Russia begins seizing Western Investments..again

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/russia_goes_from_bad_to_worse.html

wo frightening events last week showed the unbridled contempt with which the neo-Soviet regime of proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin views the rule of law.

First, a Russian court in Siberia entered a $1.7 billion judgment against the Norwegian telecommunications firm Telenor, wiping out its stake in the major Russian telecom entity, Vimplecom. One Russian investment analyst said the ruling "makes the flesh creep." That's because "Western banks and companies are owed $453 billion by Russian corporations, an amount three times as much as they are owed by Chinese, Indian and Brazilian companies combined," and it does not appear that Putin's Kremlin is inclined to tender repayment now that Russia is mired in a horrific recession that has seen 75% of the stock market's equity vanish and the currency lose one-third of its value.

The proceedings in Siberia were a sham, reminiscent of the Soviet show trials and very similar to those that sent Kremlin-critical oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky to prison in Siberia just as he began to jostle with Putin for presidential power (Khodorkovsky, by they way, is currently being tried again on the same charges in an effort to lengthen his sentence, double jeopardy being a foreign concept in Russia; Putin is also moving aggressively to abolish jury trials). Jurisdiction was manufactured artificially in the Siberian forum, where a number of other Western firms (BP of the UK, Deutsche Bank of Germany and TeliSonera of Spain) have also seen their Russian investments evaporate. It's almost as if Putin had studied at the knee of Bernie Madoff.

I'm far from a apologist for International Business Practices, typically a company enriches itself from natural resources and a few select people in the country fatten their wallets, in this case however, the Companies that dared invest in Russia typically went into minority partnerships with native Russian Companies and merely provided capital for infrastructure improvements and services the Russians themselves could not provide.

This theft will take money out of the wallets of average Russians as now Crony Capitialism Soviet style is all that is left in Russia, those businesses will lose their 450 Billion in investments or be effectively extorted into paying bribes high enough to make their investments non productive.