Pavel Durov sold the Vkontakte data center for 1 billion rubles

In early June, Megamozg announced that Pavel Durov, the founder of "Vkontakte", sold the data center that provides the social network to the current owners of the resource. The exact amount of the transaction was not disclosed by its participants, but experts assumed that Durov received about 500 million rubles from the buyer. In fact, the data center was sold for an amount of 919 million rubles, writes Izvestia. This became known from the report Mail.ru Group for the first half of 2015.

Since its inception, the social network Vkontakte has used the infrastructure owned by the first investors, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev (they owned Setektel hosting company). The new network investor, the DST fund, believed that the resource should not work with third-party data centers.

In line with the wishes of investors, in 2010 Pavel Durov held talks with ITSVA LLC, which owned land and a number of industrial facilities near St. Petersburg. After that, active work began on repairing a complex of abandoned buildings in the area. The total area of ​​land owned by ITSVA LLC was 8.5 hectares. In September 2011, this LLC was acquired by Ilya Perekopsky, who was at that time the vice-president of "Vkontakte". A little later, LLC was re-registered to an offshore company, which belonged to Durov. The head of ITSVA was Pavel Durov's half-brother Mikhail Petrov.
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Already in 2012, Pavel Bondarenko became the general director of ITSVA LLC.

As for the data centers that were built on the squares that belonged to LLC, Pavel Durov built their own funds. At the same time, Durov suggested that partners transfer ITSVA LLC to the social network balance at cost. It is interesting that in the UCP fund, which in 2013 became a shareholder of Vkontakte, having bought the entire package of shares belonging to them from Mirilashvili and Leviev, they thought that the data centers were built with the company's money. The fund tried to recover from Durov 500 million rubles in court, believing that it caused damage to the company, inflating the rent for the DC.

Durov filed a counterclaim against the UCP. Nevertheless, the parties to the conflict managed to agree after the fund sold 48% of its shares to the Mail.ru Group for $ 1.47 billion.

After Durov left Vkontakte, he still owned data centers of ITSVA LLC. In order not to engage in the re-registration of buildings and land, the new owners of Vkontakte decided to buy out 100% of the shares of ICVA. This transaction was approved, and the total cost of ICVA was estimated at 250 million rubles.

“This is not so much about the building in its pure form. A data center is also a special storage room, servers, air conditioning, staff, and more. The social network does not buy the box, but part of the equipment it needs, the conditions for storing data. In this situation, even 500 million rubles - the price is low, especially given the scale of the business. The deal is profitable for both parties, ”said Jan Kuzina, director of the consulting and valuation department at SA Ricci Real Estate Agency.