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Medvedev Courts Davos Skeptics With Better-Than-China Pitch

Washington Post

Russia has a $10 billion sales pitch for investors at this year’s World Economic Forum: give us your money and we’ll worry about corruption for you.

That was the line from First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov in an interview with Bloomberg Television last week and that’s what Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will try to convince skeptical investors of tomorrow with his keynote address at the conference in Davos, Switzerland, the third by a Russian leader in five years.

Russia plans to raise a record $10 billion from asset sales this year as it seeks to stem capital flight and reverse the state’s creeping hold over the economy, Shuvalov said. The government failed to reach a similar goal last year, when it retained its ranking as the most corrupt country in the Group of 20, an organization it leads this year.

“Russia, regardless of what people are saying, is a place that people can invest, can earn,” Shuvalov said on a Jan. 18 train ride to Moscow from Kaluga, a region that has attracted investment from companies including Volkswagen AG and AstraZeneca Plc. “If you talk with investors, they say they invest maybe less than in China, but lose less than in China. They say people don’t know Russia.”

Putin Critique

Medvedev used his Davos speech in 2011 to highlight the “new opportunities” for foreigners “for doing business with success” in Russia. The message was more upbeat than the one then-premier Vladimir Putin delivered in 2009, in which he said the global crisis had shown the dangers of rampant greed in the U.S.-dominated global financial system.