The main contractor for isolating the Russian Internet suddenly died

Anton Cherepennikov, entrepreneur and head of ICS Holding, died at the age of 40. It is said that the cause of his death was cardiac arrest.

Cherepennikov founded the ICS Holding group in 2018. The company dealt with the development of products for the system of operational and reconnaissance activities (SORM) and the implementation of the so-called “Yarovaya’s Laws”. This set of initiatives includes requires telecommunications operators to keep records of conversations in Russia for up to six months, Internet traffic for a month, and geolocation, subscriber connection information and other metadata for three years.

In 2021, the publication VTimes reported that Cherepennikov’s structures were also involved in the test launch of systems for the implementation of the Runet Isolation Law. In March 2019, his company Citadel owned 43% of Data Processing and Automation Center (DCOA), which was involved in a test run of traffic filtering systems. Currently, the main owner of DCOA is ICS Holding. In 2019, DCOA earned 589 million rubles in revenue and 7.4 million rubles in profit, according to the company’s report.

In addition to ICS Holding, Cherepennikov was a member of the board of directors of the USM holding and the telecommunications operator Megafon, and was also the co-owner and COO of USM Telecom. He was also the owner of the Virtus.pro club and the founder of the e-sports holding company ESforce. The BBC Russian service and RBC called him the partner of billionaire Alisher Usmanov, but Usmanov’s press service denied this information in August 2019.

Cherepennikov was repeatedly included in the list of the most successful young entrepreneurs in Russia according to RBC and was nominated for the Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2019 and 2020. On February 25, 2023, together with ICS Holding, it was entered on the US sanctions list.