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The Moscow Times

TV6 Team Asks to Stay on the Air

By Robin Munro Staff Writer, January 15, 2002

The management of TV6 made a proposal Monday that it hopes will allow it to preserve its journalistic team and continue running the television station, which a court last week ordered closed.

TV6 management wrote a letter to Press Minister Mikhail Lesin giving up the station's broadcasting licence so it could form a new company in time to bid for the license when a tender is held in April. In the meantime, it asked to be allowed to continue broadcasting.

Although it seemed to be a purely bureaucratic maneuver -- dissolving one defunct company to form another capable of bidding for the license -- TV6 got an encouraging response from Lesin.

The press minister, who chairs the seven-person commission that reviews licenses and has veto power over its decisions, said he supported the TV6 team led by Yevgeny Kiselyov. Its chances of winning the license were "very high," Lesin said on NTV's "Hero of the Day" program.

"I doubt there could be a better team than the one that works at TV6," Lesin said on TV6. The Supreme Arbitration Court on Friday ordered the liquidation of TV6, which is 75 percent owned by Boris Berezovsky, a Kremlin insider during the days of President Boris Yeltsin who has become a harsh critic of President Vladimir Putin's government.

The ruling, which ended an eight-month legal battle, was in response to a suit brought by minority shareholder LUKoil-Garant, a pension fund owned by oil giant LUKoil.

Lesin characterized the dispute over TV6, the last national television station outside the government's control, as a personal conflict between Berezovsky and LUKoil. The conflict grew out of the way the media market developed over the past decade, he said.

"Unfortunately the owners of mass media have used them as a political tool," Lesin said on NTV, a station that was taken away from Vladimir Gusinsky, another politically powerful businessman, last year.

Kiselyov also put a positive spin on the situation Monday.

The mood at the company is "surprisingly good, there is an unexpected atmosphere of calm, of certainty in our moral innocence and our moral victory, regardless of what happens to us," he said on Ekho Moskvy radio.

"The situation is quite different from that last spring at NTV -- there are no meetings, gatherings, endless briefings about what will happen to us: Everyone is clear what is going on," he said.

Kiselyov said the future of TV6 now depends on the Press Ministry. However, Irina Petrovskaya, a television critic for Obshchaya Gazeta, said she doubted things were as rosy as Kiselyov and Lesin made them appear. "Kiselyov wants it to convince his staff, but deep down I think he has his doubts. Lesin, even if he personally wishes that the team will keep broadcasting at TV6, also wants the public to believe that everything will be fine," Petrovskaya said in a telephone interview.

As happened at NTV last year, someone higher up -- "I don't know who" -- would make the final decision, she said.

Oleg Panfilov, of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said he believed another team had already been chosen to fill the shoes of the TV6 journalists. He had no evidence of this, but would not be at all surprised to see others step in, he said.

Ruslan Gorevoi, spokesman for the Glasnost Defense Foundation, also said he doubted that Kiselyov's team would be allowed to stay. Gorevoi said Lesin had let it be known that the Kremlin was displeased by the NTV team's transfer to TV6 and the Kremlin now wanted a "final victory."

Petrovskaya said she understood that the creation of a new company in which Kiselyov's team would work was a mere formality. "The Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corp. [the formal owner of TV6] will lose the license and another name is needed," she said.

The process to dissolve TV6 was to have started Monday at a shareholders meeting, where financial control was to have been handed over to a liquidation commission. The meeting failed to take place for lack of a quorum, defined as more than half of the shareholders. Shareholders representing just 36 percent of the shares attended.

The head of LUKoil-Garant's legal department, who declined to be named, said the lack of a quorum was "disappointing, but not unexpected." He said LUKoil-Garant would not take any special steps to hasten the demise of the channel and would only "use the law."

In the letter to Lesin, carried by Interfax, TV6 executive director Pavel Korchagin said renouncing the broadcast license was being done in the interests of viewers and to preserve the "unique collective of journalists," who left NTV after its takeover by Gazprom.

On the 9 p.m. news, TV6 reported that the letter had been sent. A spokesman for the station reached by telephone said it had no further comment Monday.

Manana Aslamazian, general director of Internews-Russia and a member since 2000 of the federal commission that allocates frequencies, said the commission tries to find the best concept for the channels.

"Finances are considered, but that is not everything. I think the current TV6 team will have a good chance of winning the tender," she said in a telephone interview.

Meanwhile, newspapers controlled by Berezovsky have carried reports saying the Kremlin has offered the station's staff a lifeline.

On "Hero of the Day," Lesin did not deny the reports in Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Kommersant saying that he had made an informal proposal that some of the TV6 shares be transfered to the station's staff.

One condition of the transfer was that no shares be left in the hands of Berezovsky or Gusinsky, Kommersant said, citing Berezovsky. Another condition is that Kiselyov not have a controlling stake.

Alexander Voloshin, the presidential chief of staff, supported the proposal and had advised Grigory Krichevsky, director of TV6's news broadcasting service, to accept it, the report said.

The U.S. government reacted harshly to Friday's court decision to liquidate TV6, the White House warning of a "strong appearance of political pressure on the courts."

The Foreign Ministry angrily fired back Monday, accusing the United States of "double standards." The U.S. statement was "a call to put pressure on the courts, which is inadmissible," the ministry said.

The ministry said the TV6 dispute must be decided as a purely legal issue.

See also:
the origianl at: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2002/01/15/001.html

The TV6 Case
The NTV Case

The Moscow Times, January 15, 2002

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