One of Runet founders, Alexei Soldatov, became a criminal case defendant and was placed under house arrest, Medusa reports.
On December 13, a Russian court put Alexei Soldatov under house arrest until January 28, 2020 as part of the case of fraud committed by an organized group or on a particularly large scale.
According to sources of Jellyfish, case is connected with transfer of approximately 490 thousand IPv4-addresses to the sum of more than 600 million rubles from the Russian research institute of development of public networks (RosNIIROS) in the Czech company Reliable Communications which co-owned by Soldatov. RosNIIROS, which has long been one of the key institutions for managing Runet, has historically had a large pool of IPv4 addresses, which have recently become a deficit — in November they ended completely in Europe.
Alexey Soldatov is one of the founders of the Internet in Russia. He headed the Computer Center of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, where the first scientific network “Relcom” with Internet access was created. In 1992 he became the founder of the first Internet provider in Russia, Relcom. In 2008-2010, Soldatov was Deputy Head of the Ministry of Communications.
