Former telecommunications minister and presidential counselor Leonid Reiman has created and personally invested in a fund called Alternative Capital Investment. Partners in the fund are a Cyprus-based subsidiary of VTB, a leading Russian bank controlled by the Russian state, and other unnamed investors.

Reiman’s representative told Russian business daily Vedomosti that the fund intends to invest in the media, telecommunications, and IT sectors.

The fund aims to raise $250 million, $40 million of which has already been collected. The fund’s activity could complement the activities of NGI, another fund backed by Reiman and that specializes in software investments.

In September 2010, NGI acquired stakes in Russia’s PingWin Software and France’s Mandriva. In March 2011, Reiman became president of Mandriva’s supervisory board.

Reiman is also a founder of Rosa, a Russian developer of open source software.

These moves by Reiman could be related to Russia’s ambitions to create a national operating system. Reiman left his position of presidential counselor only last September.

Source: Vedomosti