DMITRI LYSKOV: GUSINSKI RELINQUISHES RUSSIAN CITIZENSHIP AND THE MEDIA-MOST

A news emerged yesterday that Vladimir Gusinski, the holding Media-Most’s head, who is currently in Great Britain, had appealed for British citizenship. It means that Mr. Gusinski renounces Russian citizenship and is abandoning the Media-Most. Legally, dual citizenship is not envisaged in Russia’s legislation, and should Mr. Gusinski gets British citizenship, He will automatically lose Russia’s. Another Russian law, that of mass media, holds even more interesting consequences for Mr. Gusinski. According to the clause 7 of the law, a founder of a Russian mass media outlet cannot be, among other things, a “citizen of another state or a person without citizenship not residing permanently in the Russian Federation.” That is, having received British citizenship, Mr. Gusinski is losing his Media-Most. The concept of Russia’s information security adopted December 27th 1991, treats this issue even stricter. Apparently, periodicals controlled by the Media-Most blasted its basic tenets. In the Media-Most’s web site the following quotation can be found. “All started in 1992 when Vladimir Gusinski (then head of the Most Group and the Most Bank’s chairman) decided to found the all-Russian newspaper Segodnya. Mr. Gusinski may well succeed to getting British citizenship. Mr. Putin’s cudgel seems to have worked, although the President has not even brandished.