Evgeny Lebedev


Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev is a Russian-British businessman, who is the owner of Lebedev Holdings Ltd, which owns the Evening Standard, The Independent and the TV channel, London Live.
In 2020, Lebedev became a member of the House of Lords. He received his nomination from the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for his media industry work and conservation charity support.

Early life and education

Born in Moscow, Lebedev is the son of Alexander Lebedev, a part owner of the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and former spy for the KGB and later its successor the FSB, and his first wife Natalia Sokolova. He moved to London at the age of eight, when his father began working for the KGB. His father was in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, where he worked until 1992. In London, he had the diplomatic cover of an economic attaché.
Lebedev attended St Barnabas and St Philip's Church of England Primary School in Kensington, followed by Holland Park comprehensive and Mill Hill boarding school. He then went on to study the history of art at Christie's in London. He has lived in the UK ever since, and became a British citizen in 2010.
His maternal grandfather Vladimir Sokolov was a scientist, and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, later the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Media interests

On 21 January 2009, Evgeny and Alexander Lebedev bought a 65% share in the Evening Standard newspaper. The previous owners, Daily Mail and General Trust plc, continue to hold 24.9% of the company. Under the Lebedevs' ownership, the Evening Standard became a free newspaper in October 2009, and confounded industry observers by moving from large losses to become profitable. Circulation tripled immediately to 700,000. In January 2014, the circulation was increased to 900,000, and the paper now has a readership of more than 2 million people in London.
On 25 March 2010, just weeks before it was due to close, Lebedev bought The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. On 26 October 2010, the i newspaper was launched, the first national daily newspaper to be launched in the UK since The Independent in 1986, at a time of falling newspaper circulations and title closures worldwide.
The i was named National Newspaper of the Year in 2015. The Evening Standard was named News Website of the Year in 2019.
In 2011, he launched The Journalism Foundation, to promote "free and independent journalism throughout the world", although it was closed down after a year.
The papers have been described as "progressive" in The New York Times. In 2013, Amol Rajan became editor of The Independent, making him the second non-white editor of a national newspaper. Two of the other editors have been women: Sarah Sands preceding ex-Chancellor George Osborne at the Evening Standard, and Lisa Markwell of The Independent on Sunday. Some of the editors in Lebedev's newspaper group were unusually young; Rajan and the i editor, Oliver Duff, were both in their early thirties.
In February 2016, it was announced that Independent Press Ltd had reached an agreement to sell the i to Johnston Press, and that The Independent would become digital-only from March 2016. In December 2019, Comscore, an American media analytics company, released figures that showed that The Independent had overtaken The Guardian in unique visitors for the previous month for the first time. This made The Independent the largest quality digital media brand in the UK.
In 2019, it was reported that Lebedev sold a 30% stake in the publications to a private Saudi investor. After a second regulator concluded no investigation was necessary, Ofcom judged that the sale had not led to “any influence” on the news outlets controlled by the British-Russian businessman.

International journalism

Lebedev travels widely as a journalist and has interviewed global leaders including Hamid Karzai, Ismail Haniyeh, Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Lukashenko.
In 2013, he interviewed the Ku Klux Klan at their Arkansas headquarters, while in 2014 he investigated the drug wars in Mexico. In 2015, he visited Gabon, to write on the fate of the African forest elephant. These projects and others have produced a series of articles and broadcasts in Vanity Fair, The New Statesman, GQ, Vogue, The Guardian, the BBC and elsewhere.

Charity work

Lebedev was the chairman of the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, which was founded with Mikhail Gorbachev in 2006, to help children with cancer.
He is the patron of the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund, which helps to address poverty in London, and has raised over £13m since its launch in 2010.
Lebedev has spearheaded a number of campaigns and fundraising appeals run by the Evening Standard and The Independent, including the Homeless Veterans Campaign in 2014; the Space for Giants Elephant Campaign in 2013; and the Child Soldiers campaign in 2012. In 2015, the Great Ormond Street Christmas campaign raised more than £3.5 million, making it the most successful Christmas appeal in the history of The Independent.
Lebedev is also a patron of Space for Giants, an international conservation charity. In 2015, he worked with Space for Giants to launch the Giants Club initiative, which unites leaders of African states and heads of businesses to save Africa's remaining elephant population.
In 2018, Lebedev launched #AIDSFree, a cross-title campaign between The Independent and Evening Standard to raise money for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The campaign raised £3.26m for the cause.
In 2019, Lebedev announced that both the Evening Standard and The Independent would launch a multiple-year campaign to tackle homelessness in London and around the world.

Other business interests

Lebedev co-owns The Grapes, a riverside pub in Limehouse, London, with Sir Ian McKellen and Sean Mathias.
Lebedev purchased the historic Château Gütsch in Lucerne, Switzerland in 2012, and he turned it into a luxury hotel-restaurant.
Lebedev is chairman and host of the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. He also supports the Moscow Art Theatre.

Personal life

According to The Daily Telegraph, Lebedev previously dated British actress Joely Richardson.
Lebedev collects modern British art, and owns pieces by Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Jake and Dinos Chapman. According to the New Statesman, he also has a wide knowledge of Renaissance art and vorticist poetry. He had a pet wolf called Boris.
Lebedev and his father Alexander are known for holding lavish social events with guests ranging from celebrities like Mick Jagger, Eddie Izzard, Ian McKellen, Keira Knightley, Joan Collins and Ralph Fiennes to royalty Princess Eugenie and politicians like Sadiq Khan and Boris Johnson.