The creators of "Lentach" blocked the work of the public due to a conflict with the administrator

The founders of the former Lenta.ru public page Lentach, Andrey Konyaev and Igor Belkin, have blocked the community's work due to a conflict with administrator Mark Shein. This was reported in a post by Lentach, signed by Konyaev.

"The ideas and principles on which we transferred the community are no longer valid. Mark Shein has done a lot to develop this community, no one will ever be able to take that away from him. But Mark's aspirations are now in a different plane. We, as founders, see no other way out than to free Mark from his obligations to Lentach. From now on, he has no relation to this public," the post says.

In particular, Konyaev accused Shein of the fact that under his leadership the public “began to get into incomprehensible situations,” and the “last straw” was the idea of ​​creating a network of regional communities “Now” on the basis of “Lentach,” the main investor of which was to be Anton Gangnus.

According to Konyaev, "it did not look like an investment, but like the sale of Lentach to a separate company with unclear sources of financing." For example, the publication Roem pointed out that Gangnus had previously been an investor in projects that served the interests of the Russian presidential administration. At the same time, in the text of Vedomosti dedicated to the launch of the Seychas project, Konyaev's participation was announced on par with Shein.

Mark Shein responded to Konyaev's claims with a post on Lentach's Facebook page. There, he called Konyaev and Belkin's actions a "raider takeover" and promised to fight for the public page by involving the VKontakte administration or through the courts.

"We grew the community from 300 thousand to more than a million readers, increased the monthly reach from a million to 7 million people. And a few months ago they came to the editorial office for money. They demanded from us sums that we simply did not have. They threatened to fire the entire editorial office otherwise. We tried to negotiate, not to bring this unpleasant story into the public sphere. But they decided that it would be easier to simply take away the community that we had grown," Shein wrote.

According to Konyaev, "we will talk to the team that remains after Shein and decide how to live on." Meanwhile, Shein noted in his post that "at the moment, the entire editorial staff has been excluded from the admin panel in VK, no negotiations on the fate of the editors are being conducted with us and have not been conducted." Lentach's Twitter and Facebook accounts continue to function under the management of Shein's editorial staff, and Konyaev has declared a "day of silence" in the main public page.

• The Lentach community was initially created as an official representative of Lenta.ru on the VKontakte network; among other employees of the publication, it was led by Igor Belkin and Andrey Konyaev. The public page was transferred to the management of readers after the dismissal of the editor-in-chief of Lenta.ru Galina Timchenko in the spring of 2014. After that, Mark Shein, chosen by Konyaev and Belkin from among the most active readers, became the head of the community.
• Today, Lentach is the largest public page on VKontakte covering the political agenda, with more than 1.2 million users subscribed to it.