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[Second Issue of the Day]
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Ex-spy chief, TV rebels bid for Russian TV licence
By Andrei Shukshin
MOSCOW, March 27 (Reuters) - A government commission met on Wednesday to decide whether to let the team of Russia's last independent nationwide television channel reclaim the station, although this time under the supervision of a former spy master.
Thirteen contenders, including a group headed by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, are competing for the right to use the frequency on which TV6 television broadcast.
Authorities took the station off air in January in a dramatic midnight blackout that raised concern over President Vladimir Putin's tolerance of dissent.
The government dismissed charges it was trying to silence a vocal critic, citing instead a court decision to wind up TV6. Its closure gave the Kremlin a monopoly of the country's airwaves for the first time since the Soviet era.
The Media Ministry called a tender for March 27 to choose a company to broadcast on the frequency which is temporarily occupied by a sports channel.
Rival bidders said they expected an impartial hearing as they arrived at the ministry's downtown Moscow headquarters early on Wednesday for the all-day session.
"If I didn't believe that it would be fair I wouldn't be here," said Alexander Gurnov, a former presenter with state-run RTR television.
The broadcasting commission is due to announce its decision late in the afternoon.
Stiff competition emerged for the licence but the TV6 team appeared to have secured poll position after allying themselves with Yevgeny Primakov, a former prime minister and spy master with excellent Kremlin connections.
Local media said Primakov, a strong believer in the guiding role of the state, was part of a Kremlin solution to its dilemma about how to calm concerns about media freedoms in Russia while keeping an eye on TV6's fiercely independent journalists.
The paring of Yevgeny Kiselyov, the managing director and star news show host of TV6, with Primakov in a supervisory role, is seen as a marriage of convenience between a outspoken journalist and man whose background makes him ill at ease with the media.
The duo are expected to tap a consortium of big Russian companies led by the head of power monopoly UES Anatoly Chubais and aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, for funds.
MEDIA CASUALTIES
The closure of TV6 was the second big blow to befall its journalists in less than a year. Last April they deserted en masse their NTV channel after it was taken over by state-dominated natural monopoly Gazprom in a boardroom coup.
NTV's takeover was condemned worldwide as a Kremlin assault on freedom of speech in Russia, but Putin said the channel was never independent and served the narrow interests of its owner, the once powerful businessman Vladimir Gusinsky.
Many of the journalists, who won fame in mid-1990s for their hard-hitting coverage of the Chechen war, migrated to TV6 where they transformed the then teenage entertainment outlet into a serious political channel.
But TV6 belonged to another tycoon who had fallen foul of the Kremlin, Boris Berezovsky. In January, a court ruled that the station be shut down on complaints by a minority shareholder it had not set straight charter capital irregularities.
Many, including in the U.S. administration, saw the hand of the Kremlin behind the move, but officials insisted the dispute was purely commercial.
Berezovsky's TV6 managers said on Tuesday liquidating the company would take months and broadcasting on the frequency was unlikely to resume before September.
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