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Bloomberg: IT Companies Are Fleeing Belarus

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Bloomberg: IT Companies Are Fleeing Belarus

The main direction is Ukraine.

An extremely strange thing has happened in Minsk over the past decade: despite Lukashenka's authoritarian rule, Belarusian tech companies have flourished. An educated workforce, combined with the lowest labor cost in Europe, has enabled game developers and outsourcing firms to win over customers around the world.

But, according to Kiryl Holub, co-founder of the Angels Band investment club, now this success is under threat, writes Bloomberg (translated by unian.net).

Following the dubious presidential election, Belarusian police turned off the country's internet for three days and violently attacked protesters. Searches were carried out in the offices of Yandex and PandaDos. Holub, 41, was also arrested near his home in the suburbs of Minsk.

"If Lukashenka retains power, the IT sector will be killed and buried," he said. Holub was released from prison three days after his arrest.

As Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime cracks down on opposition leaders and turns to Vladimir Putin for help in the fight against protesters, an increasing number of technical workers are fleeing from Belarus abroad. Ukraine, according to Holub, is the main direction. If such an outflow is sustained, it will undermine Lukashenka's attempts to portray himself as "the defender of the economy."

The Belarusian IT sector developed against the backdrop of a downturn in the economy dominated by state-owned agricultural enterprises and heavy industry plants inherited from the USSR. IT accounts for approximately 6.5% of Belarus' GDP. Last year, the industry was responsible for economic growth," said former Economy Minister Dzmitry Kruty, who is now Lukashenka's deputy chief of staff.

Belarusian Hi-Tech Park, located on Minsk's eastern outskirts, has grown and now numbers almost 700 companies. It was opened 15 years ago. Approximately 60 thousand people work there, earning $ 2 billion annually from the export of their services and products. Most of the workers are relatively young people who have traveled extensively and earn four times the average salary in Belarus. These are mobile people.

Several dozen employees of companies from the park staged a protest on Friday evening, but the police dispersed them. Pavel Liber, previously apolitical top manager of the Belarusian branch of EPAM, moved to Ukraine.

Before that, he helped develop a program independently of his company that exposed election fraud.

"At first, the authorities did not take us seriously. But with the growing number of users of the application, at the end of July, my team of 40 people was forced to leave Belarus for security reasons," Liber said, speaking to Bloomberg reporters by phone from Kyiv.

Tech companies quickly came out against violent police responses to protests that erupted after Lukashenka's "victory" in the rigged elections on August 9. A few days later, the companies' executive directors, which employ about 20,000 people, signed an open letter. In it, they warned that because of the brutal reprisals against protesters, IT specialists could leave the country.

Among the signatories were the founder and CEO of EPAM Systems Arkadz Dobkin, the developer of the World of Tanks game Viktar Kisly, as well as the investor Yury Hurski, who sold the Belarusian Facebook and Alphabet apps.

EPAM is the largest IT company in Belarus. It can move a limited number of employees to other countries but does not plan a large-scale move. This was reported by the press service of the company. Russian Yandex evacuated some workers from Minsk, as reported by The Bell, citing sources. The trend could grow.

The Flo app developer, which employs 200 people in Belarus, is considering moving to Lithuania, Poland, or the UK. Yury Hurski told the publication about this.

"Nobody wants to live in North Korea in the middle of Europe. (...) There are no borders for IT engineers. They can find work anywhere," said Mikita Mikado, head of PandaDoc, who is going to transport 250 programmers from Belarus if the situation worsens.

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