The Paradise Papers documented how Russian state-linked money entered major social-media companies through offshore investment structures. In 2011, VTB Bank, which was later controlled by the Russian state, invested $191 million in DST Global, the investment firm founded by billionaire Yuri Milner, helping it acquire a large stake in Twitter. A subsidiary of Kremlin-controlled Gazprom separately funded an investment company that partnered with DST Global to buy Facebook shares. The structures obscured the connection between the platforms’ investors and Russian state institutions while allowing the investors to profit from the companies’ public offerings.
DST Global sold its Twitter stake before the U.S. government sanctioned VTB in 2014 over Russia’s military intervention in Crimea. Four days after Facebook’s May 2012 initial public offering, a DST Global subsidiary sold more than 27 million Facebook shares for approximately $1 billion; Twitter went public in 2013. The documents did not establish that Facebook or Twitter violated law or that the investments directed platform policy, but they exposed a material transparency problem: powerful communication networks could receive state-linked capital through layered offshore entities, leaving users and the public with limited visibility into influential ownership and financial relationships.
