Next, what remained of the prince's business empire - the lucrative Jasra oil interests and the DST mobile phone company - was expropriated.
The investment in DST may also lead to Tencent co-investing with DST in deals in the US and around the world.
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Stilwell owns 33% of DST and 90% of Janus, whose flashy managers want nothing to do with the parent and aren't happy about being lumped together with steady-as-you-go DST.
The investment allows us to benefit from the fast-growing Internet market in Russia, as well as to leverage our technical and operational know-how to strengthen the leadership position of DST and explore new business opportunities in the Russian-speaking Internet markets.
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The new ICQ owner is Digital Sky Technologies (DST), a high-flying Russian Internet firm with investments in social networks (Facebook and Zynga, which makes games for SNS portals) and webmail.
The deal made DST one of the largest first-class mailers in the U.S. 1.8 billion items in 2000 but the new business has its own problems.
Mutual fund giants like Fidelity Investments handle their own back-office work, but DST is by far the biggest player in the other 60% of the fund industry that contracts out.
Tiger Global Management, a New York hedge fund that is also a shareholder in DST, has already specialised in investing in start-ups beyond the West's well-known technology clusters.
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Today, Yuri Milner, Alisher Usmanov and their DST partners have become the favorites of Silicon Valley start-ups.
One further factor was essential in helping DST to gatecrash the party of the handful of private-equity funds, such as Elevation Partners, TCV and Silver Lake Partners, which typically provide successful American internet firms with additional cash.
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In contrast, analysts say, DST may have overpaid for Zynga, the world's largest online-gaming service, and for Groupon, a website that aggregates buyers and gets them special deals.
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"The rapid advancement of mobile TV technology is giving consumers unparalleled flexibility in how they watch TV and our integration with DST offers yet another way to view TV while they're on-the-go, " said Salil Dalvi and Erik Moreno, co-general managers of Mobile Content Venture (MCV).
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On May 18, 2013, the lock-up expires on 47 million shares held by Mail.ru and DST Global.
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Bidders reportedly showing an interest in the Sunnyvale, California-based company include Silver Lake, Peter Chernin, Providence Equity Partners, DST Global and Alibaba Group.
Other technology firms and investment banks are racing to raise capital and hatch potential IPOs because of the sky-high valuation Facebook is establishing with its private share offering and infusion from Goldman and DST.
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