Оригинал статьи из The Economist про Gunvor
Grease my palm
Nov 27th 2008
Bribery and corruption have become endemic
RUSSIA may not have democratic elections or the rule of law, but it does have one long-standing
institution that works: corruption. This has penetrated the political, economic, judicial and social systems
so thoroughly that is has ceased to be a deviation from the norm and become the norm itself. A
corruption index compiled by Transparency International gives Russia 2.1 points out of ten, its worst
performance for eight years and on a par with Kenya and Bangladesh. Ordinary Russians are well aware
of this, with three-quarters of them describing the level of corruption in their country as “high”
or “very
high”.
The size of the corruption market is estimated to be close to $300 billion, equivalent to 20% of Russia’s
GDP. INDEM, a think-tank that monitors and analyses corruption, says 80% of all Russian businesses pay
bribes. In the past eight years the size of the average business bribe has gone up from $10,000 to
$130,000, which is enough to buy a small flat in Moscow.
A businessman who was stopped by the traffic police in Moscow recently was shown a piece of paper with
“30,000 roubles”
written on it. He refused to pay and asked the policeman why he was being asked so
much for a minor offence. “The answer was that the policeman had bought a flat for his mother in
Bulgaria and he now needed money to do it up,”
the businessmen said. Far from being a taboo subject,
corruption is discussed openly by politicians, people and even the media—but it makes no difference.
Corruption has become so endemic that it is perceived as normal. Opinion polls show that the majority of
Russians, particularly the young, do not consider bribery a crime. The Russian language distinguishes
between “offering a reward”
to a bureaucrat for making life easier for you, and the brazen (and
sometimes violent) extraction of a bribe by a bureaucrat.
Small and medium-sized businesses suffer the most. Dmitry Golovin, who owns a tool-leasing company
in Yekaterinburg, explains: “You go to the local administration to get permission for something and they
send you to a private firm that will sort out the paperwork for you, which happens to be owned by their
relatives.”
The reason for the persistent corruption is not that the Russian people Novosti
are genetically programmed to pay bribes, but that the state still sees
them as its vassals rather than its masters. The job of Russian law
enforcers is to protect the interests of the state, personified by their
particular boss, against the people. This psychology is particularly
developed among former (and not so former) KGB members who have
gained huge political and economic power in the country since Mr Putin
came to office. Indeed, the top ranks in the Federal Security Service
(FSB) describe themselves as the country’s new nobility—a class of
people personally loyal to the monarch and entitled to an estate with
people to serve them. As Russia’s former prosecutor-general, who is
now the Kremlin’s representative in the north Caucasus, said in front of
Mr Putin: “We are the people of the sovereign.”
Thus they do not see a
redistribution of property from private hands into their own as theft but
as their right.
The precedent was set by the destruction of the Yukos oil company in
2003-04. Mr Khodorkovsky, its then owner, was arrested at gunpoint
in Siberia and after a sham trial sent to jail where he has spent the
past five years. Yukos was broken into bits and, after an opaque
auction, passed to Rosneft, a state oil company chaired by Igor Sechin,
the ideologue of the siloviki.
What are we going to do about
this?
Tricks of the trade
Mr Khodorkovsky was accused, among other things, of selling Yukos’s oil through offshore trading
companies to minimise taxation. So now Rosneft sells the bulk of its oil through a Dutch-registered
trading firm, Gunvor, whose ownership structure looks like a Chinese puzzle. The rise in Gunvor’s
fortunes coincided with the fall of Yukos. A little-known company before 2003, Gunvor has grown into the
world’s third-largest oil trader, which ships a third of Russia’s seaborne oil exports and has estimated
revenues of $70 billion a year.
One of Gunvor’s founders is Gennady Timchenko, who sponsored a judo club of which Mr Putin was
honorary president and worked in an oil company that was given a large export quota as part of a
controversial oil-for-food scheme set up by Mr Putin during his time in St Petersburg. Mr Timchenko says
he was not involved in the deal and his success is not built on favours.
The Yukos case changed the logic of corruption. As INDEM’s Mr Satarov explains, before 2003 officials
simply took a cut of businesses’
profits. After Yukos they started to take
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