Facebook: Are You Interfacing with the Russian Mafia & KGB?

[Triple Zero]

Facebook: Are You Interfacing with the Russian Mafia & KGB?

Andrey Ternovskiy, one of Russia's wunderkind Internet entrepreneurs, is being courted by venture capitalists the world over. To get access to cash he needn't leave Moscow, but he doesn't want to do business with the billionaire oligarchs tied to the Russian Mafia and Putin's KGB-FSB machine in the Kremlin.

So, earlier this year the 18-year-old founder of Chatroullet, a webcam-based conversation website, came to the United States to meet with investors. Ternovskiy didn't tell anyone his itinerary. Nevertheless, when he arrived in New York, there was a chauffer-driven limo waiting for him, courtesy of Yuri Milner and Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's hottest investment company.

Ternovskiy reportedly has rebuffed DST's efforts, describing them as "harrassing and hounding."

Ryan Tate at gawker.com appropriately describes the DST limo episode as "creepy." However, the experience goes beyond "creepy," illustrating the nexus between Russia's "business" community and it's intelligence structures. How did DST know Ternovskiy's flight schedule? There are a number of ways that DST could have gotten that information, nearly all of which would be illegal in any country where the "rule of law" is more than merely an empty slogan. But considering DST's high-level ties to Vladimir Putin's KGB-FSB police-state apparatus, obtaining Ternovskiy's airline itinerary must have been child's play.

The Russian teenager is demonstrating better business sense and greater ethical judgment than American corporations, such as social network behemoth Facebook and Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. Over the past year, DST has made several large investments in Facebook, and now holds a ten percent share in the company, which boasts more than 500 million users worldwide — and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.

DST, which has also invested heavily in Zynga, the online social network game developer (FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars [above], etc.), and Groupon, a deal-of-the-day website, has a billion dollars to invest in Internet companies and, reportedly, is also looking at buying into Twitter.

DST has chosen Goldman Sachs for its initial public offering next year. The choice of Goldman Sachs (GS) is not surprising, as GS already owns an undisclosed stake in DST and, aside from the company's Russian co-founders, Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger,  all three of DST's partners (Alexander Tamas, Verdi Israelian, and John Lindfors) are former GS executives.

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[Cain]

There is no functional difference between a Russian businessman, spy, diplomat or gangster.

That said, it's probably inaccurate to refer to Yuri Milner's DST as being tied to the "Putin KGB-FSB machine".  Milner is closer to Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian oligarch and "liberal", and to President Medvedev who, contrary to receieved opinion in the West, is not Putin's lackey.