Igor Putin, a cousin of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, is apparently in extremely high demand among employers: in late September he took a job at Master Bank, and by early December he had radically changed fields, becoming head of Surguttruboprovodstroy LLC (STPS). The company, which specializes in pipeline construction, is closely tied to Stroytransgaz OJSC, controlled by Vladimir Putin’s longtime associate Gennady Timchenko, and works with Arkady Rotenberg’s Stroygazmontazh LLC, another longtime friend of the prime minister. ////////// So there you have it—and you ask why pipelines in Russia cost three times as much as they do in the rest of the world. Overhead for entertaining VIPs is very high.