) in debt, including 19.6 billion rubles (or $201 million) of tax debt owed to the Russian Federal Tax Service.

At the time of filing for bankruptcy in June 2022, the company stated that its assets, worth 3.5 billion Russian rubles (or about $36 million in today’s money), weren’t enough to cover its debts. To make matters worse, its corporate bank accounts were frozen in connection with lawsuits filed in Russia by the owners of YouTube channels that Google had banned from the platform.

Google has also been hit with fines for refusing to remove information deemed illegal in Russia, including publications about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian LLC’s assets are to be auctioned off to pay its creditors. In April 2024, its trustee must file a report on bankruptcy proceedings.