Moscow Court Fines Ex-Google Boss Carlo Biondo $1.7B

The Moscow Arbitration Court officially ruled that Carlo Salvatore Maria D’Asaro Biondo, the former head of Google's local Russian entity, personally owes an eye-watering 160.3 billion rubles to the company's bankruptcy trustee, Valery Talyarovsky. For those keeping score in real currencies, that converts to roughly 1.7 billion dollars pinned directly to a single former manager.

The dispute traces back to an ancient corporate restructuring dance. The court took issue with the termination of a 2009 advertising resale agreement and the subsequent signing of a fresh contract in 2018. The bankruptcy trustee decided that every single payment routed from the Russian subsidiary to Google Ireland Limited between 2018 and 2022 was legally invalid, making the routine intra-company transfer look like an unauthorized cash grab in the eyes of local judges.

The astronomical bill breaks down into 101.7 billion rubles in principal debt and another 58.6 billion rubles in piled-on interest. Moscow's arbitrators had already attempted to squeeze this exact same phantom fortune out of Google Ireland Limited back in February, apparently deciding that doubling down on the former executive personally might work twice as well.

The Russian branch of Google originally filed for its own bankruptcy in October 2023 after local authorities froze its bank accounts, making normal operations impossible. Despite the corporate collapse, the entity somehow still managed to cough up 16.8 billion rubles in regulatory penalties on behalf of its American parent company shortly before this latest ruling.

Demanding billions from an executive who has long packed his bags and left the country looks less like law enforcement and more like aggressive bureaucratic performance art. International bailiffs will certainly file this one under pure comedy, but it proves that in regional bankruptcy courts, imagination remains completely untamed by reality.