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Board chairman says Rambler not party to Nginx dispute

Rambler Group will hold an extraordinary board meeting to discuss the situation regarding Nginx

MOSCOW, December 14. /TASS/. Rambler Group is not a party in the dispute surrounding the Nginx company, Board Chairman of Rambler Group and First Deputy CEO of Sberbank Lev Khasis said on Friday.

"As far as I understand, long before we [Sberbank] became Rambler’s shareholder, Rambler handed over the rights for supervising this case and for all claims to one of a companies owned by Alexander Leonidovich Mamut," he told the Kommersant FM radio station. "This happened three or four years ago, and, at present, Rambler is not a party in this story. This is what I’ve managed to learn from verbal conversations so far."

He said that claims against Nginx were laid by a company which is not part of the Rambler Group, and "the rights for those claims were handed over to this company long ago."

Khasis also confirmed that Rambler Group will hold an extraordinary board meeting to discuss the situation regarding Nginx.

"We will surely gather before the New Year to see how it all looks like in the documents. Then we will be able to provide more information," the official said.

Seizure of documents related to a criminal case on copyright violation took place in Nginx office, a TASS source in law enforcement authorities said on Thursday. A dispute related to the computer program was the cause for proceedings, the source added. Rambler Group said on Thursday that its exclusive rights to the web-server Nginx developed by ex-employee of the company Igor Sysoev were breached.

Sysoev created Nginx in 2002, when he worked in Rambler. Nginx is one of the most popular web-servers worldwide at present. It is used for hosting of largest and most heavily loaded websites. The web-server was distributed for free under a license with an open code. In 2011, Sysoev left Rambler and founded Nginx, which started creating paid products based on software of the same name. The US-based F5 Networks acquired the project in March 2019 for $670 mln.