Mohammad Zahoor

Zahoor was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1955. In 1974, aged 19, he won a scholarship to study metallurgy in the Soviet Union; after a brief stay in Moscow he was sent to Donetsk in Ukraine, where he lived in student dormitories for six years and quickly learned Russian. In 1980 he wrote a thesis on the rolling plant at the Donetsk Steel Mill — the mill he would buy 16 years later.⁠[1][2][2][3]

After completing his studies, he returned to Pakistan on a five-year contract with Pakistan Steel, starting as a safety engineer and later rising to head of production, planning and control; he felt he faced discrimination in his career advancement, resigned, and took a job with a Pakistani company that did business in Russia.⁠[2][3][2][2]

On January 4, 1987, Zahoor returned to Moscow to start new businesses for the Karachi-based Tabani Group, working in spare parts supply and trading in steel, zinc, aluminum, medical equipment and computers. In 1991, with a Thai partner he had met in the steel trade, he founded Metalsrussia in Moscow, a Hong Kong-registered trading company that later became the ISTIL Group (International Steel & Tube Industries, Ltd.). He lived in Moscow continuously for 13 years, until 2000.⁠[2][2][2][4][5][2]

During Ukraine’s 1994 presidential election, advisers to incumbent President Leonid Kravchuk asked Zahoor to speak on Kravchuk’s behalf as a major investor, and the speech was broadcast on television. A few months later Leonid Kuchma won the election; Zahoor recalled that he then had “serious problems,” and decided never again to publicly support any Ukrainian politician.⁠[4][4]

In 1996, Zahoor took part in a tender and bought the dying Donetsk Metallurgical Plant, which had about $150 million in debts; he said there were no other bidders and the buyer had to make its investments within two years. After the mill turned around, he said some local people — including some he understood to represent the Industrial Union of Donbass — wanted to take it, and in 2000 he lost the big mill; Oleksandr Pilipenko, vice president of the Industrial Union of Donbass, denied that the group was ever involved in an unfriendly takeover attempt.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

Zahoor said these disputes taught him the value of independent news media in exposing conflicts: “Media for me is a kind of self-defense.”⁠[2][2]

After losing the big mill, Zahoor kept another Donetsk steel mill and invested $150 million in upgrading it with more energy-efficient, less polluting technology. In 2008, at the peak of steel prices, he sold the steel business; the price was not disclosed and exists only as estimates — more than $500 million in a 2009 estimate, and about $1 billion in most later ones. He said he decided to sell because he foresaw that after the Beijing Olympics China’s surplus steel capacity would crush small mills; the buyer was a Russian parliamentarian, and the mill went bankrupt within a year.⁠[2][2][4][6][2][7]

After selling the steel business, Zahoor shifted the ISTIL Group’s focus to Ukrainian real estate and media, with the group estimating its 2009 investments in Ukraine at $110 million. Its real estate projects included the Leipzig Hotel, a century-old building near Kyiv’s Golden Gate that had stood empty for years, the Rialto Business Center in Podil and a logistics center near Boryspil; its media projects included the ISTIL Studios film and television production center, costing an estimated $15 million, and a stake in the satellite TV provider Poverkhnost Group. ISTIL Studios had originally been a partnership with political talk show host Savik Shuster, but the two fell out in the summer of 2009 and gave differing accounts of the terms.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

In July 2009, Zahoor bought the Ukrainian English-language newspaper Kyiv Post from its founder, Jed SundenJed SundenJed Sunden is an American publisher and media entrepreneur who founded the Ukrainian English-language newspaper Kyiv Post in Kyiv in 1995 and built on it to create KP Media, whose holdings included the weekly Korrespondent, korrespondent.net and bigmir.net; he sold the Kyiv Post in 2009 and his stake in KP Media in 2011. Since 2024 he has run the American Ukraine PAC in the United States, raising money for members of Congress who support Ukraine.Open the full entry; neither side disclosed the price, which Dragon Capital estimated at about $1.1 million. He said he had read the paper since its launch in 1995 and bought it for personal as well as business reasons; he later explained his motive in one word — “nostalgia” — saying he knew from day one it would not survive commercially and aimed only to break even. On acquiring it, he pledged to uphold its independent journalism standards and said he wanted readers to get “the correct picture of Ukraine, not a rosy one.”⁠[5][2][6][6][5][2]

Under his ownership, he added pages and improved print quality, invested in the website and tried to launch Russian- and Ukrainian-language versions (which did not work out), and removed the “massage” classified ads to make it a “family newspaper.”⁠[6][6]

In 2010–2011, Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash sued the Kyiv Post for libel in the United Kingdom; Zahoor paid $63,000 in pre-trial fees and hired a lawyer to defend it, and the London court dismissed the claim. In April 2011, after chief editor Brian Bonner ran an interview with the agriculture minister against his wishes, Zahoor fired him, saying “it is not his newspaper, in fact. It is my newspaper”; after the newsroom went on strike, he reinstated Bonner. In April 2013, he fired Bonner again over a financial dispute between Bonner and the CEO, changing his mind four months later.⁠[8][6][6][6][8][8]

In September 2013, businessman Sergei Kurchenko offered $3.5 million for the Kyiv Post. Zahoor said he would sell only to someone who would preserve the paper’s “soul,” that he did not trust oligarchs with ties to the government, and that selling to them “would have been a betrayal of the readers.” He also said the Ukrainian authorities had launched court cases against other parts of his business to get the paper to dial back its coverage, “which we did not.”⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

On March 21, 2018, Zahoor announced the sale of the Kyiv Post to Odesa businessman Adnan KivanAdnan KivanAdnan Kivan (1962–2024) was a Syrian-born Ukrainian businessman and the founder of the Odesa real estate developer Kadorr Group; in March 2018 he bought the English-language outlet Kyiv Post from Mohammad Zahoor, becoming its third owner, and held it until his death in October 2024.Open the full entry for “much higher than” $3.5 million. He said he had invested at least $5 million in the paper over nine years and had always cared about it “like a father”; he also said he had rejected bids from Firtash, Kurchenko and people he suspected of fronting for Petro Poroshenko, and would not sell to anyone who would destroy the paper or its editorial independence.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7]

As of March 2020, Zahoor was still seeking an investor for the Leipzig Hotel project, which he called the Renaissance Hotel; he had lost business assets in the Donbas after Russia’s 2014 invasion but still owned a profitable plastics manufacturer in Obukhiv and the Rialto Business Center in Kyiv, among other assets. He also ran Ukraine’s annual YUNA music awards.⁠[9][9][9][9]

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Zahoor’s family left Kyiv and stayed in London. In an interview in March 2022, he urged the world to take Ukraine’s side, argued that the EU, the United States and Britain had done far too little, and compared the war’s possible consequences for Russia to those of the 1979–1989 Soviet-Afghan war.⁠[1][1][1][1]