| It just so happened that the anniversary of the arrest of the former head of the almost former oil company YUKOS, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, almost coincided with the lawsuit that Alfa Bank won against the Kommersant newspaper. In essence, these are two sides of the same political process. The process of decomposition of Russian capitalism from the outside and from the inside.
Much has been written about the Khodorkovsky case, and even more will be written, but no one is yet able to calculate the full range of its possible negative consequences for the economy and the general atmosphere in Russia. In any case, it is obvious: we have a precedent for the struggle of one environment against another, an attack on large Russian business from the outside. The case of "Alpha" against "Kommersant" is a sad and dangerous precedent for the struggle within strategic allies, the battle of "friends" with "friends."
In a sense, the very existence of Alfa Bank and, in general, any financial and industrial empires owned by people outside the president’s inner circle now depends on the existence of independent, private, respectable media. Because the liberal independent press is, in fact, the only public defender of economic freedoms and private business in today's Russia.
Large Russian business missed the historical moment when it needed to clearly structure itself, create a party and defend its own interests in the legal political field. The oligarchs preferred to act through banal shadow pushing of “their” officials into the government and regional administrations or attempts to bribe “not their” officials. The Russian people for the most part are still extremely wary of very rich people, do not perceive their property as legitimate, and their wealth as honestly earned. In such a situation, not just disunity, but direct wars within this already extremely narrow and extremely vulnerable liberal business community are like death.
It is no secret to any of the people watching the developments around big business in Russia that Alfa Group is experiencing certain pressure from the state. There are problems with the appointment of foreign top managers to the Tyumen Oil Company, half of which was bought by British Petroleum in the personal presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. There are criminal cases involving structures controlled by one of the top managers of TNK-BP, Viktor Vekselberg. The head of British Petroleum, Lord John Brown, came to Moscow a couple of months ago and, after meetings with Russian government officials, announced that he had received guarantees for the operation of the joint company in Russia. The very fact of such a visit “for guarantees” and such recognition from the lips of a man who heads the list of the 25 most influential businessmen in Europe testifies to how difficult everything is in Alpha’s current relations with the state authorities.
The Kommersant newspaper, which Alfa Bank found guilty of massive withdrawals of money by depositors at the height of the so-called banking “crisis of confidence” in June this year, was far from the only one that wrote about the queues of frightened deposit holders in bank offices. At the same time, it is clear that the very $11 million that Alfa seized from Kommersant is a lot for the newspaper and very little for the bank’s owners. It is no less obvious that if Alfa Group had really serious problems with the state, threatening its entire business, Kommersant in its current status would honestly and impartially describe these problems, and would not clearly take the side of the state, as is certain state media would do.
In such a situation, the most worthy thing that the owners of Alfa Bank can do is to consider their pride satisfied and refuse to collect the amount seized from the newspaper. 11 million dollars is too small an amount when at stake is the very right to legally engage in large private business in Russia and the right to write honestly about everything that happens in this business. Semyon Novoprudsky
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