Here's a quick line from an amusing Wall Street Journal piece about Alfa Bank's undiminished swagger amid the other fallen oligarchs:Mr. Fridman says Alfa works within the law and dismisses the criticism as "PR" by Alfa's rivals. The group's foreign partners, he says, might complain about its tactics, but they're happy with their investments.
Russian officials say Alfa doesn't get special treatment.
Riiiiight. All those other incidents in which it looked like Alfa and/or Mikhail Fridman were getting special favors from government were just routine actions and coincidences that seemed to always contribute to their favor.
"Moments like this one must simply conclude that corruption in Russia is largely a Western product. Nobody cares how the country works or how many rules their investment partners break, so long as it is robustly profitable. The second in which the business community demanded even the slightest accountability or rule of law, things would dramatically change."
Indeed, and this ain't news. Rewind back to 1993-1994, when the USG decided they preferred the crushing, then the circumvention of the the Duma, rather than submit the imposition of the "Washington consensus" to the judgement of the elected representatives of the Russian people. And the motivations of the Western investment community concerning Russia was clear even then:
"Based on discusions I had with US global investors durng the 1990s, I
think I am in a good position to point out why many of them preferred
to see major Russian companies pass into just a few corrupt hands. If
a few Russian insiders could buy out Russian oil fields and other
firms at only 1-2 cents on the dollar, they probably would be willing
to sell their takings to US and other international investors at 2-4
cents."
Michael Hudson, President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term
Economic Trends, writing in "The National Interest" Number 60, Summer
2000, pg 105, on one of the factors driving the USAID/HIID approach to
Russian privatization.
It's stuff like this that has convined me that Western intentions concerning Russia are anything but benign, and that the Russian government are well-advised to put us on "ignore"
Sometimes these comments look like they are meant for another story... What does the United States have to do with this crooked billionaire at Alfa bank and the bribery he carries out to get rich?