Posts Tagged ‘medvedev’
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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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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Lackluster Yaroslavl Speech May Serve as Omen
The Moscow Times
Based on Dmitry Medvedev’s previous speeches, few people expected any cogent policy statements from the president during his address on Thursday to the third annual Global Policy Forum in Yaroslavl. Medvedev did not disappoint these expectations — or rather, the lack of them. His speech, like his previous ones, largely consisted of generalities.
As a commentator for the Rosbalt news agency noted: “The inarticulate and vague speech the president gave is practically becoming his personal trademark.”
Political analyst Lilia Shevtsova wrote on her blog: “Every time Medvedev speaks in public, he only reinforces the impression of inadequacy. How many times can you say the same thing over and over again?”
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Russia Squanders Its Chance at Democracy
In late August, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev appointed Georgy Poltavchenko governor of St. Petersburg. Poltavchenko has served as presidential envoy to Russia’s central-administrative district since 2000. More importantly, he is a loyalist to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and a KGB veteran. He replaces Valentina Matviyenko, another Putin confidante, who has moved on to chair the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Parliament. Sergey Mironov, the former speaker of the Federation Council, is out. All this game of musical chairs has little to do with either President Medvedev or significant democratic developments. Rather, it demonstrates how Putin is rearranging his insiders.
Planned in secret as early as July, Poltavchenko’s appointment highlights the deep gap between democratic rhetoric and practice in today’s Russia. Analyzing the move, Nikolay Petrov, the Moscow Carnegie Endowment regional-politics expert, sounded baffled:
If United Russia were suffering from low ratings in St. Petersburg and the unpopular Matviyenko was dragging the party even further down, why replace her with a gray, low-profile presidential envoy who has about as much charisma as State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov? For all of her shortcomings—and there were many of them—Matviyenko at least was a colorful and charismatic politician.
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Remember Sergei Magnitsky
Who’s really running Russia? The smart money has been on Vladimir Putin, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky appears to underscore that conclusion. How the Magnitsky case is resolved will reveal the extent of Mr. Putin’s reach, even though Dmitry Medvedev serves as president.
Mr. Magnitsky was arrested by Russia’s Interior Ministry in 2008 shortly after he declared that he had evidence of police corruption and embezzlement at the ministry. The complaint said he had helped a client, American-owned investment firm Hermitage Capital, evade taxes. He died after 11 months in prison.
Now Russia has indicted two doctors for his death in a case that exudes the smell of a cover-up. It has strained U.S.-Russian relations and tested the relative powers of President Medvedev, an advocate of the rule of law, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
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Bill Browder: the man making Moscow squirm over the death of Sergei Magnitsky
Bill Browder is a man on a mission. “I want to change Russia and change human rights advocacy in Russia in a profound way,” the hedge fund millionaire says with almost messianic zeal, in his sparsely furnished offices in London’s Golden Square.
It is, safe to say, an unusual ambition for a successful financier with $1bn of assets under management. But Browder has had an unusual time of late.
Two years ago, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management discovered a new calling. The catalyst was the tragic death of a colleague, Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year-old tax lawyer and married father of two, at the hands of the Russian state. Until then, Browder’s activism had been limited to boardroom battles against corruption in Russia, where he had been the largest foreign portfolio investor with a track record for boosting shareholder returns by cleaning up companies.
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FEULNER: A malfunctioning ‘reset’
It has been two years now since President Obama heralded a new era in U.S.-Russian relations – a “reset,” as he put it. His plan was to “cooperate more effectively in areas of common interest.” He and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev were “committed to leaving behind the suspicion and the rivalry of the past.”
Fast-forward to the present. Have things improved? Considering that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently called the United States a “parasite” on the global economy, and the State Department has put 64 Russian officials on a visa blacklist, it’s fair to say: not much.
The latest round of trouble springs from the case of the late Sergei Magnitsky, whose name is probably unfamiliar to many Americans. A lawyer for one of the largest Western hedge funds in Russia, Magnitsky in 2008 accused Russian officials of swindling $230 million in tax rebates. Even in post-Cold War Russia, it was a bold move.
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Report on Lawyer’s Death Provides a Chance for Medvedev to Redeem Himself
Even by the dubious standards of the Russian system of justice, the Sergei Magnitsky case is an outrage. Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison in November 2009 after 11 months in custody. He was arrested by senior police officials who had fraudulently seized control of assets of the U.K.-based Hermitage investment fund and had thereby secured a $230 million tax refund – the largest in Russian history. Magnitsky, an attorney, was working on behalf of Hermitage to recover the assets. In an appalling reversal of fate, Magnitsky himself was accused of tax fraud.
On 5 July President Dmitry Medvedev heard a report from his Council on Civil Society and Human Rights. The report covered a broad range of topics, from terrorism in the North Caucasus to children’s rights. Buried in the middle of the report, which was orally presented to Medvedev by council members, were their findings on the Magnitsky case. Their material was explosive. Not only did they confirm that Magnitsky had been illegally detained and denied medical treatment, they also revealed that immediately before his death he had been beaten by eight guards in the medical facility to which he had been transferred – and where he had again been denied medical treatment. This final tragic detail had not previously been known. It is an almost unbelievably cruel footnote to an already horrific tale.
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