That’s what it’s called, right—when you buy for one ruble and sell for five? A 400% profit.
We used to think only drug trafficking could generate returns like that. But it turns out you can make that kind of money from Moscow’s New Year decorations.
Next time you’re walking through the city center, take a look at things like these:
Each one costs 475,000 rubles. In other words, the manufacturer sells them to anyone willing to buy at that price.
But the Moscow city government bought these things for 2,241,630 rubles apiece—4.71 times more.
Beautiful, isn’t it.
The city paid 143.4 million rubles for 64 of these glowing contraptions. Of that, 110 million was simply stolen by the wonderful urbanists Sergey Semyonovich Sobyanin and suppliers linked to Boris and Arkady Rotenberg.
In total, 7 (seven) billion rubles was spent on the “New Year illumination.” The suppliers of these “goblets” and everything else were the same.
If you extrapolate, then 5.6 billion out of those 7 billion was stolen.
I admit that straightforward extrapolation isn’t entirely fair in this case. Maybe somewhere they weren’t stealing 400 percent, but only 300.
But the scale of the scheme is clear.
You know, as far as I’m concerned, it would be better to have no illumination at all than to have it with the “side effect” of 5.6 billion rubles stolen. With that money, you could cover paid medical operations for everyone in the country who needs them for a year.
I’m sure most Muscovites would gladly settle for an ordinary Christmas tree with a red star on top for the sake of that. Like in most Russian cities.
Now I’m just curious: after figures like these, will the “Sobyanin bloggers” still dare to repeat their usual line, “sure, they steal a little, but look how beautiful everything has become,” and also, “at least they’re doing something, while all you do is criticize”?
Of course they’re working. Making a couple million on every lamppost.
Subscribe if, like me, you’re sick of this gang of thieves and want to drive them out:
PS Thanks to Meduza and Ivan Golunov for the excellent investigation. It’s Golunov’s birthday today as well—happy birthday!
PPS Of course, the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) will file a criminal complaint over the large-scale embezzlement of budget funds in the procurement of this “illumination.”