MOSCOW -- A British company is suing one of the most successful web entrepreneurs in Russia.
Albert Popkov is the creator of odnoklassniki.ru (classmates), a very popular social-networking website with more than 25 million registered users throughout the former Soviet Union.
But the CEO of the London-based company i-CD, Alistair Crawford, told RFE/RL's Russian Service that Popkov developed odnoklassniki.ru while working for i-CD.
Crawford says Popkov launched odnoklassniki.ru just 16 days after he left i-CD in 2006. He claims that Popkov stole the idea from another project that i-CD worked on, and that this is illegal. He is asking that odnoklassniki.ru be awarded to i-CD.
Odnoklassniki.ru is estimated by analysts to be worth tens of millions of dollars.