IT company ABBYY has simultaneously laid off more than a hundred employees with Russian citizenship in a number of regional European offices. This was reported by Russian media and Telegram channels, according to Komersant ukrainskyi
According to numerous reports, Russians in the company’s offices in Hungary, Serbia, and Cyprus were immediately laid off. Moreover, the process was quite brutal, in the typical Russian style.
“During the meeting, everyone was banned from chatting and video and microphones were turned off. They said that everyone was fired and that they would receive a letter in the mail. Immediately after the meeting, corporate access was cut off everywhere. They fired everyone with a Russian passport,”
Additional evidence of the mass dismissal of Russians is the large number of their job applications that simultaneously appeared on LinkedIn.
ABBYY is one of the world’s leading digital document processing companies. It was founded in 1989 by David Yang, a student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Back in 2011, the Russian state foundation Skolkovo gave the company a grant of 450 million rubles (about $15 million). However, after the full-scale Russian invasion, the company announced its withdrawal from Russia and Belarus, which, however, extended at least until 2023.