Russian-British media owner Yevgeny Lebedev has been appointed to the House of Lords in Britain.
Queen Elizabeth II conferred Lebedev’s lifetime peerage on Friday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office said.
Lebedev owns Britain’s Independent and Evening Standard newspapers. His father, Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, is co-owner of the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Russia.
In summer 2019, then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s government launched an investigation into his sale of a 30% stake in the Evening Standard and Independent to a Saudi investor.
That summer, he was reported to have entertained then-Foreign Secretary Johnson at a party in his family’s villa in Italy.
Alexander Lebedev, an ex-KGB agent turned business tycoon, was reportedly one of the figures investigated as part of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee report on alleged Kremlin interference in country’s 2016 Brexit referendum.
