Snowden welcomed in Russia, great job offer too

[Scurrilous]

72. Life is great in Russia. Ask Pavel Durov (Snowden's prospective employer).

If you can find where he's hiding...

Is Pavel Durov, Russia's Zuckerberg, a Kremlin Target?

<snip>

"Since 2010, the fifth and sixth floors of the Singer House have been rented out by VKontakte.ru, the most popular social network in Russia. VKontakte, which is pronounced Vee-contact and translates as “in contact,” has more than 210 million users and is the third-most-visited site in Russia. It is a relatively small office—just a couple dozen programmers work at the Singer building—with all the familiar startup accoutrements: brightly colored couches, free soda and chocolate, and a workforce of mainly young male programmers who rarely show up before early afternoon.

When I visited one day in June, Georgy Lobushkin, VKontakte’s 25-year-old spokesperson and the only employee of the press-shy company to have much contact with the outside world, met me as I walked off the caged elevator. We passed rows of empty cubicles. At the end of a hallway was an office with its door open. Houseplants blocked a window; a pair of black, very expensive Bowers & Wilkins speakers sat on the floor. This, said Lobushkin, was the office of VKontakte’s founder and chief executive officer, Pavel Durov."

<snip>

"Durov had not been seen since early April, when he fled the country after investigators opened a case against him for allegedly running over the foot of a traffic policeman in a white Mercedes. There were rumors he was in Italy, or maybe Switzerland, though the U.S. was also a possibility. Wherever he was, he wasn’t in his office, and with every day he stayed invisible, the future of the social network he built became more precarious.

It had been a tumultuous year for Durov and his company. Around the time he disappeared, two original VKontakte investors and longtime friends of Durov’s sold their shares—worth 48 percent of the company—to an investment fund with reported ties to the ruling clique around President Vladimir Putin. Irina Levova, a senior analyst at the Russian Association of Electronic Communications, said the purchase of a stake in VKontakte resembled the “standard Russian method” of a “legitimized raider attack with the help of the Investigative Committee and administrative pressure.” It appeared the Kremlin might have launched the beginnings of a hostile takeover."

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-01/is-pavel-durov-russias-zuckerberg-a-kremlin-target


But hey...free soda and chocolate! Rockstar!!1!