Russia-based private investment group United Capital Partners or UCP said it will be suing two stakeholders of the social network Vkontakte, East-West Digital News reported.
Last year, UCP bought a 48% stake in Vkontakte. The fund said it will be filing a case against Mail.ru Group and Ivan Tavrin, the investor who acquired his 12% stake in the firm a few months ago from Vkontakte Founder Pavel Durov, the report said.
UCP claimed that the two shareholders blocked the development of the company and made decisions which were not in the best interests of the firm. More specifically, the Russian fund accused the two stakeholders of not supporting its demand to get independent auditors to look into the abuses that the company's resources have been subjected to. UCP said these abuses have been going on for the past few years, the report said.
Moreover, UCP also accused Durov of devoting a portion of his time on the IM project called Telegram which he introduced in 2013 independent of Vkontakte. UCP said the endeavor could possibly reflect a conflict of interest, the report said.
UCP said, "As a shareholder of VK, Mail.ru Group represents Telegram as not competing with VK and instant messaging systems as holding no interest to VK. This position is increasingly difficult to understand when industry experts and financial anaysts tell us the opposite and Facebook has bought WhatsApp for $19 billion."
Another conflict of interest also lies in the ownership of Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir by Mail.ru Group. According to the fund, these social networks compete with Vkontakte. The other issue that UCP finds suspicious is Tavrin's affiliation with Megafon, a company that is controlled by Alisher Usmanov, a main stakeholder in Mail.ru Group, the report said.
Meanwhile, Mail.ru Group GM Dmitry Grishin responded to the accusation by saying that the move is a "tactic of corporate trolling that only harms the business."
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