The presidential amnesty for businesses that promised not to split the business and thereby evade taxes gave rise to a serious conflict among the co-owners of Mastertel JSC. Recently, new top managers came to the company’s head office, accompanied by heavily armed guards. They took over the accounting, administrative and personnel departments, and transferred powers of attorney with digital signature to themselves. As a result, the company’s work was paralyzed. Meanwhile, it was a successful company from the early 2000s. One of its products, MasterCloud, has received recognition as a “golden partner of Veeam,” the leader of the American software development market, and even the status of a CISCO partner.
This was in 2020, and now waves from the company’s internal conflict can become disruptions and reach Mastertel’s clients, the largest private and public banks. The safe operation of cloud servers, transport and logistics companies may be disrupted. Mastertel co-founder Mikhail Belov spoke about this situation. “There is a risk of a complete shutdown of the company, the conflict is getting worse every day. This will inevitably lead to disaster,” Belov said. 
But the second co-owner and general director of Mastertel, Vitaly Ezopov, has his own version of the conflict. In one of his interviews, he stated that it was they who wanted to squeeze him out of the joint business, that the company was almost subjected to a raider takeover. According to Ezopov, the cause of the conflict was his offer to co-founder Belov to participate in the presidential amnesty for refusing to split up the business and the associated “tax optimization.” The essence of the amnesty is that the Ministry of Finance will not punish the company for past sins with partial tax evasion if the company voluntarily puts its finances in order.
Allegedly, the partner did not support this idea and continued to grow the business. Then armed guards were hired, new managers and external audit specialists were introduced. “The company is simply being led to bankruptcy… Like in the movies. My domains were stolen, including the Mastertel domain,” Ezopov complained.
But what’s interesting is that a married couple became the new managers on behalf of Ezopov. This is citizen Alena Timoni, she, having no experience in the IT field, took the post of deputy general director. And it is not clear for what merit her husband Andrei Buravchikov became a co-owner of half the shares of the company.
Ezopov himself in one of his programs (he is also a radio host), discussing the psychology of conflict, made it clear how to treat subordinates. Like unreasonable children, or like dogs to whom the owner throws a piece of meat and in return demands unconditional obedience. Hearing this, Mastertel employees began to quit en masse, not wanting to work under the command of “armed managers.”
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
