NEW YORK — In fall 2010, the Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner took the stage for a Q&A at a technology conference in San Francisco.
Milner, whose holdings have included major stakes in Facebook and Twitter, is known for expounding on everything from the future of social media to the frontiers of space travel.
But when someone asked a question that had swirled around his Silicon Valley ascent — who were his investors? — he did not answer, turning repeatedly to the moderator with a look of incomprehension.
Now, leaked documents examined by The New York Times offer a partial answer: Behind Milner’s investments in Facebook and Twitter were hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kremlin.
Obscured by a maze of offshore shell companies, the Twitter investment was backed by VTB, a Russian state-controlled bank often used for politically strategic deals.
And a big investor in Milner’s Facebook deal received financing from Gazprom Investholding, another government-controlled financial institution, according to the documents.
They include a cache of records from the Bermuda law firm Appleby that were obtained by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and reviewed by The Times in collaboration with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Ultimately, Milner’s companies came to own more than 8 percent of Facebook and 5 percent of Twitter, helping earn him a place on various lists of the world’s most powerful business people.
His companies sold those holdings several years ago, but he retains investments in several other large technology companies and continues to make new deals. Among Milner’s current investments is a real estate venture founded and partly owned by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites have become a major focus of federal investigations into Kremlin interference in the 2016 election.
Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators are examining how Russians linked to the Kremlin turned the sites into garden hoses of bogus news stories and divisive political ads, and whether they coordinated with the Trump campaign.
No one has suggested that Milner or his companies had any connection to the propaganda operation.Milner said in a pair of recent interviews that the Russian government money was no different from the financing he had received from his many other investors around the world.
There is nothing illegal about foreign state-owned institutions investing in US companies. VTB and Gazprom said the transactions were both sound investments, not motivated by politics.
Milner, 55, studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University before moving to the United States, where he attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s and then worked for the World Bank in Washington.
He returned to Russia, and eventually teamed with Alisher Usmanov — an Uzbek-Russian oligarch close to the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev — and a former Goldman Sachs executive to build a significant stake in Mail.ru, a Russian Internet company that now trades on the London Stock Exchange.
In May 2009, Facebook announced an investment of about $200 million by Milner’s company, Digital Sky Technologies, and said the company planned to spend at least $100 million buying additional stock. Eventually, Milner’s new venture capital firm, DST Global, also amassed a significant stake in Facebook.
The documents reviewed by The Times reveal that DST brought something else as well: a connection to the Kremlin.
