Just an absolutely divine quote from Shuvalov at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club:
Agreed. It’s outrageous, really—to exaggerate the issue of corruption to such an extent.
Official Shuvalov is driving along in his Rolls-Royce Phantom, and the radio is talking about corruption. Shuvalov arrives at the airfield and boards his $50 million private jet—and behind his back, someone is murmuring about corruption.
Shuvalov flies to London and steps into his apartment in the city center worth 680 million rubles (about $11 million at the time)—and the butler is whispering with the other servants about corruption. Then he goes to meet Abramovich and Usmanov, Britain-based Russian tycoons, to receive a $100 million bribe from them—and the waiter in the restaurant is muttering about corruption.
He returns to Moscow and drops in to see how renovations are going in the “tsar apartment” worth 600 million rubles (about $10 million at the time)—and the workers exchange glances, clearly thinking about corruption.
What can you do, huh?
It’s terrible: civil servant Igor Ivanovich Shuvalov has grown very tired of this corruption topic; the attention paid to it is simply excessive.