Read this excellent article by Aleksashenko, who meticulously examines how Putin “fulfilled” the campaign promises he made in the Russian presidential candidate Vladimir Putin’s programmatic election article, “On Our Economic Tasks”:
Two years have passed since Vladimir Putin became Russia’s president for the third time. At that time (the first half of 2012), the Russian economy was growing by 4.6% year-on-year; today (based on first-quarter results), the growth rate is 0.8%. And most experts (including government ones) believe that the Russian economy is most likely headed for recession; there are about as many optimists “betting” on acceleration in the near future as there are people willing to bet on zero in roulette.
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Since October 2011, after Putin announced his impending return to the presidency, $200 billion in private capital has fled Russia, according to the Central Bank of Russia — 10% of Russia’s GDP.
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“I believe it is possible by 2016 to reduce the state’s stake in certain raw-materials companies and complete the process of withdrawing from the capital of large non-resource companies that are not natural monopolies and are not part of the defense sector,” Putin writes, and continues: “The presence of the largest enterprises and banks with dominant state ownership, as well as natural monopolies, including Gazprom, in the capital of other business entities should also be reduced <...> The acquisition of new assets in Russia by state-owned companies must be limited.”
I won’t talk about Rosneft’s takeover of TNK-BP — after all, in almost all developing countries, and even in developed Norway, hydrocarbon resources belong to state companies. I won’t even mention the fact that not a single state company has yet moved to reduce the government’s stake — after all, that was promised by 2016.
But what cannot go unmentioned is the reverse process: the continuing creeping nationalization. As early as spring 2012, immediately after candidate Putin’s election victory, VTB Bank took over Bank of Moscow. And in such a way that the state budget then had to urgently hand VTB more than 200 billion rubles. In 2013, the same bank bought the mobile operator Tele2 — the very company to which the state had for many years denied both a license to operate in the Moscow region and licenses to operate on 3G and 4G standards. Yet after the foreign investor was pushed out of the company, the granting of such licenses was promptly announced. In 2014, the same bank bought from the Moscow city government 100% of Russia’s largest greenhouse enterprise, OJSC Agrokombinat Yuzhny, and OJSC Hotel Company, which owns 12 two- to four-star hotels in Moscow. Rostec, the state corporation that, judging by its name, ought to be focused on cutting-edge technology and innovation, has moved into copper and rare-earth metals mining.
Full text here: http://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/news/26207871/dvojka-po-ekonomike