Arkady Volozs, one of the founders of Yandex, informed the Prime Minister of Israel and three ministers in a letter that he decided to move the company's headquarters to Tel Aviv in order to avoid international sanctions.
The company, also known as the "Russian Google", is asking for special conditions for its non-Israeli employees.
"I decided to move Yandex's international headquarters to Tel Aviv and bring hundreds of developers, engineers and technologists to Israel"
- writes Arkagyi Volozs, CEO and founder of Yandex, in a letter sent to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and other ministers, ynet reports
Among the recipients of the letter are Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Interior Minister Ajelet Shaked and Innovation, Information and Technology Minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen.
In the letter entitled "Yandex - Expanding its operations in Israel", Volozs explained that he is essentially trying to ensure that Israel provides the company, which is considered the "Russian Google", exceptional conditions that allow it to employ non-Israeli workers.
"In order for the company's employees to make the decision to move to Israel and live there, even for several years, several conditions must be met, for which we ask for your help: the issuance of work visas to non-Jewish workers or those ineligible under the Law of Return, and temporary issuing travel documents for the company's employees with Russian citizenship"
Volozs writes.
The temporary travel documents should allow these workers to move freely around the world, something that has become impossible with a Russian passport since Russia invaded Ukraine in February this year. At the end of the letter, Volozs invites the ministers to visit Yandex's offices in Israel and asks them to "approve our requests described above".
Yandex already has significant business activities in Israel and employs 450 people. The company's best-known brands in the local market are Yango Taxis, the Yango Deli retail and delivery business, and Wind scooters, which it recently acquired. In addition, Yandex has a platform called "Practicum" for training high-tech workers, the cloud service Yandex Cloud. In addition, the company can present serious research results regarding autonomous vehicles.
Volozs himself lived in Israel in recent years, after receiving Israeli citizenship in 2017 based on the Law of Return. Today, he is responsible for Yandex's technological aspects and its activities outside the borders of Russia. According to recent press reports in Russia, it plans to split Yandex into two companies – one Russian and one international, which will be headquartered in Israel.
However, according to experts, it is doubtful how the plans for the division into two can be implemented, even in the background of intellectual property rights issues, but mainly because of the possible effects of such a step on the debt settlement. The suspension of the trading of Yandex shares in New York and the blocking of access to the actual capital triggered the clause of the 1.25 billion dollar exchange bond allowing immediate repayment. The immediate repayment of this bond could lead to the insolvency of Yandex, so the company is currently negotiating with the bondholders.
In the two months since the start of the war in Ukraine, hundreds of Yandex employees have fled Russia, many of them to Israel. At its peak, nearly 10% of the company's 18,000 employees were based outside Russia, according to estimates published in Russian media.
But while many programmers have fled to former Russian republics such as Armenia and Georgia, many of the company's top executives, who are eligible under the Law of Return, have moved to Israel, including the company's former CEO and Yandex's vice president of human resources, Yango Deli, of Russia's operations. also its CEO.
Yandex is Russia's best-known and largest high-tech company, which has been listed in the Netherlands since its foundation, and before the war in Ukraine, its shares were traded in the Nasdaq stock market at a value of 32 billion dollars.
At the 2009 IPO in New York, the first major tech IPO since the 2008 financial crisis, the Russian government demanded and received a golden stake in Yandex. The golden share gave the right to refuse to buy more than 25% of the company's shares.
In 2019, Volozs managed to weaken the Kremlin's influence somewhat by diverting the gold stock to a fund that represents some of the company's shareholders, including representatives of the Russian government. Almost immediately after the start of the Russian invasion, and somewhat surprisingly, Yandex Deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan came under Western sanctions after he appeared in a photo with President Vladimir Putin at a meeting with businessmen in the Kremlin.
The deputy CEO immediately resigned and was replaced by one of the senior executives, although Khudaverdyan will remain at Yandex as a sort of adviser. Thus, Yango Deli's operations in France and England were also shut down, and the power was turned off in the data center in Finland. Since the Russian invasion, trading in Yandex shares has been suspended in New York, shortly after the company's value plummeted below $5 billion.
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