#11
Financial Times (UK)
12 January 2002
Media mogul seeks to mix in new circles:
LUNCH WITH THE FT:
US-born Boris Jordan is desperate to prove his bona
fides in the controversial battle for Russia's popular NTV television station
By JOHN KAMPFNER
Boris Jordan breezes in to Claridges in jeans and jacket. He's late. Pile-up on the motorway from the airport. London traffic is just as bad as Moscow's.
It meant Gordon Ramsey's culinary experience would have to wait. We would have to make do with some sushi in the foyer. Time was short. He had a series of meetings with potential partners in the afternoon.
There is something neither fish nor fowl about Jordan. He's neither fully American nor Russian. A New Yorker of White Russian descent, he moved to Moscow in the early 1990s from where he persuaded western financiers to invest in the conversion from communism. His Renaissance Capital Group was Russia's first western-style investment bank. Serious money was made - and lost. His clients threw billions at him - then accused him of playing fast and loose.
After the 1998 crash he retrenched, reinventing himself last April as a media mogul. He engineered the take-over of the popular television station, NTV, by helping state conglomerate Gazprom acquire a majority holding through its wholly owned subsidiary, Gazprom-Media.
All the while, NTV's founder and chief, Vladimir Gusinsky, had been under house arrest in Spain, as the Russian government sought his extradition. Jordan became chief executive of NTV last April and has been fighting off accusations of being a Kremlin stooge ever since.
Now he's trying to put together his own consortium and hoping to negotiate a buy-out from Gazprom over the next month. He is flitting between European capitals, hoping to have a final bid ready within weeks. But it won't be easy. Media ownership means power. Other oligarchs are in the race. The Kremlin is keeping a close watch.
Jordan is desperate to prove his bona fides. He rattles out the figures - he says he will have reduced a projected loss for this year of Dollars 26m by three-quarters, with forecasts of a profit for 2002.
"I acquired an asset in total distress." He suggests he has turned round not just the finances, but also the journalism. "The Russian people are tired of being lectured to, being told what to think. In our programmes we try to give both sides."
He has in his sights Yevgeny Kisilyov, NTV's star anchor, who quit in disgust when Jordan took over and led more than half the journalists to a new, smaller station, TV6.
Now it, too, is embroiled in intrigues, with fights for control between Boris Berezovsky, another oligarch, and the country's largest oil group, Lukoil, and with the government toying with the idea of closing it down.
Jordan scarcely conceals his schadenfreude or his disdain for Kisilyov and Berezovsky. "Imagine Al Gore buying CBS and announcing he was using it to form a political party. That's what Berezovsky is doing. Would the American people accept that?"
Ratings are finally on the increase for NTV's more measured political talk shows, but Jordan accepts he still has considerable work to win over the doubters. He says he has met Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, three times - the first in July to lobby him to persuade Gazprom to divest its holding in the station, and the other two in public gatherings.
"Our programmes are as critical as they need to be," he says, with unintended ambiguity. But he proudly declares that one of his television crews has been arrested after filming in Chechnya.
So many hopes for a vigorous free press in Russia were invested in NTV, in spite of the questions surrounding the financial dealings of Gusinsky's Media Most empire. The demise of the station's original cast was bound to reflect badly on whoever took it over. Jordan accepts that. That is why he is lobbying so hard. He feels he is making some headway in Europe, but he still has problems with the American administration. When US government officials visit Moscow, TV6 is one of the channels invited in to the embassy, but NTV is made to remain outside.
"I've met with Congressmen, Senators, people at the State Department and the National Security Council, but they don't want to hear," Jordan complains.
The station now plans to publish its news reports on its English-language web pages to "prove" its objectivity.
Does he ever speak to Gusinsky, who is holed up in New York. "Yes, we've talked," he says. "We have nothing personal against each other." What did he think of the arrest? "I think it was probably wrong." He then corrects himself. "No it was definitely wrong."
When Jordan seeks to prove a point, he takes a precise stab at one of his salmon or tuna sushi rolls and then washes it down with mineral water. He is earnest, surprisingly nervous, and doesn't try to smooth-talk me.
He came on to the business scene shortly before I left Moscow after a period working there, and the Russia he speaks of is unfamiliar to me. This is post-post-communism. It is hard-nosed, still living on the edge, but denuded of much of the passion that went with the momentous events of the early 1990s.
He is part of the new generation of Russians whose only ideology is pragmatism, like Putin, who he says is "doing all the right things to rid Russia of anarchy".
Chastened by the crash, Jordan insists he is more cautious now. "The mistake was we thought Russia could be reformed in a few years. I want to be part of that, but we now know it will take much longer. But, for the first time since Peter the Great, Russia can integrate into the community of Europe."
What about his own integration? His family certainly lives the privileged life - a mansion in Moscow's suburbs, children at one of the capital's smart new private schools, his wife now running a small company that makes uniforms for some of the city's best academic institutions.
This, he says, is where he wants to stay. Long Island, where he was raised, is no longer his home. He was never quite accepted. At school he was called a "red" and a "commie". On graduating from New York University he wanted to work for the State Department, but was told he would not be posted to eastern Europe. "They said they thought I'd be too emotional. So I gave up the idea of government service and went into business."
But there was something about making money that has left him still unsatisfied. "I was always an intermediary, for people like Soros and BP. Then I decided I wanted to be the principal. The media is a breath of fresh air after the stodgy world of finance."
Perhaps, I suggest, as we stand up to leave, he is in it for the glamour and the power?
Not in the least, he says. But then he cannot resist telling me that the previous week at a media function he had sat next to Lord Black, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, and Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC. That is the new company he would like to keep.
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