What striking (and, indeed, honest) quotes were given by steel oligarch Alexander Abramov. They appear in a Vedomosti article whose subheading is just as striking and honest: Raw materials are in Russia; high technology and exotic real estate are abroad. That is their investment strategy. The article is about Abramov investing $1 billion in foreign assets.
This is exactly what I mean in the discussion about the uselessness and harmfulness of Russia’s raw-materials oligarchs.
Here is how Abramov himself describes it:
Right: there were three huge Soviet steel plants and coal in the ground, they were “digitized,” and now the Wikipedia article on Evraz proudly says: an international vertically integrated steel and mining company headquartered in London.
With the money generated by factories and coal, Abramovich buys football clubs and castles in England, while Abramov invests in “a $400 million luxury resort project on an uninhabited island in the Turks and Caicos archipelago in the Caribbean, and in the construction of the most expensive residential complex in the Czech Republic — The Oaks, with 220 exclusive villas near Prague, costing €400 million. An Abramov-owned structure also invested in the most expensive estate on the coast of New Zealand, valued at $50 million, with vast pastures, a yacht pier, and villas considered luxurious by local standards.”
Absolutely шикардос (slang for “fancy as hell”), no question about it.
True, as they write, he also invested in Phystech (the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology). The article is unclear as to whether Abramov put 200 million rubles into the endowment, or whether the entire endowment is 200 million rubles, but in any case that is only about $3 million, so whatever Abramov’s share was, it is far less than the value of the New Zealand sheep wandering around his “most expensive estate” on those remarkable islands.
At the same time, Abramov is apparently one of the more decent members of the Russian oligarchic gang. He is interested not only in football but also in education — there is Phystech, for one, and I once saw him at Yale, where he serves on the international advisory board to the university president — I assume that cost him about thirty times more than Phystech.
But what do the rest of us get out of it? All we get are things like these forums about working at Evraz’s Nizhny Tagil plant, where people write about salaries of 25,000 rubles a month (roughly a few hundred U.S. dollars) and describe the enterprise as “if you want to see a model of an Indian factory from the era of British colonialism in action, welcome”._
So once again: Russia’s raw-materials oligarchs 1) are unnecessary, 2) are harmful, and 3) should pay a fair tax on their unimaginable resource-driven enrichment. Otherwise, as we can see, this windfall money burns such a hole in their pockets that they end up causing upheaval in real estate markets everywhere, all the way to New Zealand.
No need to jail them, shoot them, or torture them. Just make them pay taxes, the way it is done in every country. They will still be very rich people. Super-rich. But not as rich as they are now — this is madness. You do know that the average salary of a Russian citizen is now lower than that of a Chinese citizen, right? That is the flip side of this kind of wealth inequality.
By the way, I just remembered that I never posted here my latest interview with TV Rain (*Dozhd*, an independent Russian TV channel) on *Hard Day’s Night*. There, among the very fresh and original questions about the Russian March, “why haven’t you been jailed,” “why haven’t you been killed,” “why did you destroy the opposition,” and “who commissions your investigations,” there is also a short discussion of a compensatory tax on oligarchs starting at 55:30.
