State-Run Shakedown
Alex Shifrin thought he found a surefire way to profit from Moscow’s new consumers with an old Russian tradition: soup. Russians can’t get enough of the stuff, slurping down an incredible 32 billion bowls each year. But with the city’s emerging middle class increasingly adopting Westernized, on-the-go lifestyles, soup fans have less time to boil it for themselves. Shifrin, an advertising executive, and three partners smelled an opportunity. Why not cook it for them? They pooled their personal savings and in April 2010 launched Soupchik, a chain of takeaway outlets serving up borscht, chicken noodle and other local favorites to upwardly mobile Muscovites.
The investors, however, learned that nothing in Russia is a sure thing, thanks to the unpredictable and predatory government. A steady stream of corrupt tax officials, police officers and other security agents began harassing them for payoffs. Within weeks of Soupchik’s opening, two tax inspectors claimed the start-up was violating an obscure retailing regulation. Shifrin protested, and amid the negotiations, a tax administrator suggested that some $1,000 in cash would resolve the matter. (Shifrin refused to ante up, and the tax office eventually dropped its case.)
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One More Reason Not to Invest in Russia
In the 1990s, Anatoly Chubais was guilty for all the country’s economic woes, as the popular phrase goes. Now Regional Development Minister Viktor Basargin has found a new source of Russia’s economic problems — foreign investors.
At the Baikal International Economic Forum on Monday in Irkutsk, Basargin criticized foreign investors, calling them “vacuum cleaners” that “suck up Russia’s natural resources and export them out of the country.”
“Vacuum cleaners” is nothing compared with what Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was called. Although Hermitage was the largest portfolio investor in Russia in the mid-2000s — with more than $4 billion in investments in the country — the Russian government labeled him “a threat to national security” in 2006 and denied him entry into the country. Browder was blacklisted after he spent years fighting against corruption and abuse of shareholder rights in Gazprom and other large companies that Hermitage invested in.
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Cameron justifies Moscow visit to parliament
British Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament on Wednesday that he had raised a number of human-rights issues with the Russian authorities during his recent visit to Moscow.
Cameron met with President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minster Vladimir Putin during his brief visit to the Russian capital. He also met a number of human-rights activists.
He was accused during a news conference with Medvedev of “parking” the issue of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer killed in London in 2006, in exchange for trade relations. Cameron denied the allegation, saying the issue remained “important” for Britain.
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For U.S. And Russia, Distrust Still Runs High
NPR
President Obama’s policy of engagement with Russia has paid off in several concrete achievements, including a nuclear arms control agreement and greater cooperation on Iran and Afghanistan.
But both supporters and critics of the so-called reset policy worry that further victories will be harder to win. Both nations are distracted by presidential politics, preventing policymakers from talking seriously about matters such as missile defense.
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Lebedev targets Russian secret police for damages
Russia’s secret police have long been immune to the law that they supposedly uphold, a state within a state that acts with virtual impunity in the tradition of its KGB forebears. But now, a disgruntled banker has decided to test just how aloof they are from the law, with a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in a Moscow court.
Alexander Lebedev, the billionaire owner of The Independent and Evening Standard newspapers in London, launched the lawsuit claiming damages of 350m roubles ($11.6m) to his business reputation following a raid by masked special forces on his National Reserve Bank in November.
The lawsuit is the first of its kind in Russia to target the FSB, according to Mr Lebedev. “It’s the first time to my knowledge that any one has tried this,” he said.
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The Murky World Of Russian Business Deals
No-one knows the challenges of operating a business in Russia better than Bob Dudley – the CEO of BP who is travelling there alongside David Cameron.
Mr Dudley was kicked out of the country in 2008 after claiming he had been harassed by the Russian government. BP say their Moscow offices were raided illegally only last week.
In his speech at Moscow University, David Cameron said British companies “need to have faith that the State, the judiciary and the police will protect their hard work and not put the obstacles of bureaucracy, regulation and corruption in their way”.
Corruption is endemic in Russian business – so says Bill Browder, of London-based Hermitage Capital.
He says his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died an agonising death in a Moscow jail at the hands of the people who arrested him after he uncovered a state-committed fraud worth millions of pounds.
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David Cameron’s trip to Russia: the message Moscow needs to hear
In his mission to rescue Anglo-Russian relations, David Cameron must insist on a radical clean-up in its economy, says Tony Brenton, Britain’s former ambassador.
David Cameron today visits Moscow. This is not a routine item in his diary. No British prime minister has made a bilateral visit to Russia since 2005, and no Russian president has travelled to London since 2006. This has been an extraordinarily long gap in formal encounters between the leaders of two such significant countries.
The hiatus goes back to late 2006 and the murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko. Russia refused to answer questions about apparent links of the FSB (Russia’s security agency) to the affair, or to extradite the suspected murderer. Relations accordingly went into the deep freeze. We shut off contacts with the FSB and expelled a number of Russian diplomats. The Russians retaliated with their own expulsions and put brutal pressure on our cultural arm, the British Council (in an act described by one observer as “like hitting a librarian”).
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David Cameron is ‘ignoring Russian crime problems’, according to leading investor
David Cameron is turning a blind eye to ‘spectacular criminality’ to avoid disrupting his Moscow trade mission, a leading investor claims.
Hermitage Capital boss Bill Browder, formerly the biggest investor in Russia, believes the Prime Minister is ‘afraid’ to address serious crimes against British firms, including the killing of Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
The broadside came as documents seen by the Daily Mail revealed that officials complicit in Magnitsky’s death have been flying in and out of Britain with impunity.
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Bill Browder: ‘It’s insane to do business in Russia’
Russia is a “terrible, terrible place to do business”, according to Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital, once the country’s largest portfolio investor.
He was speaking as the British prime minister met Russian leaders in an effort to improve relations.
Much of Mr Browder’s concern relates to lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was imprisoned as a healthy man without trial in November 2008, then died in jail a year later, aged 37.
A report by President Dmitry Medvedev’s human rights council concluded that there was reasonable suspicion that Mr Magnitsky’s death was triggered by beatings while in police custody.
Mr Magnitsky had claimed to have unearthed evidence that implicated the police, officials and bankers in a massive fraud, which used Hermitage as a vehicle.
In July Russian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation into his death. микрозаймы онлайн займы на карту без отказа https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php займ на карту срочно без отказа
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
