Grigory Berezkin closed the deal to buy RBK. RBC TV channel. How will he remain in our memory RBK channel owner
Saved by shareholders
Gallery last disclosed its financial results for 2013: by the results of nine months of that year, 132 million rubles were recorded. net profit with revenues of 4.6 billion rubles.
In the same year, the group took part in an outdoor advertising auction held in Moscow and faced financial problems. At the auction Gallery won 760 places for billboards, promising to transfer 13.5 billion rubles for them over the next ten years. To participate in the auction, the group attracted a loan from Sberbank for 1.5 billion rubles. Already at the end of 2014, Gallery violated one of the loan covenants, after which Sberbank reduced the size of the credit line from 1.5 billion to 900 million rubles, and postponed the maturity from 2019 to April 2015, then the rating agency Standard & Poor's. It indicated that at the end of 2014 Gallery's debt should exceed its EBITDA by 21 times, while in 2013 this ratio was only 2.5.
In 2015, Gallery came to the rescue of some of its shareholders, who, as the group itself reported, paid off its debt to Sberbank in April of that year. At the same time as RBC, Gallery's ownership structure changed: Baring Vostok's structures increased their share in the outdoor advertising operator from at least 23.15% to a control one (the exact size of the stake is not known). Remained at that time a co-owner of the group and one of its founders, Anatoly Mostovoy. At the beginning of 2015, he owned 6.85% of the group.
Mostovoy told RBC on Monday, July 16, that a few years ago he sold his stake to Gallery and “is no longer interested in her fate”. In fact, the share was sold to the former financial director of the Kalina concern, Alexander Petrov, according to two sources of RBC, but Mostovoy does not confirm this information. It was not possible to contact Petrov at the time of publication.
Sberbank still remains Gallery's creditor, as follows from the materials of the Unified Federal Register of significant information about the facts of the activities of legal entities. In particular, the state bank now pledges the promissory notes of Gellary Service LLC, the main operating company of the group, as well as a 100% stake in the subsidiary Gellary Digital LLC, under the credit line opened back in 2014.
Ivan Tavrin agreed with Sberbank on the purchase of Gallery's majority stake, says one of RBC's interlocutors. A Sberbank spokesman declined to comment.
Let Moscow down
In the absence of financial indicators, RBC's interlocutors found it difficult to assess the current value of Gallery. In their opinion, the group is likely to be unprofitable in the last two years. The main reason for this is the high annual payments following the results of the Moscow auction in 2013. Their base size is almost 1.4 billion rubles. a year, but the last time, in December 2017, Gallery transferred only 772 million rubles. - the amount may be reduced if the winner of the auction failed to establish the structures for reasons beyond his control.
From Russ Outdoor, which in 2013 won the auction for 27.2 billion rubles. almost 2.2 thousand places for shields and small-format structures, annual deductions to the Moscow budget make up almost a third of all revenues, according to the latest available statements of the company for 2016. Then Russ Outdoor recorded 1.2 billion rubles. net loss on revenue of almost RUB 9 billion In 2015, the market leader was forced to restructure a loan to its lender and main shareholder - VTB (the state bank owns 26.3% of Russ Outdoor).
Photo: Valentina Svistunova / Interpress / TASS
To reduce operating costs, the owners of Russ Outdoor and Gallery wanted to merge the business, but the French JCDecaux, which owns 25% of Russ Outdoor, opposes the merger, like RBC.
Tavrin also negotiated with the owners of Russ Outdoor, RBC sources say, specifying that in this case, unlike Gallery, there are no agreements yet. RBC sent a request to Russ Outdoor.
Belief in the digital
Ivan Tavrin now fully owns the television holding UTV, which manages the U, Muz TV, Disney channels and owns 75% of CTC Media (CTC, Domashny, Che, CTC Love and CTC Kids "). Until December 2017, 58.3% of UTV was owned by Alisher Usmanov, but business partners dispersed. According to sources close to Usmanov, he gave up the television assets, and Tavrin, in turn, lost his at least three percent stake in USM Holdings Ltd, the parent company for Usmanov's assets. A USM spokesman declined to comment on this information.
Tavrin is also the main owner of the Choose Radio holding, which operates 79 regional radio stations. Over the past year, the businessman has new stations in Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod and Vologda, because, as his acquaintances say, he believes in this business: local radio stations least of all compete with the Internet for advertisers' budgets.
In outdoor advertising, Tavrin is attracted by the prospects of gaining distribution of digital formats, RBC sources explain. According to Espar-Analytic, at the end of 2017, Gallery had 158 such structures, and Russ Outdoor - 105. At the same time, digital provided more than 22% of all possible revenue of Gallery and 15% of Russ Outdoor.
Image copyright Prokofiev Vyacheslav / TASS Image caption Igor Poletaev at the premiere of the series "Devil Hunt" in February 2017
NTV presenter Igor Poletaev, who headed the editorial office of the business broadcasting of the TV company, became the managing director of the RBC TV channel, taking the place of Elmar Murtazaev, who had resigned the day before. The BBC Russian service asked former colleagues who he was.
Poletaev has not been named to RBC employees as a possible new head of the TV channel. His name was first announced to them on Friday morning.
For Poletaev himself, this is not the first experience of working at RBC: it was here in 2000 that he began his professional career - first in a news agency, and then on a television channel.
“Having immersed myself in the topic for three years as a reporter (and then as an editor), I decided to try to realize my old dream - to become a TV news host,” says Poletaev's profile on the NTV website.
"On September 2, 2003, the first live broadcast of RBK-TV took place. It was also my first day on the air of the information service, which can be described in one word - delight!" - he recalled.
Poletaev began working at NTV in 2006. He came there as a business news anchor and later became one of the hosts of the Today news program.
The host of the Dozhd TV channel Pavel Lobkov, who left NTV in 2011, speaks of Poletaev as "always correct" and "very neat, tidy" colleague.
"[Poletaev] gave the impression of a broker or a bank trader who suddenly went to work on television," Lobkov said.
According to one of Poletaev's former colleagues at NTV, he owes his career success in the first years of work to Tatyana Mitkova, who in 2014 became deputy general director and the head of the TV channel's information broadcasting directorate.
The BBC's interlocutor was skeptical about Poletaev's abilities as a leader. Former RBC TV presenter Andrei Shilyaev did not agree with this assessment: "Igor Poletaev is a smart, experienced person, he has been cooking in the television kitchen for a long time."
"The job of a manager is not some kind of special profession or special education, it is a job for a person with common sense," said Shilyaev.
Shilyaev calls his former colleague "on the one hand a maestro, on the other a mathematician." "This is the kind of person who can bring in some music, revive the RBC TV channel, which in last years I was looking for ", - added the former presenter of the channel.
The editor-in-chief of NTV, Alexandra Kosterin, called Poletaev a professional and wished him success as the head of the RBC TV channel.
Who was before Poletaev
The fact that this post became vacant became known the day before. On Thursday, Elmar Murtazaev, who has worked as the managing director of the RBC channel since 2016, announced his resignation. And on Friday, Meduza reported that many of the channel’s leading employees would leave after him.
So far, no one has written a letter of resignation, several employees of the TV channel, who wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC Russian Service. We are talking about planned vacations, said the press service of RBC.
Stories of the Day and Prime Time staff members go on paid leave until October. “We have indeed slightly increased the planned summer vacations for RBC TV employees,” Nikolai Molibog, Director General of RBC Holding, confirmed to Vedomosti.
The part of the TV channel team that came with Murtazaev goes on a long vacation: former Forbes.ru editor-in-chief Alexander Bogomolov (Murtazaev was previously editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, ex-employees of the Central Television program on NTV Alexander Urzhanov and Igor Sadreev (both came to RBC at the end of 2016), presenter Stanislav Kucher (leads special air on RBC since 2017), former editor of the RBC Finance department Elena Tofanyuk, correspondents Roman Super and Rodion Chepel.
In June, RBC holding changed its owner - now it belongs to the owner of the ESN group, Grigory Berezkin. He has not yet met with the team and did not tell them about his plans to develop the channel, two employees of the holding told the BBC Russian Service. But for Murtazaev and RBC employees, it was obvious that the new owner would not leave the old team on the channel.
Paid vacation for three months is a kind of "parachute" for employees, say two employees of the RBC TV channel. Murtazaev made it clear to his employees long ago that he would not stay to work under the new owner, and that, most likely, the channel's management would change. Until new plans are announced, employees are encouraged to go on vacation.
No one announced any specific plans to change the channel's editorial policy, but the staff are confident that the television will show less political news.
RBC (from "RosBusinessConsulting") is a Russian media holding, which includes a TV channel of the same name, a news agency, a newspaper and a magazine. Conducts industry conferences, business regattas and awards. It is the largest non-state media holding in Russia. The headquarters is located in Moscow.
Story
Over its more than twenty-year history, from a small news agency, RBC has grown into a diversified company that operates in the IT, television and press segments.
Since the early 2000s, the RBC website has been one of the most visited information resources on the Russian Internet (and, according to many competitors, also one of the leaders in "purchased traffic"). For several years in a row, the company's declared sales of online advertising several times exceeded the sales of other major advertising platforms, including Internet giants like Yandex, Mail.ru, Rambler and others, it was noted in the investigation of SmartMoney magazine, published in 2006.
In 2002, RBC was the first among media holdings to place its shares on Russian stock exchanges. By 2008, their price increased more than tenfold, the company itself was estimated by its management at one and a half billion dollars.
Change of ownership
In July 2009, RBC shareholders agreed with Mikhail Prokhorov's Onexim group to purchase the latest additional issue of 51% of the company's shares for $ 80 million, half of which will go to cover debts. The issue of asset stripping is being considered in court. The total debt of RBC at the end of August 2009 was estimated by the company's creditors at $ 207 million. In June 2010, the deal was completed: ONEXIM for $ 80 million bought an additional issue of RBC TV Moscow, which controls most of RBC's assets.
Further history (2010-2015)
At the end of 2013, after unsuccessful negotiations on the purchase of the Russian edition of Forbes, a number of its employees moved to RBC: editor-in-chief Elizaveta Osetinskaya, her deputy Valery Igumenov (headed by RBC magazine), editor Elena Tofanyuk, columnist Irina Malkova and several correspondents, with the aim of improving the quality of materials was bought up by employees of other publications. Elizaveta Osetinskaya, as the editor-in-chief of RBC, took up the unification of the editorial offices of the magazine, website, newspaper and TV channel. Subsequently, cost optimization began, during which the staff was reduced from 2000 to 1100 employees, non-core assets were sold (the Salon-Press publishing house, which produced glossy magazines).
By 2014, the RBC website became one of the leaders in citation according to Medialogia data (in the spring its audience reached 20 million unique visitors per month), in September 2015, RBC newspaper became the leader in terms of audience in the segment of daily business publications.
By 2015, the aggregate sales of the holding reached a little over five billion rubles, the EBITDA of the group of companies reached 426 million rubles. Nevertheless, the group's net loss amounted to 1.58 billion rubles, long-term debt rose to 17 billion rubles ($ 263 million).
Dismissal of editors-in-chief
In April 2016, a number of media outlets linked searches in the office of the Onexim group and the vacation of the editor-in-chief of the RBC holding Elizaveta Osetinskaya with the Kremlin's pressure on Mikhail Prokhorov due to publications about the alleged daughter and son-in-law of Vladimir Putin Ekaterina Tikhonova and Kirill Shamalov, as well as about Panama archive. At the same time, the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov stated that the authorities are not trying to put pressure on the editorial policy of the holding.
On May 11, it became known about the investigation of a fraud case at RBC, the persons involved in which could be the general director of the holding Nikolai Molibog and a group of his subordinates.
On May 13, 2016, the holding lost its editorial management: the editor-in-chief of the RBC newspaper Maxim Solyus was fired, the editor-in-chief of the holding Elizaveta Osetinskaya and the editor-in-chief of the news agency Roman Badanin resigned by agreement of the parties. Nikolai Molibog explained the dismissals by "disagreements on some important issues." RBC's journalists and editors were obliged to coordinate the texts with the holding's CEO before publication. Following the leaders of the publication, many editors and journalists planned to leave; others decided to work "until the first note taken."
Commenting on the layoffs, Deputy Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications Alexei Volin said that "the owner of RBC had every reason to be dissatisfied ... [since] his managers generated losses, not profits" and that "looking for politics where there is purely economics is completely pointless." Ossetian denied this version, noting: Chief editors are not engaged in business, they are in charge of the editorial office .
New leadership
On July 7, the Vedomosti newspaper, with reference to an internal letter, announced the appointment of Elizaveta Golikova and Igor Trosnikov as the “heads of the combined editorial office,” July 14 was indicated as the start date. Both new leaders were former editors of the Kommersant newspaper, and until recently worked for the state news agency TASS.
On the evening of July 7, 2016, Elizaveta Golikova and Igor Trosnikov, together with Nikolai Molibog, met with the editors of the publication and the website to discuss the future information policy of the holding. A transcript of the meeting was published on the website of the Meduza Internet edition, which received an audio recording from one of the meeting participants.
During the conversation, the new leaders announced the presence of certain restrictions, embodied in double solid, an example of the intersection of which Molibog and Trosnikov called the coverage of the RBC Panama Archive against the background of Vedomosti and Kommersant. Also, RBC journalists were urged not to apply for resignation, because this wrong attitude to what you have done, not to the company, or to shareholders... When asked about the possibility of publishing materials about Ekaterina Tikhonova in the future, Trosnikov refused to answer. The top managers called their main goal the preservation of performance, respect for the audience, and unlocking potential.
In early July, RBC magazine ceased to be a part of the united editorial board of the holding, passing under the control of Molibog. Employees of the media and telecom department of the combined editorial staff moved to the magazine in full. The editor-in-chief of the magazine asked not to associate the reshuffle with the change of the editorial board.
From May to July 2016, 20 journalists left the holding, including eight out of 10 deputy editors-in-chief, four out of 12 heads of directions, services and department editors, one of four special correspondents. Departments of politics, industry and energy resources, the Internet release service, in turn, no one left. On August 18, the deputy editor-in-chief and head of the online edition Vladimir Motorin announced his resignation. Most of the journalists who left the RBC print media in August-October 2016 began working on the Dozhd TV channel, which led to a split within its editorial office.
Under the new leadership, RBC began to issue fewer investigations; there were no longer any texts about the Putin family. In terms of audience size, the holding competed with the largest state-owned media (in March 2017, RBC and RIA Novosti websites were visited by 26.5 and 27.4 million people) [ ]. The media reported dissatisfaction with the editorial policy of the publication on the eve of the presidential election in the presidential administration, in particular, with Alexei Gromov).
New owner (2017 - present)
According to the BBC Russian Service, the decision to sell the holding to Prokhorov was made under pressure from the presidential administration. Also, according to media reports, Berezkin was dissatisfied with the excessive politicization of his new asset, planning to concentrate his work on covering business processes.
Mission
media
The RBC media holding includes the information agency RosBusinessConsulting, an Internet news portal, and a business analytical portal Quote.rbc.ru; in 2003, the publication of the daily analytical newspaper RBC began (until 2014 - RBC daily; is published in both print and online versions) and the monthly business magazine "RBC", the business TV channel "RBK-TV" (created in 2003), the magazine about high technologies "CNews", the project for the sale of ready-made marketing information " RBC. Market research ”, the automobile portal“ Autonews.ru ”, the portal about alcoholic beverages“ Drinktime.rbc.ru ”and a number of other online business, information, service and entertainment publications.
In early October 2007, RBC. Information Systems ”bought 89.99% of the shares of the magazine“ Our Money ”from“ KIT Finance ”and 100% of the shares of the weekly newspaper“ M² - Kvadratny Meter ”from the publishing house Rodionov.
In December 2014, the media holding entered the media monitoring and analytics market by purchasing the specialized Internet service Public.ru.
IT
Another major area of \u200b\u200bRBC's activity is domain registration and hosting, which provide customers with ample opportunities for doing business on the Internet.
Within the holding, a subdivision "RBC-soft" was created, specializing in the development of software (SW). In 2007 it was transformed into the Armada company.
The RBC group of companies includes the largest community of hosting providers and domain name registrars in Russia and Eastern Europe, Ru-Center Group. Currently "Ru-Center Group" includes seven key operating companies: registrars "R01", "
CEO of RBC
Member of the Board of Directors of RBC
Nikolai Molibog has been the CEO of RBC since January 2014. From August 2013 until his appointment as CEO of the company, he was the first deputy CEO of RBC. From 2000 to 2003, Nikolay worked as a manager of a network of regional enterprises of CJSC Kommersant. Publishing House". From 2003 to 2004, he held the position of Deputy Managing Director of the socio-political newspaper Gazeta. Since 2004, Nikolay worked for Afisha, where he rose from Director for Distribution and Regional Development to General Director of the Afisha publishing house. From July 2010 to May 2013, he was the General Director of the united Afisha-Rambler. In 2011 he entered the rating of young media managers of Russia by Odgers Berndtson in the category "Internet projects" with the highest rating (AA). In 2013, he entered the top three CIS leaders in the field of media business according to the Association of Russian Managers. Nikolay graduated faculty of Economics Novosibirsk technical university communications and informatics.
First Deputy CEO of RBC
Ekaterina Kruglova has been Deputy CEO of RBC since December 2013. Ekaterina began her career in the media business as an analyst in the development department of the NTV-Plus company in 2002. In 2003 she moved to Afisha company as an analyst in the business analysis department. In the period from 2005 to 2010, she held the positions of Director for Business Analysis and Deputy General Director of Afisha. After the merger of Afisha and Rambler in 2010, she was appointed Executive Director of the merged company, where she worked until May 2013. Ekaterina graduated from the Faculty of Sociology of the Moscow Pedagogical state university, and also received an MBA from the Mirbis Moscow School of Economics.
Deputy General Director of RBC
He joined the RBC team in May 2014, initially held the post of Director for Economics and Finance at RU-CENTER Group, since December 2014 - Chief Financial Officer of the RBC Group of Companies. In his current position, he is responsible for the operational efficiency of RBC's digital products.
In 2003 he came to work at RIA Novosti, where he held various positions in the financial department. From September 2011 to March 2014 Igor was the deputy chief editor for development of RIA Novosti. In 2005, Igor successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and was awarded the degree of Candidate of Economic Sciences. In 2011, he received a diploma from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants ACCA DipIFR.
Corporate Commercial Director of RBC
General Director of "Media World"
Deputy General Director of RBC for Technologies
Since September 2013, Alexander Kononenko has been the CEO of Media Mir LLC (part of the RBC Group and unites non-business Internet projects), and is also the Deputy CEO for Technologies at RBC. Alexander has over 10 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. Previously, from May 2008 to March 2010, he held the position of CTO at Severen Telecom. In the period from April 2010 to May 2011, he was the technical director of the RBC Hosting Center, after which he moved to the position of technical director at the united Afisha-Rambler company. From May 2013 until joining RBC, he held the position of CEO for technologies at Afisha-Rambler-SUP. Alexander graduated from the Faculty of Informatics and Telecommunications of the Volga University. V.N. Tatishchev.
On Friday, May 13, RBC reported that virtually all top managers responsible for editorial policy are leaving the holding. "Lenta.ru" understands what is happening in one of the largest media holdings in the country and what preceded the departure of the editorial leadership.
What's happening
The holding has officially announced that the chief editor of the projects Elizaveta Osetinskaya, the editor-in-chief of the news agency Roman Badanin and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper of the same name, Maxim Solyus, are leaving RBC.
The general director of the holding, Nikolai Molibog, explained this by the fact that the opinion of the editorial heads about the future of RBC did not coincide with the position of their leaders. "IN recent times we talked a lot about how to further develop RBC, and in these conversations we could not come to a common opinion on some important issues, ”he officially stated. Therefore, we agreed to part.
Who will take their place is not reported yet. Following the departure of the tops, some of the employees of the joint editorial office of RBC also announced their intention to quit in social networks.
After the announcement of the resignation of the top management, RBC shares are listed on the stock exchange.
What came before
In April, it became known that in the fall of 2016, Elizaveta Osetinskaya would retire while studying at Stanford University under the Innovation in Journalism program. It was assumed that the training will last one academic year, after which the editor-in-chief will continue to manage the editorial staff of RBC projects.
However, later, on April 20, the media holding announced that Osetinskaya would leave management a few months before her academic leave - after the May holidays. The holding's representatives argued that her absence would be just temporary. It was reported that editor-in-chief, including Badanin and Solus, would be in charge of editorial projects in her absence.
How Ossetinskaya's vacation was linked to searches at Mikhail Prokhorov's
The official news of the premature leave of the top manager appeared almost simultaneously with the reports of searches in the Onexim group - the structure that controls RBC and other companies of Mikhail Prokhorov. At the same time, inspectors did not come to RBC itself, a representative of the media holding told Lente.ru.
The media wrote that the searches in Onexim may have a political connotation: the authorities are allegedly trying to put pressure on Prokhorov to sell RBC. According to another version, they are trying to force the billionaire to sell the energy company Quadra. Shortly before the law enforcement agencies came to Onexim, a story about violations in the work of Quadra was shown on TV. The media also claimed that RBC, which publishes materials about Panamanian offshores and investigations involving large businessmen and high-ranking officials, bypasses Prokhorov's energy company, which is also associated with offshore companies.
What they say in the Kremlin
The press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov has repeatedly denied media reports about the Kremlin's pressure on Prokhorov because of the allegedly irritating RBC articles. Peskov said that he communicates with Osetinskaya, as well as with many other heads of the media. Shortly before her departure, the press secretary of the head of state met with her, but, according to Peskov, they did not discuss the Ossetian vacation.
Is Prokhorov selling or not selling RBC?
At the end of April, the media reported that after the searches, Prokhorov seriously thought about selling both RBC and Quadra. The fact that a businessman from time to time negotiates the sale of a media holding is essentially nothing new.
It is known that he has been looking for a buyer since at least August 2014 (although representatives of the entrepreneur denied this information). Kommersant then wrote that Prokhorov needed media platforms when he was involved in politics: he was the leader of the Right Cause party, participated in the presidential race, and then headed the Civil Platform. But in 2014, the businessman retired from the affairs of the party, and subsequently spoke out for its complete liquidation.
Photo: Ekaterina Chesnokova / RIA Novosti
After unpromising attempts to make a career as a politician, Prokhorov's need for media assets disappeared, besides, RBC worked exclusively to cover losses, and the shareholder had to invest considerable funds in it. At the moment, the holding's debt is $ 220 million. However, the billionaire liked what the RBC journalists did.
How they tried to change the holding
A little over a year ago, RBC announced Strategy 360, within which the holding should continue to live. The initiator and ideological inspirer of the document was Nikolai Molibog. “RBC's goal is to maintain revenue growth rates at a level not lower than the market average in the future. To achieve this goal, RBC plans to combine organic growth and profitable acquisitions in the fastest growing media segment - the Internet. RBC sees its key operational goal as ensuring the high popularity of RBC's resources among the Russian-speaking audience in the CIS countries and around the world in general. The main task, from the point of view of financial management, is to increase the profitability of the business, ”the company's website says.
However, for two years, during which Molibog led the company, RBC generated only losses: 1.97 billion rubles in 2014 and the same amount in 2015. The holding kept afloat thanks to the sale of assets: the Salon publishing house, the RBC Money payment system and Utro.ru were disposed of.
Photo: Sergey Kiselev / Kommersant
There were also acquisitions. In 2014, the company bought the Public.ru integrator for 19 million rubles (and 200 thousand euros to diversify its revenue streams). The project was supervised by Dmitry Kharitonov, digital director of business projects at RBC. Subsequently, according to the source, all activities on the project were frozen. The losses of Utro.ru alone, sold for only 30 million rubles, amounted to at least 100 million rubles of revenue per year. At least, the publication brought this amount in 2013, and its daily traffic reached 400-500 thousand visitors per day.
RBC is not Prokhorov's first ambitious but failed project. In 2014, an entrepreneur to the state for 1 euro a project of an innovative "Yo-mobile", on which he had previously pinned great hopes and in which he invested 150 million euros.
To whom he sells if he sells
According to Gazeta.Ru sources, the most likely buyer of the media holding is Yury Kovalchuk's National Media Group. At various times, the media claimed that Arkady Rotenberg, Vladimir Lisin, the Gazprom-Media holding, the co-owner of the Ilim group, Zakhar Smushkin, and the owner of Komsomolskaya Pravda, Grigory Berezkin, claim RBC.
Another version refuting previous assumptions
A top manager of a large Russian media holding told Lente.ru that the sale of RBC had already taken place. This happened before it became known about the academic leave of the Ossetian. However, he did not specify whether her decision to leave on her own or the new owner insisted on it.