Gulf companies look west for media assets

Gulf states have gotten a hankering for Eastern and Central European media assets lately, it seems. First, Ras al Khaimah's sovereign wealth fund, RAKIA, was said to have purchased the private Georgian broadcaster, Imedi TV, last year. (These claims were fervently and rather colourfully disputed by the head of RAKIA in

in February, but the actual ownership remains shrouded in mystery --

.) And now, Al Jazeera is in talks to take over the Bosnian broadcaster, Studio 99, according to

.

The deal is not yet done, according to people close to the negotiations, but the mayor of Sarajevo apparently thought things were far enough along to announce to local journalists last week that Al Jazeera was going to buy the station for around $210,000 -- around the same price the city paid for the station a few months back -- and turn it into a Balkans media centre. If the deal goes through, it will be the most exotic purchase so far in Al Jazeera's recent shopping spree.

These stories have more in common that geography. In both cases, private media assets were passed   into foreign hands just as lawsuits over their ownership were pending in the courts. In Georgia, that lawsuit was brought by the family of the late oligarch Badri Patarkatsishvili against their distant relative, Joseph Kay, who reportedly sold off 90 per cent of Imedi to RAK's property arm, Rakeen. The family said, in short, that the station wasn't Kay's to sell, and alleged that the Georgian government played a role in stripping them of their assets.

is hanging over Studio 99, brought by the original founders of the broadcaster against Adil Kulenovic, the managing director of its parent company, PEP. They too argue that the station was not his to sell to the government, and therefore not the government's to sell to a foreign entity.