The co-founder of Russian technology giant Yandex, Arkady Volozh, officially said goodbye to the group’s 20,000 employees on Friday after resigning in June following the first international sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine, AFP reported.

“The time has come to write a farewell message (…) As you know, I haven’t managed Yandex Russia for a long time and this year I had to leave all positions” in the management, he wrote in an internal message of the company. , a source familiar with the exchanges confirmed to AFP.

In early June, he resigned from the leadership of Yandex, Russia’s main search engine, which he co-founded in 1997, after falling under individual sanctions of the European Union in connection with Ukraine.

“Yandex is the project of my life, but not only mine. For 30 years, we did it together, from scratch, in the context of global competition,” recalls 58-year-old Arkady Volozh.

He also called the company’s restructuring plan “quite reasonable and necessary” “under the current circumstances.”

In early December, Oleksii Kudrin, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, said he was joining Yandex as a “development advisor”, days after management announced a reorganization of the group.

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