8 Dec 2022 12:07

Alexander Voloshin could be re-elected to Yandex's board of directors

MOSCOW. Dec 8 (Interfax) - Yandex will hold its annual general shareholders' meeting on December 22, the Russian IT company said in a statement.

The meeting agenda does not have information on the company's upcoming restructuring.

Shareholders are instead invited to re-elect three non-executive directors to the board of directors for four years, specifically: Alexander Voloshin, former head of the Russian presidential administration; Charles Ryan, co-founder of Almaz Capital Partners; and Roger Rijnia, who previously worked at Apple and a number of Dutch companies.

The other members have time remaining in their service on the board.

According to a letter from John Boynton, chairman of the company's board, there are now five vacancies on the board of directors, including a seat for an executive director.

"We are continuing to seek suitable candidates, and we hope to present these candidates to the shareholders in a timely manner," Boynton said in the letter.

Since the beginning of the year, two executive directors, Arkady Volozh and Tigran Khudaverdyan, have left the Yandex board of directors owing to the European Union imposing sanctions against them. Moreover, two non-executive directors left the board in early March, including Esther Dyson, the founder of Wellville, and Ilya Strebulaev, a professor of finance at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The fifth seat on the board has been vacant since 2021.

Yandex's board of directors currently comprises seven members, including Alexander Moldovan, PhD, academic at the Russian Academy of Sciences; John Boynton, president at the Firehouse Capital Inc. private investment company; Alexander Voloshin; Charles Ryan; Alexei Yakovitsky, VTB Capital CEO; Alexei Komissarov, CEO of ANO Russia - Country of Opportunities; as well as Roger Rijnia.

The shareholder structure of Yandex N.V ., Yandex's parent company, was the following as on September 30: the Volozh family trust owns 8.5% of the capital, or 45.1% of the votes; management and employees own 3.2%, or 6.6% of the votes; investors who participated in the pre-IPO own 0.7%, or 2% of the votes; and free float is 87.6% of the capital, or 46.3% of the votes.