MOSCOW, May 27 (RIA Novosti) – Shareholders of Internet giant Yandex, which operates Russia’s largest search engine, have voted Sberbank CEO German Gref onto the company’s board of directors, Yandex said Tuesday.
Gref was elected to a three-year term as a non-executive director, the company said in a statement.
Yandex’s board nominated Gref to the position in early May, but a source in the company said that talks with the Sberbank CEO had actually started earlier in the year and the top manager had given his consent last month. In 2009, Sberbank purchased a “golden share” of Yandex for 1 Euro, but had never used it.
With Gref joining the board, the number of directors has been boosted to nine. Yandex’s most influential shareholder is CEO and founder Arkady Volozh, with a 35.6 percent share of voting stock.
Baring Vostok Capital owns a further 18.36 percent, while Vladimir Ivanov, one of Yandex’s oldest managers, owns 11.24 percent. The largest portfolio investors are Oppenheimer Funds (2.63 percent), Thornburg Investment Management (1.88 percent), Morgan Stanley Investment Management (1.53 percent) and Capital Group International (1.51 percent).
