The Primul în Moldova TV station and Accent TV are no longer owned by Igor Chaika, a businessman, and son of the former Prosecutor General of Russia, nor by the businessman Vadim Ciubara. According to a response from the Audiovisual Council for Media Azi, the new beneficiaries are Russian citizens Samvel Grigorian and Natalia Ermilova.

According to Media Azi, official data show that the changes in the shareholders of the company that owns Primul în Moldova and Accent TV were registered in mid-summer. This is the Media Invest Service company from the Russian Federation, previously owned by Igor Chaika (51%) and Vadim Ciubara (49%). Media Invest Service is the founder of Telesistem, which owns the broadcasting licenses for the two channels.

Currently, the owner of the company is the company Объединенные Ресурсы (from Russian, United Resources) in the proportion of 100%, it is shown in the official response of the Audiovisual Council. According to the document, the owners of the company, founded in 2020, are Samvel Grigorian (50%) and Natalia Ermilova (50%). The Board of Directors also states that the information provided by Telesistem refers to August 13, and the changes in the list of founders of Media Invest Service were introduced on August 11, the day on which Media Azi requested the information.

The data provided by the Council coincide with those in the State Register of Legal Entities of the Russian Federation. Moreover, reports of legal encumbrances between Igor Chaika and the Media Invest Service are also recorded in the documents. On June 30, 2021, a pledge agreement was signed, Chaika appearing as a pledge creditor. The document shows that the changes were entered into the database on July 7. At the same time, Vadim Ciubara lost his shares in the company’s shareholders but kept his position as administrator, and the changes in the public documents were operated on August 11, as announced by the Board of Directors.

The businessman Samvel Grigorean is also listed as the founder of the Tandem company in St. Petersburg, which operates in the field of construction and has the same legal address as Объединеные Ресурсы.

In December 2019, Igor Chaika, a businessman and the youngest son of the former Attorney General of the Russian Federation, obtained a 51% stake in Media Invest Service, while Vadim Ciubara owned 49%.

The monitoring reports of the civil society and those of the Audiovisual Council showed that the respective positions favored the Socialist Party and the former president Igor Dodon in the last electoral elections.

What connects Chaika and Dodon

The relationship between Chaika and Dodon is older. In February 2019, the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism announced that, according to confidential documents, Chaika was, as early as 2017, one of the sponsors of the Din Suflet Foundation, managed by Galina Dodon. Thus, on August 16, 2017, on the bank account for euro opened at Victoriabank bank in Chișinău of the Foundation entered the amount of 70 thousand euros, and the money was transferred from an account opened at Absolutbank in Moscow in his name Igor Chaika. Igor Chaika is also a business partner with the president’s brother, Alexandru Dodon.

In February 2019, at the end of the parliamentary election campaign, pilots Lionel Buruiană, 37, and Mihai Crihana, 54, who had been in the Taliban prison in Afghanistan since November 2015, were released. Then the press wrote that the release of the two had been negotiated by a Russian organization, Delovaya Rossia, and one of its co-chairs, Igor Yurevich Chaika.

ZdG wrote in February 2019 that during Dodon’s presidency, Igor Chaika visited Chișinău and Comrat several times, setting up several deals with Găgăuzia, but also with Transnistria, forecasting significant Russian investments on the left bank of the Dniester. In fact, on the website of the organization “Delovaya Rossia”, www.deloros.ru, we find dozens of information about economic transactions, current or future, with companies from various areas, including Moldova.