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Economist Sergei Guriev Leaves Russia Abruptly

May 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The economist, Sergei Guriev, who wielded significant influence under the presidency of Dmitri A. Medvedev, has been questioned repeatedly in a case that stems from a report of which he was a co-author that criticized the treatment of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned oil tycoon.

Mr. Guriev’s flight comes amid investigations that focus on Moscow insiders who, investigators believe, have offered support to the opposition movement.

Behind their suspicions lies an uncomfortable truth: Among the businessmen and technocrats who make up Moscow’s ruling class are many who hold relatively liberal views, and who are uncomfortable with the repressive, conservative course Vladimir V. Putin has set since his return to the presidency. But they have felt safe, for the most part, until now.

“This means that no one has immunity,” said Aleksei V. Makarkin, an analyst at Moscow’s Center for Political Technologies. “If any representative of the elite enters into a relationship with the opposition, he takes a great risk.”

Mr. Guriev would not comment on his decision, and he has said he is vacationing with his wife and children in France. But a friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Guriev left Russia abruptly because “had reason to believe he could be deprived of his freedom.”

Investigations have begun to scrutinize government insiders, including officials who fell into Mr. Medvedev’s liberal-leaning camp. Notably, investigators opened a criminal case against a top official at the Skolkovo Foundation, the state-financed innovation hub that was Mr. Medvedev’s trademark project, claiming the payment of hefty speaker’s fees to the opposition leader Ilya V. Ponomarev.

One of the few political heavyweights affiliated with Mr. Medvedev, the deputy prime minister Vladislav Y. Surkov, resigned after publicly criticizing the investigation, amid reports he was forced out. Officials, speaking anonymously, told journalists that Mr. Surkov — who once called the anti-Putin protesters “the best part of our society” — was himself funneling money to opposition groups.

Mr. Guriev, the rector of the New Economic School, seemed untouchable until recently. He wrote speeches for Mr. Medvedev, sat on numerous advisory bodies and served on the boards of state companies. When President Obama visited Moscow in 2009, he chose Mr. Guriev’s university as the site for a speech.

A centrist figure, on good terms with most of Moscow’s power brokers, Mr. Guriev took the unusual step last May of contributing 10,000 rubles, or around $320, to a fund supporting the anticorruption efforts of Aleksei A. Navalny, an opposition leader.

In an essay about the decision, he said he did it because he believes Russia needs more political competition.

“Am I not afraid?” he wrote “No. I am a free person. I know that as long as I haven’t violated the law, no one can forbid me to say something or do something. Might I be misled? Of course.”

Since then, Mr. Guriev has been questioned repeatedly in a case stemming from the 2011 report on Mr. Khodorkovsky’s case. Investigators have scrutinized several experts, contending they had received money a decade ago from a fund linked to Yukos, Mr. Khodorkovsky’s company.

Mr. Guriev’s friend, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to comment on the case, said that after the most recent round of questioning, Mr. Guriev “asked a number of influential people in Moscow who normally would protect him, and he was given advice that he was not safe.” The friend added, “He left in a hurry, we’re talking about a few days.”

Another friend and colleague, the Pennsylvania State University economist Barry W. Ickes, cast Mr. Guriev’s decision as the result of a long deliberation. “It came to a point where he had to make a decision, because he was in limbo,” he said.

Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, said that as far as he knew, Mr. Guriev had simply left Russia on vacation, and that he could not comment on the investigation. “This is not our question. This has nothing to do with the Kremlin, nothing to do with the president,” he said. “The only thing I can tell you is that this is pure speculation.”

Commenting on Mr. Guriev’s case on Wednesday, the pro-Kremlin analyst Sergei A. Markov wrote that institutions like Skolkovo and the New Economic School had been used to funnel funds to demonstrators.

“The sudden departure of Guriev is connected to the attempt to keep out of the hands of investigators these secret channels, through which oligarchic and federal budgetary funds went to support the revolutionary anti-Putin opposition,” Mr. Markov said. “The goal was, of course, not direct revolution, but for Putin to give up his intentions to return for a third term.”

Andrew Roth contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/world/europe/economist-sergei-guriev-leaves-russia-abruptly.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Trial of Putin Nemesis Is Delayed for a Week

April 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

More than 100 journalists massed here in Kirov, about 560 miles northeast of Moscow, many traveling with Mr. Navalny and his supporters overnight for more than 12 hours by train. But the court proceedings they had come to watch were finished in just about an hour as the judge, Sergei V. Blinov, granted a one-week adjournment to give Mr. Navalny’s lawyers more time to prepare their defense.

His lawyers had requested a monthlong postponement, and also urged that the trial be held in Moscow, where Mr. Navalny lives.

A lawyer for Mr. Navalny, Olga Mikhailova, said the postponement would allow time for a regional court to issue a ruling, expected early next week, on a complaint by Mr. Navalny that the authorities had mishandled his case.

Mr. Navalny rose to fame by crusading against official corruption with tart-tongued blog posts and a flair for turning phrases. By far the most memorable of these was his branding of United Russia, the party that nominated Vladimir V. Putin for president, as the “party of swindlers and thieves” — an expression now so permanently fixed in the Russian political lexicon that it appears among the top results of a Google search for the party’s real name.

Mr. Navalny, 36, is charged with embezzling $500,000 from a state-controlled timber company here while working as an adviser to the regional governor in 2009.

Prosecutors had scrutinized the case and previously dismissed it, but federal officials revived it after Mr. Navalny became the most prominent leader of the huge street protests in Moscow that followed Russia’s disputed parliamentary elections in December 2011.

Although others who have challenged Mr. Putin have faced prosecution, most notably the Yukos oil tycoon, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, who remains in prison, the case against Mr. Navalny is the first in post-Soviet Russia against such a high-profile political leader.

Emerging from the courtroom after the brief proceedings, Mr. Navalny repeated his claims of innocence. Having made a trademark of publishing documentary evidence of official corruption on the Internet, he noted that he had similarly posted all of the documentary materials related to his case, which he said proved the embezzlement charges baseless.

“I am not going to say banal, routine phrases that the case is fabricated, falsified and I am fully innocent,” Mr. Navalny said. “Since I posted all the material of the case, any person, even without a judicial education, can be sure of it.” He added, “I am sure that in the course of the hearings my innocence will be fully proved.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/world/europe/trial-of-putin-nemesis-is-delayed-for-a-week.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Russian Tycoons Find Tougher Times as Money Flees

December 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

NIKOLAI MAKSIMOV, one of the richest men in Russia, was sitting in a grimy jail cell in the Ural Mountains.

Through the murk, Mr. Maksimov saw his cellmate — a man, he says, who appeared ill with tuberculosis, a scourge in Russian prisons. “I had the feeling that I was put in this cell on purpose,” Mr. Maksimov, now free on bail, recalled recently.

Mr. Maksimov, who was arrested in February on suspicion of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, is hardly the only Russian tycoon who has run into trouble. Among the six men who have topped the Forbes rich list here in the last decade, one, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, is in prison, and another, Boris A. Berezovsky, is in exile. They, like Mr. Maksimov, maintain their innocence.

Even before the authorities here acted last week to quash protests against the government and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s rich were growing agitated, too. Evidence is mounting that conditions are deteriorating for the maintenance and investment of their vast wealth — and while this development may gladden populists, it may become an economic threat.

Post-Soviet privatizations shifted state-owned factories into the hands of a coterie of well-connected businessmen — the oligarchs. Partly as a result, Russia has 101 billionaires, behind only China, with 115, and the United States, with 412, according to Forbes.

Only now, capital flight, a problem in the 1990s, has re-emerged. Money is flowing out of Russia faster than it is flowing in. The net outflow is expected to reach $70 billion by year-end, and the figures suggest that the bulk of that will be from large investors.

Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist for Deutsche Bank here, notes that “the scale of capital flight has more than compensated for the rise of oil prices.”

Even if oil output is maintained and crude prices stay relatively high, according to Russian finance ministry estimates, the nation’s current account will slip into deficit by 2014. Then Russia’s economy, like that of the United States, will depend on an inflow of investment, economists say.

The Russian government has recently made modest gains in attracting foreign investment. The problem is that for every foreign company that invests — from Exxon on the Russian Arctic Shelf to Cisco Systems in a high-technology park going up outside Moscow — far more Russian entrepreneurs head for the exits, gauging the risks too great.

Officials understand that oil can take Russia only so far and are eager to lure investment from all quarters. “The amazing thing is that they are doing far better with the foreign investors than the locals,” says Clemens Grafe, chief economist at Goldman Sachs here.

It’s hard to know how big a role cases like Mr. Maksimov’s have played. Mr. Maksimov, 54, is withering in his criticism of the authorities. The suggestion is that his business enemies enlisted the police to try to persuade him to resolve a dispute.

“I was on the Forbes list; now I’m going to jail,” he says. “It’s normal. It’s Russia.”

His troubles began three years ago, when he sued Vladimir S. Lisin, another steel tycoon, touching off the dispute that eventually led to Mr. Maksimov’s arrest.

The two had made a deal, which quickly soured, for Mr. Lisin to buy 50 percent plus one share of Mr. Maksimov’s company, the Maxi Group. Maxi was estimated at the time to be worth $1.2 billion after debts. Mr. Lisin’s company, Novolipetsk, paid Mr. Maksimov an advance of $317 million. It was to pay the remainder after an outside auditor estimated the extent of the company’s debt, within 90 days.

Executives of Novolipetsk declined to pay. In an interview at its headquarters here, lawyers for Novolipetsk accused Mr. Maksimov of transferring large sums out of the Maxi Group to the bank account of his girlfriend. He denied the accusation, saying he had been buying out shares that his girlfriend, who was also a business partner, owned in business subsidiaries.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=985d3b9a39dc500f5b4f4c396ee95cd7

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