“According to the minutes of the general meeting of October 11, 2022, a decision was made to liquidate,” the document filed with the French register of legal entities on October 26 from the Open Press society says.
RT publishes a copy of this document.
© Register of legal entities in France
The owner and beneficiary of the legal entity is Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky.
This is stated in an extract from the register of beneficial owners of France, which was received by RT.
From the same extracts it follows: the first time the organization almost closed in 2019.
Then its net assets fell below half of the authorized capital.
The size of the authorized capital is equal to €1.
However, despite the situation in which the company was threatened with termination of activities, by decision of the board of directors, its activities were continued.
Established in 2018, Open Press managed to change its "registration" once: in 2021, it moved from the commune of Bobigny (a northeastern suburb of Paris) a little further - to the region, to the town of Creteil (Fr. Créteil).
This allowed her not to publish annual reports for 2019-2020.
Open Press also had a twin sister in Estonia, a company of the same name, which closed in 2020.
RT wrote about her: she was responsible for the administration and financing of the Open Media association, at that time the main mouthpiece of Khodorkovsky on the Russian-language Internet.
An average of €1 million passed through it per year.
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Waste Ballast
The goals for which these legal entities were created are no longer important, so they get rid of firms like unnecessary ballast.
This idea was expressed by two people who understand the structure of the MBH business.
Information about the closure of Open Press as "waste material" is confirmed by an employee of one of Khodorkovsky's charitable structures, with whom RT spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Open Press existed simply to transfer money to Russia for projects.
Jurisdictions were changed, most likely due to Western grants, there are a lot of different troubles, - the interlocutor of RT notes.
“Now it doesn’t work, because no more money is sent to Russia.”
Investigative journalist, founder of the Prigovor.ru portal about Khodorkovsky's criminal case Sergei Sokolov notes that the decision to close the French organization is not accidental.
“Khodorkovsky loves to resort to all sorts of schemes that make it difficult for the regulatory authorities to track his participation in any projects.
This was noticeable even in Yukos, with its hundreds of offshore companies, subsidiaries and trusts that complicate the ownership structure, Sokolov, who has been studying the empire of the disgraced oligarch since the 1990s, told RT.
- Therefore, here I see two reasons for the closure.
The first is financial, so as not to publish annual reports, the second is political, in order to complicate the work of the Russian Ministry of Justice and the prosecutor's office.
Khodorkovsky has done this at least twice in recent years, Sokolov recalls.
The first is in 2021, when, after the recognition of Open Russia as an undesirable organization, he “duplicated” the London-based Future Russia Foundation ***, opening a legal entity of the same name in Lithuania.
The second time was in 2022, when he “changed the sign” of his British foundation Justice for Journalists.
In order not to publish annual reports, the legal entity changed its registration address and name three years after its establishment - it became known as JWJ TWO.
And Khodorkovsky assigned the “vacated” name to a new company, which he founded in 2022.
Thus, a new “Justice for Journalists” appeared in the British register, confusingly similar to the first one, but formally having nothing to do with it and, in addition, freed from the obligation to publish annual reports for at least another year and a half.
Sokolov's portal Prigovor.ru talked about this in detail.
Strongly unwanted
The Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation declared Open Press undesirable on November 14, 2022.
“Based on the results of a study of the materials received ... it was established that its activities pose a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order and the security of Russia,” the department writes on its website.
Despite the fact that the Open Press legal entity itself is likely to cease to exist in the near future, agencies cooperating with it, journalists and legal entities on the territory of the Russian Federation may face criminal or administrative liability.
From open data, media publications and the stories of the journalists themselves working in the media structures of the MBK, one can outline the range of projects funded by Open Press.
This is, firstly, a grid of Telegram channels associated with Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
This includes the channels "We can explain" (replaced the channel "Open Media. Exclusives"), "ChTD" (former "MBH Media") with a total audience of almost 700 thousand people.
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Associated with Khodorkovsky are the Sirena channel (92,000 subscribers) and the Kholod magazine channel (55,000 subscribers), as well as smaller ones like Skat media.
The abundance of titles and materials is intended to create the effect of mass character, but in fact they cover approximately the same topics, and they are led by the same people, the media reported.
Secondly, this is a whole series of publications that arose both on the wave of the SVO and inherited the ideological and financial components from the closed Open Media (MBKh Media) and Open Russia.
These are, for example, the new media Polygon, headed by the former editor-in-chief of MBKh Media Veronika Kutsyllo, the Dossier Center of journalist Sergei Kanev and, according to the Tsargrad TV channel, the VPost publication of journalist Kirill Kharatyan.
Sources of the Tsargrad TV channel in the Russian Financial Monitoring said that the journalists of the named resources and Telegram channels received a total of 47.75 million rubles from the French Open Press.
Transactions were sent to 25 different individuals and Russian companies controlled by them.
According to Sokolov, changing the founders, places of residence and activities of controlled organizations is Khodorkovsky's corporate style.
“In the last year and a half, a new type of competition has emerged between anti-Russian public organizations and the Russian Ministry of Justice,” the expert notes.
- The Ministry of Justice recognizes a certain organization as a foreign agent or undesirable, and it changes its name and legal entity, dragging former employees into the new organization.
The Ministry of Justice enters a new office in the register, and another one appears instead of it.
It's like fighting a hydra: you cut off one head, and another immediately grows in its place.
I think some new, systematic approaches are needed to immediately hit this hydra.”
* The activity of the organization was recognized as undesirable by the decision of the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia dated 11/14/22.
** Included in the register of individuals acting as a foreign agent by decision of the Russian Ministry of Justice dated 05/20/2022.
*** The activity of the organization was recognized as undesirable by the decision of the Ministry of Justice of Russia dated 30.06.21.