Maria Komarova will soon leave the post of general director of the publishing house Independent Media, told the "Vedomosti" employee of this company and a source close to its shareholders. Independent Media is one of the largest publishing houses in Russia, it specializes in the production of glossy magazines - Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Rob report, "Home hearth", "Popular mechanics" and so on. A representative of Independent Media confirmed Komarova's future departure and said that the new CEO from August 1 will be Natalia Vesnina, acting commercial director of the company. Komarova headed the publishing house in May 2017. Before that, she worked as general director of Kommersant Publishing House, headed the group "Choose radio" Ivan Tavrin, and in the past was a friend of Vyacheslav Volodin (now the speaker of the State Duma).
When appointing Komarova, Vedomosti's interlocutors pointed to her little experience with the glossy press and in digital solutions. It is the development of ID on the Internet - one of the main strategic goals of the company, then told its representatives.
Komarova will now manage the media assets of the April Group, according to an Independent Media report. The founder of the "April Group" Anatoly Milyukov is a former top manager of Gazprombank and one of the co-owners of Independent Media.
The ID thanks Komarov for the work done, the company said in a statement: "Under her leadership, successful projects have been implemented, especially in the digital field."
However, two sources of Vedomosti reported that, despite the progress in the Internet development of the media company, Komarova eventually failed to find a common language with all ID shareholders.
Magazines that are published by Independent Media, formerly part of Sanoma Independent Media (SIM), owned by the Finnish Sanoma. In 2014, Sanoma decided to sell its assets in Russia, but managed to do so only in 2016. Part of its assets was bought by Inventure Partners and its partners, the other (Men's Health, National Geographic, Harvard Business Review, The Moscow Times and " Vedomosti ") - Yana Mosel-Kudryavtseva, the wife of Demyan Kudryavtsev, former CEO of Kommersant Publishing House. Inventure Partners and partners publish magazines together with American Hearst, which owns the original versions of these media.
Independent Media does not disclose financial results. In "SPARK-Interfax" published financial statements of legal entities included in the ID, compiled according to the Russian accounting standards. The total revenue of these legal entities for 2016 is about 3 billion rubles. Data for 2017 are not yet available.