Maxim Konovalov, general director of the Moscow legal entity Nginx, told Forbes about the details of the searches that took place on December 12 at the company’s office because of claims from Rambler, who decided to prove with the help of a criminal case that the rights to Nginx actually belong to him. It turned out that searches throughout the day also took place at the homes of the creators of Nginx, and Rambler’s claims were primarily related to the sale of the startup to the Americans for $ 670 million.
“They came to me at 7 in the morning, riot police with machine gunners,” before that “some people walked with my photograph on the porch and found out where I live, although I never hid,” Konovalov said. According to him, laptops and mobile devices were taken from the founders of Nginx during searches. Both entrepreneurs were interrogated for about 4 hours.
Rambler did not make claims to Nginx for eight years, so the trigger was most likely the sale of Nginx to the American company F5 for $ 670 million in March this year: “If we had not sold the company, or sold cheaply, or went bankrupt, then nothing this would not be, ”sums up Konovalov.
According to him, in the near future, he and Sysoev are going to develop a protection plan.
- Nginx is one of the most successful IT companies of recent years, created by Russian programmers. In 2002, the former system administrator “Rambler” Igor Sysoev created an open-source web server, and in 2011 founded Nginx. Now it is the most popular web server in the world – about 33% of all sites work on it. Among the company’s customers are Yandex, Mail.Ru Group, Netflix, Dropbox and others. This year, the US F5 Networks bought Nginx for $ 670 million.
- On Thursday, there were searches at the Nginx office, the founders of the company were detained, they spent the whole day in police interrogation. They were released only late at night, having selected the phones.
