Matsotsky Sergei Savelievich

Matsotsky Sergei Savelievich

Biography

Born February 25, 1962 in Moscow

He graduated from secondary school No. 444 with an in-depth study of mathematics, computer science and physics, then - the Moscow Institute of Petrochemical and Gas Industry named after Gubkin with a degree in applied mathematics. At that time, the institute had a very strong department of applied mathematics, but most importantly, it was possible to deal with what is today called "information technology," as well as participate in complex projects^[1].

In 1984-1990 was an engineer - head of the department of the Central Geophysical Expedition of the USSR Ministry of Neftegazprom. He was a system programmer, led the development of a large package of programs. In the second half of the 80s, the once most powerful organization began to rapidly degrade. Qualified specialists left the Central Geophysical Expedition of the Ministry of Neftegazprom. Someone went to the West, others went into business in Russia.

 In 1990, Sergei Matsotsky began his business career as head of the commercial department of the Intermicro joint venture: "This experience turned out to be very useful, " he notes. "I realized how not to do business."

1992-2020: Work at IBS

 In 1992, Matsotsky, along with other specialists, left Intermicro and created IBS. From 1992 to 1997 Matsotsky served as Executive Director of IBS.

In 1997, the company raised $31 million in investments from Citigroup and AIG, planning to launch an IPO in 2001. This plan was shelved due to the 2000-2001 dot-com crisis. Since 1997, Matsotsky became CEO and Chairman of the Board of IBS.

In 2005, the company successfully conducted an IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, receiving $113 million for a 33% stake.

In January 2012, Matsotsky stepped down as CEO of the company to focus on strategic development.

Under the leadership of Matsotsky IBS , she entered the top ten largest system integrators providers IT infrastructures in the market and. Russia CIS The company and its subsidiaries provided IT solutions to enterprises consulting,,,,,,. public private cloud services PaaS IaaS SaaS

Luxoft

In 2000, IBS, in order to diversify its business, established Luxoft, a separate business structure for offshore software development, which soon became one of the world's largest software developers serving Boeing, Deutsche Bank, IBM, the US Department of Energy, as well as hundreds of other international customers.

Luxoft became a public company in 2013, listing $555 million in shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

By the end of the 2010s, Luxoft became a major IT service provider with 42 offices in 21 countries, which took part in digital transformation projects for companies in the financial, energy, telecommunications, aviation and automotive industries.

On January 7, 2019, US IT services provider DXC Technology announced the acquisition for $2 billion of Luxoft Holding, a subsidiary of IBS Group Holding. According to the terms of the deal, the main owners of Luxoft, including Sergei Matsotsky, receive $655 million for their share. More on the deal here.

Innovative education

In 2007, Sergey led the IBS project to launch a unique master's program for IT specialists at MIPT. The two giants - business and educational - joined forces to give students almost oriented training: at that time, not a single Russian university could give anything like that. In addition, IBS fully funded the program.

A similar program was launched at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Non-Ferrous Metals, which is now known as the National University of Science and Technology MISiS.

2020

Leaving IBS

On April 13, 2020, IBS reported that the founders of the company Anatoly Karachinsky and Sergey Matsotsky, whose partnership lasted more than 30 years, decided to further develop their businesses on their own.

It happens that people disperse after a longer period. There are simply different priorities, different views on what would be more correct, more useful and more interesting to do further, - Sergey Matsotsky told TAdviser

Matsotsky ceases to be a minority shareholder of the company and resigns from the board of directors of IBS ("IBS IT Services").

After the separation, Sergey retained several companies previously owned by IBS, including the former IBS infrastructure division, which was responsible for the holding's system integration projects, Budget and Financial Technologies (BFT) and Arenadata.

BFT specializes in projects in the field of automation of budgetary and financial management, creation of technological platforms, portal solutions.

Arenadata, originally founded as a technology startup for working with open source products, is engaged in building analytical systems, optimizing data storage, building universal storage and migrating from traditional DBMS to distributed storage and data processing systems based on MPP (massive parallel processing) and Hadoop. Arenadata customers are mainly large companies and holdings from the retail and telecom industries.

This is a logical separation: those businesses that are closer to me are moving to me, - said Sergey Matsotsky in a conversation with TAdviser

Rubitech System Integrator

On June 30, 2020, Sergei Matsotsky announced on his page on the social network Facebook about the creation of a new company - Rubytech. According to him, she will be engaged in system integration the Russian market. information technology

GS INVEST: a new holding led by Sergei Matsotsky

GS INVEST is a holding that currently includes all the key IT assets of Matsotsky: BFT, Arenadata, Rubitech and a number of other technology companies. GS INVEST is a joint venture with Gazprombank, acting as a financial partner without participation in operating activities. The management company "GS INVEST" was created in November 2020.

2021: TAdviser interview

In June 2021, in an interview with TAdviserAlexander Levashov, the founder of the GS Invest holding, Sergei Matsotsky, shared his opinion on the current state of affairs in the Russian information technology market - on changes in demand, on changing generations of key players, on the role and main digital projects of the state, and also spoke about the reasons for leaving IBS and his new business. Read the interview.

2020-2022: Membership on the Board of Directors of VimpelCom and Alfa-Bank

Sergey Matsotsky has served as an independent member of the board of directors Alfa-Bank since 2020 VimpelCom and since March 2021. In a press release bank , it was reported that Sergey's extensive experience in technology and innovation will strengthen the bank's technological leadership. Similarly, VimpelCom believed that the changes in the company's board of directors, including the introduction of Matsotsky as an independent director, corresponded to the new operating model of the holding (Veon including the Russian operator mobile and the fixed ""). communications Beeline

A year later, Sergey resigned from the boards of directors of Alfa-Bank and VimpelCom.

2022

Inclusion in the list of 25 main persons of state digitalization according to TAdviser

In January 2022, it was included in the list of 25 main persons of state digitalization of Russia according to TAdviser.

Click to enlarge

Joining the list of the largest IT billionaires in Russia

In August 2022, TAdviser compiled the first list of the largest IT billionaires in Russia. Sergey Matsotsky took eighteenth place in it (more).

Sale of interest in "GS INVEST" to management of the holding company

On March 3, 2023, it became known that the composition of the owners IT of the holding managing GS INVEST IT companies,,,,, had changed. "Rubitech" IT One Arenadata Avanpost "Rock-P" "BFT"

Sergey Matsotsky sold his stake in 47% of the shares to the management of the holding. It was acquired by Vasily Belov, managing director of the holding, and Igor Vedekhin, general director of Rubitech. Thus, Sergey Matsotsky completely left the GS Invest business. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.^[2]

2025

Absentee arrest on charges of bribery on an especially large scale

On July 18, 2025, the Basmanny Court of Moscow arrested billionaire Sergei Matsotsky, a former member of the board of directors of Alfa Bank and VimpelCom, co-founder of one of the largest Russian IT companies IBS, in absentia. He is accused of paying a bribe on an especially large scale. The entrepreneur is wanted.

The decision of the Basmanny District Court of the city of Moscow granted the petition of the preliminary investigation bodies to choose a preventive measure in the form of detention in relation to Matsotsky Sergei Savelyevich, accused of committing crimes under Part 5 of Art. 291 of the Criminal Code, a preventive measure in the form of detention for a period of 2 months from the moment of his extradition to the territory of the Russian Federation or from the moment of his detention in the territory of the Russian Federation, - said in the official Telegram channel of courts of general jurisdiction of the city of Moscow.

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Фото: TAdviser

Details of the Matsotsky case were not disclosed by July 18, 2025.

In 2023, Matsotsky sold a stake in the GS Invest company he founded to top managers.^[3]

Termination of criminal prosecution, cancellation of arrest and investigation

The investigation stopped the criminal prosecution in the case of bribery against IT businessman and investor Sergei Matsotsky in connection with his non-involvement in the crime. This follows from an electronic copy of the appeal resolution of the Moscow City Court, published in the card of this criminal case in the open database of courts of general jurisdiction in Moscow in August 2025.

... criminal prosecution against Matsotsky... terminated on the basis of Clause 1 of Part 1 of Art. 27 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation, with the cancellation of his search and the preventive measure chosen by the 18.07.2025 court in the form of detention, - said in the published document.

In accordance with the mentioned part of the article of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation, the non-involvement of a suspect or accused in the commission of a crime is one of the grounds for terminating criminal prosecution.

The investigator's decision to terminate the criminal prosecution was issued on August 1, follows from the published copy of the appeal decision of the Moscow City Court. At the same time, after that, on August 8, the Moscow City Court considered the appeal of Sergei Matsotsky's lawyers - the defenders asked to declare illegal the earlier decision of the court of first instance, the Basmanny Court, on the arrest of the IT entrepreneur in absentia and cancel it. Among the arguments of the defense was that the prosecution formula is not specific, and the interrogation protocol of a witness, whose name is not given in this document, is unacceptable evidence.

The Moscow City Court, however, refused to satisfy this complaint, referring to the circumstances that took place precisely at the time of the decision of the first instance.

It follows from the same document that one of the lawyers of the IT businessman is Vadim Yalovitsky. Before advocacy, he worked for a long time in the Main Military Prosecutor's Office, including as an investigator and prosecutor, and then in the Prosecutor General's Office. At ^[4]one time, he obtained the extradition to Russia of a number of famous persons hiding abroad from responsibility for committing crimes on the territory of Russia, as well as the seizure abroad of exported criminal assets and the return to Russia of money and property totaling more than 20 billion rubles in a number of high-profile cases.

A copy of the published appeal resolution of the Moscow City Court also states: Sergei Matsotsky was put on the wanted list in June, and on the federal wanted list in July, while according to the results of operational-search measures, it was established that he flew out of Russia on April 24, 2025. The same date in the appeal ruling appears as the date of initiation of a corruption criminal case against two other persons under Part 6 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (receiving a bribe on an especially large scale), which was later combined into one proceeding with the criminal case of Sergei Matsotsky under Part 5 of Article 291 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (giving a bribe on an especially large scale).

Additional information

• Sergey Matsotsky: IBS and MIPT radically change approach to IT staff training|VIPERSON^[5]
• IBS and MISIS will train IT specialists - CNews^[6]

Quotes

• We do not do IT, but manage information with IT.
• My work is what I am interested in, I didn't like it and it seems to work out, "says Sergey. - For me, the main thing is not to lead, but to explain. Agree, it is always easier to order and much more difficult to explain and make the employee take it consciously.

"Many people don't believe it, but in IBS we started with only a few thousand dollars - bonuses received for our work at Intermicro.

"With the transfer of the company to the cloud, we did not win much in either operating or capital expenditures. Nevertheless, the cloud is changing the approach to infrastructure design. Previously, an individual solution was built for each application, and modern clouds allow you to create an infrastructure that provides business support for many years to come. However, problems with management and operation are growing here. "

Awards

Matsotsky was repeatedly among the ten most influential persons in the computer market. In 1999 , according to a survey of the International Computer Club, he was recognized as a person who made the most significant contribution to the development of the Russian and international IT industry.

In 2002-2003 Sergey Matsotsky entered the rating "iTop-100 of the Russian IT industry," compiled by the iOne project. According to the rating of the magazine "Career" from 2001, he entered the top 10 best corporate strategists in Russia.

According to a study conducted by the Secret of the Firm magazine in conjunction with the consulting firm BLM-Consort and the marketing agency A/R/M/1-Marketing (2002 ), he was among the managers who made an outstanding contribution to the development of their companies after the 1998 crisis .

According to the rating of the Association of Russian Managers, it is one of the top 1000 most professional managers in Russia. In 2007 , Sergey Savelievich was recognized as the best leader of the company in the field of information technology.

Photo - Evgeny Razumny, hbr-russia.ru

Notes