Grigory Yavlinsky’s web-site, 27.03.2016

It has turned 16 years since Vladimir Putin came in power. He was appointed President not least in order to ensure the inviolability of the fraudulent results of privatisation – almost free transfer of the most profitable state-owned assets to a ‘narrow circle of friends’ via the so-called ‘loans for shares’ auctions. This arrangement has been maintained until recently: the oligarchs who know well how they got the property were ‘milked’, frightened, blackmailed and even imprisoned, but the principles of criminal scheme of assets distribution were not questioned.

Rare publications that it is vitally important to correct the consequences of the loans-for-share auctions and that this can not be neglected were silenced. It was unlucrative for the government: it meant that it will be impossible to blackmail large-scale businesses; and the oligarchs lived in hope that maybe the danger is over and maybe suddenly everything will be forgotten; and ‘the best people of the city’ without understanding anything, in fact, protected the “bright heritage of 1990s”…

And now in the fight against the decision of the Hague Court of Arbitration to pay $ 50 billion in favour of the former shareholders of YUKOS, the government has decided (it is unclear whether realizing this or not) to open a Pandora’s box, that is, they have started officially and on the international level talking about the criminal content of the key element of the Russian economic reforms – the privatisation. Yet they have been mussing up in their ‘revelations’ only about YUKOS, because they have been sued over the world, and it is clear that this is only the beginning.

And here we are coming to full circle. There is a complex of problems: a man-made economic deadlock, falling living standards, the war with Ukraine, a sharp conflict with Europe and the US – all this led the successor to abandon the obligation not to touch the ‘holy thing’ – the privatisation of 1990s. This means that at any moment ‘demolition’ of large-scale business may begin, like the recent [scandalous] demolition of vending kiosks in Moscow. And international discrediting of Russian entrepreneurs will be only snowballing… That’s the anniversary.

The original publication http://www.yavlinsky.ru/news/rossia/putin
See also: Privatisation in Russia