What wonderful fresh news we’re getting about the progress of turning Moscow into an international financial center.
Remember that little hobby Medvedev had, the one he announced at the APEC summit? We’ll change the rules, create the right conditions, improve the legislation—and investors will come running. Moscow would turn into London or Hong Kong, maybe even something better.
Let me remind you of the timeline:
2009: A financial center in Russia could be created in 5 years.
2011: Proposals for creating the IFC will be ready in 3–4 months
2011: Moscow could enter the top twenty largest international financial centers within five years
And so those very five years have passed. Even six. Even seven. So where are our investors? Where is the wonderful new legislation? Where is London, plaintively begging for just one glimpse of the amazing financial tycoons holding court in Moscow?
So the only successful project within the whole IFC effort turned out to be buying an upscale plot of land from Sberbank in Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye and slapping on, in addition to Moscow City—that urban monstrosity with its endless traffic jams—another 4.1 million square meters of luxury housing and office space.
There are no investors anywhere in sight, yet they’re rushing to build premises for them.
A truly marvelous “International” “Financial” “Center.”
We should go to their website and see—maybe that’s exactly what they declared there: we’re crooks, and our goal is to grab land and make money by building another batch of ugly offices in the most beautiful part of the Moscow suburbs? Maybe that’s what an IFC is?
So, based on the declarations made back in 2008, one can confidently say: the IFC project had already completely failed by 2013, before any war and before Crimea (the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea). And now, in 2015, after seven years, one can just as confidently demand a public flogging for all these idiots who strung us along and have now decided to simply cash in on construction.
It is important to remember: the current authorities had, and still have, absolutely everything needed to carry out their plans. A fully controlled parliament ready to pass any laws instantly. A sea of money (especially from 2009 to 2014). Control of the government. Public support. Jubilant businessmen. Key European countries willing to help the project.
But in the end, they are once again shoving luxury housing and office space down our throats under the guise of a “high-tech financial market.”
This is in response to all that talk about how “the opposition criticizes the authorities, but criticizing is easy and doing is hard.” That’s exactly the problem: they do nothing. At all. They neither know how nor want to. Their only thought is how to use any project—from nanotechnology to the IFC, from Skolkovo to Moscow State University projects—to get hold of land and start building their favorite “luxury housing.”