Russian police aren't done with the independent news agency ‘RBC’

Earlier today, Russian police indicted Nikolai Molibog, the general director of the independent news agency RBC, and Derk Sauer, vice president of the private investment bank Onexim, which owns RBC.

According to Russia's Interior Ministry, the fraud charges are related to a complaint filed by Alexander Panov, a former shareholder in Byte-Telecom. Panov accuses RBC of illegally seizing $13.4 million in Byte-Telecom shares that he says belonged to him and his partners.

Investigators are also auditing Ekaterina Kruglova (RBC's first deputy director), Igor Selivanova (the news agency's financial director), and Alexander Kononenko (the deputy director of technology). 

Writing on Facebook, Molibog said RBC has sued Panov once before for defamation (and it won). Molibog says RBC's lawyers are now entertaining more lawsuits, this time against Panov and Rambler News Service “in connection with the publication of unverified and false information that harms the professional reputation of the company and its staff.”

Panov told the newspaper Vedomosti that he expects police to discover another three instances of fraud, requiring two additional criminal cases, though he refused to offer any further details.

According to RBC's accounting records, it sold its 75-percent share of Byte-Telecom in September 2014. There is no publicly available information about the buyer, and Panov insists that the sale was fictitious. 

Onexim Group and RBC are owned by the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, several of whose assets (including Onexim Group, Quadra, Renaissance Capital, and Renaissance Credit) have been raided in recent weeks by federal police. 

The Russian Federal Security Service says the searches were related to an investigation into crimes committed when Onexim Group Tavrichesky Bank went bankrupt and was reorganized in February 2015.

Meduza's own sources in the police and Prokhorov's holdings, however, say President Putin personally sanctioned the raids, in retaliation for RBC's decision to publish information about his family and his connection to suspicious offshore accounts revealed in the so-called “Panama Papers.”

Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin's official spokesman, told reporters today that the Kremlin is not involved in any effort to pressure Mikhail Prokhorov.