Tycoons and Oligarchs - Businessmen or Bastards ?

The dissolution of the USSR created some unprecedented opportunities to get rich quick, in the rush to introduce a free market economy and break up state assets. Has this been a success? Was Putin right to lean on them? Are the oligarch's businessmen or utter bastards ?

Quote :

Oil tycoon's parole bid rejected



Mikhail Khodorkovsky

22/08/2008 - 09:45:32
A Russian court today rejected jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky's request for parole. The judge said Khodorkovsky was ineligible for early release from a sentence for tax evasion and fraud because he had refused to undertake professional training at his prison, which specialises in sewing, and because of an incident in which he flouted prison rules.

Khodorkovsky reacted by shaking his head as the decision was announced in the courtroom in the Siberian city of Chita. Khodorkovsky - who headed the Yukos oil company and was once Russia's richest man - has spent almost five years in jail. He was sentenced in 2005 to an eight-year term and has been eligible for parole for the past 10 months.

Khodorkovsky's parole hearing was seen as a test of new President Dmitry Medvedev's commitment to reforming the judiciary. The prosecution of the oligarch was widely viewed as an attempt to silence a Kremlin opponent and consolidate control over Russia's strategic energy sector. The charges and subsequent demand for huge back taxes led to the effective renationalisation of Yukos, which was taken over by the state oil company Rosneft.

Khodorkovsky also faces new charges of embezzlement and money laundering, brought in June against both the former billionaire and his business associate Platon Lebedev.

I was going to open a thread this morning asking if there was enough wealth in the world, wondering if it was distributed unevenly.

It is and by the likes of people like this. At this scale they are a hair's breadth away from treason if they are evading tax in any way. We saw from Stiglitz IMF critique of Russia that robbing at this scale was in a roundabout way sanctioned by IMF misaction.

Show these bastards no quarter I say - this is why the gallows was invented - someone else will do the business properly if it's there to be done and it is - Russia is natural-resource rich and given that NASA were forced to buy space-toilet tech from them not so long ago, it could be that they are very rich in brains too, which is a double shame if their country is not allowed to prosper around them.

The last thing we need now is a Fianna Fáil running Russia too.

In 2008 he was the 94th richest man in the world with more than 9 billion, but this man was caught in the VW share price debacle and has ended it all. Someone should have told him it was only money.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7814257.stm

cactus flower wrote:

Are the oligarch's businessmen or utter bastards ?

Is there a difference?

Too good for him, he must have bet on VW dropping and Porsche dropped him instead. What a great story of market trading that short squeeze was.