Sometimes things get done faster than fairy tales get told. Just yesterday I put up a post about the mysterious Sberbank loan to the Skolkovo business school. Right away, Yura Vasilyev scottishkot called me back and got a comment from me for Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty). Among other things, I said that there are no legal mechanisms left for putting further pressure on Sberbank, and that pressure should instead be applied to Skolkovo’s board of trustees: - From this point on, it will be quite difficult for me to demand that Sberbank disclose the terms of the loan, admits Alexei Navalny. But the Skolkovo business school has a board of trustees. There are quite a few well-known, honest, and decent people on that board—starting with Yegor Gaidar. Most likely, I will appeal to all members of the board as a Sberbank shareholder. And I will ask them to have the Skolkovo school—which everyone says is an honest and open project—voluntarily disclose the loan terms. So that the business school can show that it is itself prepared to operate under market conditions, rather than simply, forgive me, living off the money of Sberbank shareholders and the Russian federal budget... Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty), having taken an interest in the subject, did not wait for me to write to Gaidar and asked him directly for his position: **Mikhail Sokolov: **- You are a member of the board of trustees of the Skolkovo business school. Sberbank lent this institution nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, secured by land and the personal guarantees of Messrs. Vardanyan and Mikhelson. In your view, should the school in some way account for this money, make this project more open? Mr. Gref refused to tell us what kind of loan this is.
Yegor Gaidar: - Of course it should report on it. Of course it should disclose the money and all the information needed to understand how the loan will be repaid. The project itself, in my view, is sensible: from the standpoint of Russia’s development strategy, we really do need a world-class business school. It seems to me that the people working on this project generally understand how to make that happen. But of course, everything must be absolutely transparent and public. So at least one member of Skolkovo’s board of trustees has already come out in favor of disclosure. Also on the board of trustees (among the Russians) are: Vladimir Mau Gref (that one is self-explanatory) Andrei Fursenko Igor Shuvalov And—hard as it is to say—Dmitry Medvedev. And the beauty of it is that, besides these worthy comrades, the board also includes about a dozen prominent foreigners. The big question is whether these foreigners will want to cover for a strange loan while risking their reputations, or whether, like Gaidar, they will distance themselves from this story and demand disclosure. So the practical question of “what is to be done” is now clear: soon every member of the board of trustees of the Skolkovo business school will receive a very polite letter from a Sberbank shareholder calling on them to state their position on the issue and to raise, at the next trustees’ meeting, the question of disclosing information about the loan in the interests of transparency and openness. By the way, Konstantin Sonin sonin , a professor at NES (the New Economic School, one of Skolkovo’s future tenants), also told Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty) about his doubts regarding the loan’s “market-based” nature: *Konstantin Sonin is convinced that in the story of the Sberbank loan, Vardanyan chose a very Russian path: direct state financing. Both the size of the loan and other circumstances point to this: The role of the government is to set priorities on behalf of citizens and spend citizens’ money in accordance with those priorities. If we believe that it is now necessary to finance the development of business education (I myself do not believe this is necessary—it is more important to invest in the creation of modern research universities), then this should be done openly. As early as the fall of 2008, it seemed to me that the Skolkovo model did not take rapidly changing realities into account. That is why I call the Sberbank loan “hidden state aid”...* That’s that.