CONTROLLING STAKE IN POWER SHARES

CIRCUMSTANCES

Russia is becoming a country of scenery. Decorative Duma, churning out laws on the principle of Henry Ford. Decorative parties, equidistant from their voters. Decorative courts, whose decisions are known before the start of the case. Now...

Russia is becoming a country of scenery. Decorative Duma, churning out laws on the principle of Henry Ford. Decorative parties, equidistant from their voters. Decorative courts, whose decisions are known before the start of the case. Now the business is becoming decorative.

The system cannot work without rules. It is naïve to believe that before such rules were laws. Business lived by the rules. The new elite don't seem to care about them. The vector of development, directed until recently towards a civilized solution of conflicts, is turning one hundred and eighty degrees, towards the era of lawlessness. Only if in the early nineties the gold chain “with a gymnast” was the measure of success, now it is stars on shoulder straps.

The starting point was the attack on Yukos. They gasped for the biggest and strongest player. We looked at the reaction of the business. The business thought and thought - and ... decided that it was what it needed. Since then, arrests and searches, rather than actual economic events, have become the main indicator of the stock market. Arrests and searches began to be perceived as the norm. The arresters and searchers felt this and finally erased the border of what is permitted. Today, not a single businessman can be sure that, having come to work in the morning, he will not find black cars with special numbers and flashing lights at the office door. Red "eagle" crusts have become a universal - and the only - tool for resolving corporate conflicts. Hiding behind them, the security forces act ahead, impudently and straight. They pass like a tornado, touching not only the target, but also everything that they meet on the way. Just like that, on impulse.

Last week, employees of the Investigative Committee (IC) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs carried out a forcible seizure of the office of the Central Moscow Depository (CMD). Everything went in the best traditions of the "mask show" on Dubininskaya. Several cars suddenly drove up to the building, from which people in uniform and with machine guns got out. They neutralized the guards, entered the office, expelled most of its inhabitants and began searching for documents. They liked not only folders with papers, but also the server. Having loaded the trophies into the cars, the militiamen went home.

The exchange reacted with an instant collapse of quotations, the most catastrophic since Khodorkovsky's arrest. The RTS index "sank" by almost 6 percent, and the MICEX - by almost 7 percent. Still, it was not about a separate business, albeit a very large one. The actions of the employees of the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs created a risk for the property rights of thousands of shareholders. CMD is the largest registrar in the country. It serves more than three million clients, including RAO UES, SIDANCO, AvtoVAZ and many other offices, large and small. So, the policemen had no complaints against any of them. The investigators were only interested in the movement of shares in the register of the Arkhangelsk Pulp and Paper Mill. The rest ended up “in the department” just like that, for the company. Because of the inability to separate the flies from the cutlets.

The picture is asking for a textbook on the so-called hostile takeovers in Russian conditions. This is when a businessman, instead of honestly buying a business he likes, begins to push away its rightful owner, let's say, by near-legal methods: to sue him in cities and towns, to hold parallel meetings of shareholders, to seize the enterprise with arms in hand, and so on. One common method of hostile takeover is to take control of the shareholder register. This can be done remotely: by decision of the “incorruptible” court, the register can be transferred from one registrar to another. Or maybe physically. After all, these are just papers and records on electronic media. Both can be hidden, destroyed, damaged. I wrote an obscene word across the list of shareholders, blacked out a couple of LLC names - and that's it: the document is invalid. Accordingly, it will have to be restored not without the participation of the court. And investments in mantles, as you know, are the most profitable way to invest money in the Russian economy.

In this case, thank God, nothing like that happened. Two days later, the CMD restored work in full and confirmed the safety of the data. But the precedent is significant. Especially in the context of the attitude to the right of private property on the part of law enforcement agencies.

The notorious Arkhangelsk Pulp and Paper Mill, which caused all the fuss to flare up, is the object of a protracted corporate war between Zakhar Smushkin, on the one hand, and Oleg Deripaska and Vladimir Kogan, on the other. In its chronology, there have already been parallel meetings of shareholders, and litigation, and other indispensable attributes of a relatively fair redistribution of property. But that is in Arkhangelsk. Now the local disassembly has become the detonator of a nationwide scandal.

Of course, we are far from thinking that the investigators carried out the order of one of the warring parties. And no one accuses them of exceeding their powers: the search was carried out with formal observance of all procedures established by law. It's just that the epidemic of arrests and searches has erased all guidelines in the choice of means. Including the security forces themselves.

Law enforcement agencies are essentially a punitive system oriented towards destruction, incapable of creation. Therefore, if it begins to play a major role in the economy, the economy itself is destroyed. In conditions when a person is not sure that tomorrow his business will not be taken away, and he himself is arrested, no one will invest in long-term projects that can only pull out our long-suffering economy. With such high risks, a simple scheme is again updated: I agreed with the right official, sold the goods, bought a house in Switzerland and went there to live out of harm's way - they will plant more. It was not scary and even comfortable for businessmen to live without the law. And now you have to have no idea ...

PS Power resource is becoming a key factor in business development. And any resource sooner or later is converted into assets. Paradoxical as it may seem, Russia still has unaltered state property. The third wave of privatization is not far off. Who can guarantee that in the current situation at the auctions we will not hear “one big star on shoulder straps - once ...”?

STAKEHOLDER COMMENT

Gennady MELNIKOV, head of the press service of the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs:

“CMD staff can say whatever they want. We have repeatedly contacted them with requests. You understand, I'm not an investigator, but it was the investigators who had difficulty obtaining information. There are different ways of providing information, you can, among other things, “roll up a fool”. I'm not blaming anyone and I'm not trying to convict.

How can you tell if an electronic medium is relevant or not? Therefore, it is completely taken for verification. It is the same with papers: if you need several sheets from a folder, you will not embroider it, select it - this is necessary, this is not necessary. After all, it is after this that we can be accused of violating something.

And what self-respecting office will say that it has problems due to the withdrawal of some server. After all, she must protect her name! And it turns out that if they suddenly flood the server with water or turn off the electricity, they will immediately say: we are standing, we cannot work - and immediately there is panic in the market!

There were no illegal actions on our part: after all, it is not in our interests to arrange another “mask show”. We also need to protect the name. We just stand guard over the law, and if someone breaks it, how long can we wait? The situation forces us to do this, but we do everything according to the law. They have the right to say what they think, they protect their interests, but it's not the point to turn the arrows on us.

Mikhail DELYAGIN, director of the Institute of Globalization Problems:

- We have a real problem - to withdraw everything that our hands can reach. This is the current scheme of pressure on business. For example, investigators come to a store that sells TVs and say that a certain criminal bought a TV in this store. And in order to investigate, they need all the information about the transactions of this store.

Thus, the business is involved as a witness, not the accused, while causing damage to it. So it was with Yukos, when a server was almost confiscated from them, without which oil production would have stopped.

Another problem is that from the outside it is difficult to determine whether a document is relevant or not. Again, all the "extra" information can be claimed: if the case is "expanded" and new accused are involved.

Our stock market is just crashing right now. Yukos is being dismantled, while the state does not know what to do with it. In this way, both helplessness and aggression are expressed. Now some representatives of law enforcement agencies have decided: since this can be done with an oligarch, then there is no need to stand on ceremony with ordinary people.

It is necessary to create new rules of the game: to introduce a compensatory tax, to legitimize property, to force the oligarchs to work for the society, which is exactly what the government does not want. It is beneficial for the bureaucracy to keep business in limbo, to blackmail it. These idiots have driven themselves into a corner and now they cannot get out of it.

Because of this, there is an aggravation of political risks. The fall of the stock market, the banking crisis, which in general has already become an example for textbooks: the crisis was made out of nothing, out of the blue. And now everyone understands that at any moment it can simply “take off”.

Recorded by Natalia KOPEICHENKO