I don’t know. Please don’t call me some damned socialist, but I get seriously irritated when I read news like “a Russian oligarch has had a €400 million yacht built at a shipyard in Germany”.
It will be the largest sailing yacht in the world—bigger than the one that once carried our glamorous old rascal Peskov (Dmitry Peskov, a senior Kremlin official).
This marvel was paid for by Russian oligarch Andrey Melnichenko, who already owns the famous yacht “A”, worth $300 million. In other words, the guy has spent about a billion dollars on yachts.
I’ve got nothing against yachts, or billionaires on yachts. If Volozh had bought it—having made his money by creating something that did not exist in the USSR—then good for him. We got Yandex, the state got taxes, Volozh gets a yacht. Let him put a gold cap on his tooth with the letters y.a.n.d.e.x. on it and stand on deck in a white robe with a cigar, surrounded by models twerking. He’s earned that right.
Or Zimin, whom I wrote about in connection with the Dynasty Foundation. Beeline didn’t exist—he created it. A new service, new taxes, new jobs. Let him spend his money however he likes.
But Melnichenko—even if he may not be the worst kind of oligarch, not a political one like Abramovich or Usmanov—his business is essentially the same as that of most of this crowd: miners dig something out of the ground at a huge enterprise built in the USSR, and then that something is sold abroad. That’s all.
The money made from what is dug out of the ground goes to a German shipyard, so it can pay German workers excellent wages to launch a yacht with an English crew. Three times a year, our lord of the underground miners will fly there by private jet.
The billionaire’s main assets:
EuroChem — mineral fertilizers.
SUEK — coal.
All of them are old Soviet enterprises. To be fair, Melnichenko didn’t privatize them himself—he just bought them later for next to nothing.
If you go to Wikipedia to read about EuroChem, you’ll enjoy the phrase “Swiss chemical company.” Someone is mining apatite concentrate near Murmansk, but the company is Swiss, of course. The canton of Zug, as everyone knows, has wonderfully convenient tax laws.
By the way, someone sent me an interesting article. EuroChem employees were asked about Melnichenko’s yacht:
If anyone thought this post was about the conflicting class interests of workers and damned capitalists, it isn’t. This post is about the fact that our state is fundamentally broken. It cannot perform its most important function: competent taxation. It cannot properly distribute the wealth generated by Melnichenko’s entrepreneurial talents—assuming he has any—and by our shared natural resources dug out of the ground. It cannot grant freedom to trade unions, which secured decent working conditions at the German shipyard, while at the Murmansk mine there are no such unions and no decent working conditions. It cannot do anything at all.
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