Ukraine’s leading private equity firm Dragon Capital bought the online Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda, the newspaper announced on May 26.
Olena Prytula, founding editor of Ukrainska Pravda, and Tomas Fiala, CEO of Dragon Capital, signed a purchase agreement to transfer the outlet’s ownership to the investment fund.
The sum wasn’t disclosed. The business has about 50 employees.
The editorial policy of the publication and approaches to work will remain unchanged, according to Fiala.
“Same as with our existing media project, NV, we will maintain the practice of non-interference by the owner into Ukrayinska Pravda’s editorial policy and are pleased to announce the signing of a relevant document that will be publicly available on the UP website,” Fiala’s statement reads.
He added in a brief email to the Kyiv Post that the plan is to “continue. And make them technologically and commercially better.”
The Ukrainska Pravda team, led by Sevgil Musaieva, will continue their work in close cooperation with Prytula, who will continue in her role as founding editor.
Dragon Capital’s other media asset, Novoye Vremya, founded in 2014, will work independently from Ukrainska Pravda, according to the company.
Vitalii Sych, Novoye Vremya’s editor in chief, praised the initiative.
“As far as I know, the previous owner Olena Prytula has been wanting to leave the project for a while, so I’m glad that she chose Dragon instead of politics or oligarch for sale,” he wrote on Facebook.
Published in Ukrainian and Russian, Ukrainska Pravda was founded in April 2000 by Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze, killed in September the same year.
The reporter was abducted and his headless body was found months later in a forest near Kyiv, a murder linked to Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine’s authoritarian president from 1994-2005.
Gongadze had exposed high-level corruption and was an outspoken critic of Kuchma, whose voice is heard on audiotapes released by his former guard, Mykola Melnychenko, plotting to get rid of the journalist. Kuchma has always denied any involvement.
Four police officers were convicted of the crime. The highest-ranking one, Oleksiy Pukach, remains in jail. His boss at the time, Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, died from two gunshot wounds to the head in 2005, a death ruled suspiciously as suicide. Formal charges were filed against Kuchma during Viktor Yanukovych’s administration, but the case went nowhere, despite the high-profile allegations by then-deputy prosecutor-general Renat Kuzmin.
