All methods are allowed as soon as the authorities in Russia decide to seize some appetizing business. Whoever resists is simply destroyed - they can make him a pedophile or send him to a psychiatric hospital. There are many cruel examples.
After the nationalization of the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Combine, its general director Pavel Khodorkovsky was detained on suspicion of pedophilia. The coincidence of the nationalization of the enterprise and the arrest of its general director is hardly accidental. And this is by no means the first such example.
Previously, there were rumors about managers who led a holding for the production of alcohol in Russia, who were forcibly placed in a psychiatric clinic. In the detention center, they all apparently went crazy quite suddenly... And after the forced hospitalization case, the assets of the entire holding were seized.
What kind of methods does the Russian government use, which is trying to massively lay hands on private business, presenting the theft as nationalization?
From Khodorkovsky to Khodorkovsky
20 years ago in Russia, the so-called case “YUKOS“. The heads of the oil company Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the already forgotten Platon Lebedev were arrested, and after them – and a huge number of their associates. The court cases went on for several years, the Russian authorities invented charges – some more ridiculous than others. They tried to prove that the owners of Yukos deprived the state budget of tax revenues greater than the company's income.
Still, however fabricated, the accusations at the time were at least formally related to the oil company's business. And the accusations of waste and fraud against the managers were aimed at demonstrating the legality of the state's actions. But those times have clearly passed: the state no longer has to observe anything, let alone demonstrate legality.
Companies are taken over with one signature, the courts have finally become a formality, and even if it is about billions of rubles and the largest non-state companies in Russia, everything is decided in a few days, a week at most. Those who resist are simply destroyed. Of course, for now they are not shot on the spot “according to wartime laws”. But they are not given the opportunity to protect the property for years, as the Yukos legal department did long after the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Today, every available compromising material is used against these people. For example, accusations of pedophilia, as in the case of the director of the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Combine, Pavel Khodorkovsky. They take it away when they are ordered to close it under any pretext. Or as in the case of managers – even though they haven't committed any crimes, they can be sent to psychiatry directly from the pretrial detention center, where they may have refused to sign the documents required by the authorities. Then the company can be “nationalized”.
Take and rule
Vladimir Putin personally, and the Russian authorities in general do not hide that this is not a legal process. Hiding behind the illegal privatization of the 1990s, the authorities effectively seized the companies that emerged later. And the close businessmen are promised indulgences – that the confiscation will not affect them.
This is not a handover to the state of companies seized under the pretext of national security. The authorities promise redistribution of their property in the nearest future. There are not too many doubts that it will fall into the hands of Putin's cronies, as happened with the plants of foreign companies such as “Danone” or “Siemens”. At the same time, the value and quantity of the companies that fell into the state continue to grow and have already exceeded one trillion rubles.
This year alone, the Russian Ministry of Finance expects to receive over 100 billion rubles from the sale of confiscated property. As it will most likely be sold much cheaper than its cost price – virtually worthless to people close to the Kremlin. Doesn't this remind you of anything?
Privatization 2.0
Putin and his entourage - former participants in the privatization of the 1990s, who then did not have the resources to tear off a thicker piece of the pie of the almost free state property, now actually want not a restoration of justice, but a revenge. And they are no longer ashamed to use any means and methods for their goals. They have the best Soviet models used at the time against dissidents, including forced psychiatry.
Similar to the universal consumer from the story of the Strugatsi brothers “Monday begins on Saturday” Russian power attracts like a magnet all the values it can get its hands on, so that it can then distort space and stop the flow of time. This is what nationalization looks like today, or rather privatization 2.0 in the style of the 1990s.
This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and of DV as a whole.