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One More Reason Not to Invest in Russia

The Moscow Times

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.