This doesn’t even seem like the most outrageous story. Another old friend of Putin’s and a friend of Sobyanin’s turned out to be dollar multimillionaires.
True, Volkov, who knows the business circles of the Urals and Tyumen well, writes here that the “friend of Sobyanin” is simply his money man, much like Roldugin is for Putin.
Let’s set that aside for now and look at the main version:
Why do I say this story is not the most outrageous? Because this oil refinery was actually built.
The Antipinsky Oil Refinery didn’t exist before, and now it does—it stands where there used to be nothing but an empty field.
A case almost unique for Russia, where nearly all fortunes came from privatizing, stealing, or seizing what had been built in Soviet times.
Excellent, very good. You could say that this Mazurov is exactly the kind of businessman the country needs. Jobs, wages, taxes, profits, deep processing of raw materials.
The only problem is that 45% of this wonderful new plant belongs to guys responsible either for “stability” or for “connections with the authorities.”
That’s not quite how it appears in textbooks, is it?
Let’s recall the political economy course. Factors of production: land, labor, capital, entrepreneurial ability, and information.
Russian political economy looks different. The following resources are necessary to produce goods and services: 1) your willingness to hand over 45% of your future business to the president’s and governor’s friends, and 2) they will make sure the state does not interfere with your use of land, labor, capital, information, and your own entrepreneurial abilities.
So even a successful business story leads to depressing thoughts.
And if we do not dismiss Volkov’s version (see above) and recall our 2013 investigation, when we were the first to establish a documentary link between Sobyanin’s daughter and Vyacheslav Kalashnikov—the son of Kalashnikov from the Antipinsky Oil Refinery—then it all becomes downright bleak.
It is no surprise that business does not develop in Russia. The need to hand over 45% of what you built to the “senior people” somehow isn’t very motivating.