On Thursday, January 15, the Arbitration Court of the French city of Lille allowed the youngest son of Tuvan Senator Sergei Pugachev , Alexander, to acquire a controlling stake in the popular publication France-Soir. reports this AFP .

Pugachev's company Sablon International, which already owns 19.9 percent of the publication's shares, received the right to increase its share to 85 percent. The remaining 15 percent will be retained by Jean-Pierre Brunois, who has owned the newspaper since 2006.

According to current legislation, companies from outside the European Union cannot own more than 20 percent of the shares of French media. However, Alexander Pugachev is a French citizen, and the court granted him the right to acquire a controlling stake.

As Le Monde writes with reference to Press News, Sablon International intends to invest heavily in the tabloid to make the publication more popular and of higher quality. Currently, the publication's circulation is only 23 thousand copies.

The newspaper began publication in 1944 under the name Defense de la France ("French Defense"). After the war the name was changed to France-Soir. In 2006, Jean-Pierre Brunois and Russian Arkady Gaydamak competed for the right to buy the newspaper . The newspaper's employees went on strike as Brunois planned layoffs. Gaydamak, who promised not to fire staff, was unable to purchase the newspaper due to current legislation. As a result of the strike, France-Soir did not work for a month and a half.

The son of a Tuvan senator was allowed to buy a French tabloid