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Berezovsky, Murdoch Buy St. Petersburg Radio Station Modern
Logovaz News Corp., owned by Boris Berezovsky and Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch, stepped into the St. Petersburg radio market last week with the purchase of radio station Modern. This was reported by The Moscow Times July 5.
Modern has two broadcasting licenses for St. Petersburg and holds 14 licenses for broadcasting in the regions, including Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, Kaliningrad and Sochi.
Berezovsky and Murdoch bought the station from its managers, Sergei Nikolayev and Leonid Kukushkin, and an entrepreneur, Oleg Zherebtsov.
Some 223,000 people, or 5.3 percent of St. Petersburg's radio audience, tune in daily to Modern, making it the No. 10 FM station by audience size, according to market research agency Comcon-St. Petersburg.
Logovaz News Corp., or LNC, belongs equally to structures under Berezovsky and Murdoch and owns Nashe Radio, which has about 40 transmitters broadcasting to 129 cities across Russia and the CIS, as well as Ultra Radio and the recording company Real Records.
Nikolayev said each of the three owners paid taxes worth "several tens of thousands of dollars," but he declined to disclose the value of the deal.
Radio market analysts estimated that LNC paid between $1 million and $2 million for the station. A commercial director at another Petersburg station valued radio Modern, along with its regional network, at no higher than $1 million.
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