I think I’ll write an angry post about my former Yabloko colleagues (members of the liberal Yabloko party), now entrenched in the Federal Antimonopoly Service. They’re good people, really. I’m on friendly terms with many of them. The agency is headed by Artemyev, a fellow “Yabloko man.” He brought in a whole bunch of my former party comrades. All in all, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that almost every more-or-less competent “Yabloko” member ended up employed at the FAS. I know very well that there are qualified specialists there, people capable of seriously shaking down all sorts of crooks. The problem is that those crooks are the employers and bosses of those qualified specialists. So our honest antitrust officials contort themselves exposing petty wrongdoing while somehow “failing to notice” the big stuff. All you hear about are these shocking, earth-shattering investigations: *- FAS uncovered price-fixing in the parking lot at Domodedovo Airport (Moscow); FAS stopped villains from using Olympic symbols (thank God, we were getting worried there); FAS was not afraid of a mighty confectionery factory; FAS is monitoring pharmacy chains; FAS prevented a homeless guy, Petrovich, from creating a cigarette cartel selling single cigarettes outside Novokuznetskaya metro station in Moscow; * and other matters of enormous importance. And yet one small, modest company, Gunvor, somehow keeps slipping past the vigilant eye of the antitrust watchdogs. But why pay attention to it? It’s not some candy factory — it’s the world’s third-largest oil trader. It merely exports most of the oil from four of Russia’s five largest producing companies, under terms no one can quite make sense of. Is there really any threat to competition here? Any signs of monopoly or market dominance? Of course not. How can anyone waste time on such nonsense when "Evalar CJSC advertises the dietary supplement Transit as a medicinal product" ! And in the newspaper Metro, no less!!!! Emergency! Send a team out immediately! I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get the Russian FAS to examine Gunvor’s activities. Both directly and through the prosecutor’s office. I’m not asking for Gunvor employees to be arrested / shot / thrown in prison. I just want the FAS, in the course of doing its actual job, to check the company’s market share and determine whether this VERY large and influential company ought to be playing by the special rules meant for VERY large companies. But the FAS is panic-stricken at the very thought of going near Gunvor’s “effective managers” (a sarcastic Russian expression for supposedly efficient executives). The other day they sent me yet another letter:
Translated from bureaucratic birdsong, this means: we’ll dodge it every way we can, make up all sorts of nonsense, but we will not request any information on Gunvor, because we’ll get our wrists slapped and lose our official cars. At least the reply was signed by Golomolzin (one of the pre-Yabloko old guard), and not by someone I know personally. A disgrace. Shame on you, dear FAS officials. You could at least have put on the appearance of an investigation, and then said the mice ate the documents.