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The management of TV6 made a proposal Monday that it hopes will
allow it to preserve its journalistic team and continue running
the television station, which a court last week ordered closed.
TV6 management wrote a letter to Press Minister Mikhail Lesin
giving up the station's broadcasting licence so it could form
a new company in time to bid for the license when a tender is
held in April. In the meantime, it asked to be allowed to continue
broadcasting.
Although it seemed to be a purely bureaucratic maneuver -- dissolving
one defunct company to form another capable of bidding for the
license -- TV6 got an encouraging response from Lesin.
The press minister, who chairs the seven-person commission that
reviews licenses and has veto power over its decisions, said he
supported the TV6 team led by Yevgeny Kiselyov. Its chances of
winning the license were "very high," Lesin said on
NTV's "Hero of the Day" program.
"I doubt there could be a better team than the one that
works at TV6," Lesin said on TV6. The Supreme Arbitration
Court on Friday ordered the liquidation of TV6, which is 75 percent
owned by Boris Berezovsky, a Kremlin insider during the days of
President Boris Yeltsin who has become a harsh critic of President
Vladimir Putin's government.
The ruling, which ended an eight-month legal battle, was in response
to a suit brought by minority shareholder LUKoil-Garant, a pension
fund owned by oil giant LUKoil.
Lesin characterized the dispute over TV6, the last national television
station outside the government's control, as a personal conflict
between Berezovsky and LUKoil. The conflict grew out of the way
the media market developed over the past decade, he said.
"Unfortunately the owners of mass media have used them as
a political tool," Lesin said on NTV, a station that was
taken away from Vladimir Gusinsky, another politically powerful
businessman, last year.
Kiselyov also put a positive spin on the situation Monday.
The mood at the company is "surprisingly good, there is
an unexpected atmosphere of calm, of certainty in our moral innocence
and our moral victory, regardless of what happens to us,"
he said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
"The situation is quite different from that last spring
at NTV -- there are no meetings, gatherings, endless briefings
about what will happen to us: Everyone is clear what is going
on," he said.
Kiselyov said the future of TV6 now depends on the Press Ministry.
However, Irina Petrovskaya, a television critic for Obshchaya
Gazeta, said she doubted things were as rosy as Kiselyov and Lesin
made them appear. "Kiselyov wants it to convince his staff,
but deep down I think he has his doubts. Lesin, even if he personally
wishes that the team will keep broadcasting at TV6, also wants
the public to believe that everything will be fine," Petrovskaya
said in a telephone interview.
As happened at NTV last year, someone higher up -- "I don't
know who" -- would make the final decision, she said.
Oleg Panfilov, of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme
Situations, said he believed another team had already been chosen
to fill the shoes of the TV6 journalists. He had no evidence of
this, but would not be at all surprised to see others step in,
he said.
Ruslan Gorevoi, spokesman for the Glasnost Defense Foundation,
also said he doubted that Kiselyov's team would be allowed to
stay. Gorevoi said Lesin had let it be known that the Kremlin
was displeased by the NTV team's transfer to TV6 and the Kremlin
now wanted a "final victory."
Petrovskaya said she understood that the creation of a new company
in which Kiselyov's team would work was a mere formality. "The
Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corp. [the formal owner of TV6]
will lose the license and another name is needed," she said.
The process to dissolve TV6 was to have started Monday at a shareholders
meeting, where financial control was to have been handed over
to a liquidation commission. The meeting failed to take place
for lack of a quorum, defined as more than half of the shareholders.
Shareholders representing just 36 percent of the shares attended.
The head of LUKoil-Garant's legal department, who declined to
be named, said the lack of a quorum was "disappointing, but
not unexpected." He said LUKoil-Garant would not take any
special steps to hasten the demise of the channel and would only
"use the law."
In the letter to Lesin, carried by Interfax, TV6 executive director
Pavel Korchagin said renouncing the broadcast license was being
done in the interests of viewers and to preserve the "unique
collective of journalists," who left NTV after its takeover
by Gazprom.
On the 9 p.m. news, TV6 reported that the letter had been sent.
A spokesman for the station reached by telephone said it had no
further comment Monday.
Manana Aslamazian, general director of Internews-Russia and a
member since 2000 of the federal commission that allocates frequencies,
said the commission tries to find the best concept for the channels.
"Finances are considered, but that is not everything. I
think the current TV6 team will have a good chance of winning
the tender," she said in a telephone interview.
Meanwhile, newspapers controlled by Berezovsky have carried
reports saying the Kremlin has offered the station's staff a lifeline.
On "Hero of the Day," Lesin did not deny the reports
in Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Kommersant saying that he had made
an informal proposal that some of the TV6 shares be transfered
to the station's staff.
One condition of the transfer was that no shares be left in the
hands of Berezovsky or Gusinsky, Kommersant said, citing Berezovsky.
Another condition is that Kiselyov not have a controlling stake.
Alexander Voloshin, the presidential chief of staff, supported
the proposal and had advised Grigory Krichevsky, director of TV6's
news broadcasting service, to accept it, the report said.
The U.S. government reacted harshly to Friday's court decision
to liquidate TV6, the White House warning of a "strong appearance
of political pressure on the courts."
The Foreign Ministry angrily fired back Monday, accusing the
United States of "double standards." The U.S. statement
was "a call to put pressure on the courts, which is inadmissible,"
the ministry said.
The ministry said the TV6 dispute must be decided as a purely
legal issue.
See also:
the origianl at: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2002/01/15/001.html
The TV6 Case
The NTV Case
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