By Denys Bigus, Natalie Sedletska, Kyrylo Loukerenko and Lyubomyr Ferens

A new team has abruptly taken over programming at TVi, one of Ukraine’s few remaining independent media outlets, and journalists are crying foul. Security personnel barred TVi’s former owner and managers from entering the building.  Meanwhile, over five days in April, insiders say, a dizzying series of transactions involving companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and United Kingdom took place amid allegations of fraud and forgery. The barred managers say their station has been taken over by raiders who have literally stolen the company.  The truth is more complex.

The upheaval culminated on April 29 when more than 30 journalists quit the station, citing the new management’s attempts to pressure themand the lack of transparency over the way the new owners obtained control of TVi.

“We don’t see any prospects for fulfilling our professional responsibilities at the channel, because we cannot guarantee our audience fair and unbiased reports and we think that people calling themselves owners and managers of the channel have destroyed TVi’s reputation,” - a TVi journalists said in an online statement.

Prior to the takeover, the station was widely considered to be the only television outlet in Ukraine investigating corruption at top levels of government and openly criticizing Ukraine’s authoritarian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The journalists’ concerns were echoed by the international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which in a statement dated April 26, condemned the sudden change of management at the opposition TV station TVi. “We are disturbed by the lack of financial transparency surrounding certain media owners in Ukraine and the increasing concentration of ownership in few hands, which threatens diversity in the provision of news and information.”

A team of former TVi reporters, independently from both sides of the conflict, investigated the ownership of the station and the various changes.  The new management agreed to both air and post their findings on TVi. The story’s trail  took a number of twists and turns through the murky world of offshore structures amid allegations of fraud, forgery, threats, massive credit-card debt and near-bankruptcy.

Round One of the Big Fight

The battle over TVi got its start in events that happened five years ago, in March 2008.

At that time, Vladimir Gusinski, a media mogul who in the nineties established Russia’s NTV channel, formed a partnership with his friend, Russian businessman Konstantin Kagalovsky to create and manage a television network to be known as TVi.

Gusinski had been through some tumultuous times with NTV, which began in 1993 as an independent (and some said anti-government) news organization. In 2001, after a series of reports critical of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Gusinski was squeezed out and replaced by state-owned gas giant Gazprom.

Despite their friendship, the partnership between Gusinski and Kagalovsky did not last long. Within three years they were suing each other in the Supreme Court of New York State. The case came to trial in late 2011, and in August 2012 the judge issued a 108-page decision in Gusinski’s favor.

The decision sheds light on how Kagalovsky used offshore entities to wrest control of TVi from Gusinski:

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