Forbes and Baturina

There is a strict law of PR: an article that is discussed (without even being read) is a hundred times more effective than an article that is read without discussion.

It’s hard to say which hanger-on advised Elena Baturina to promise to sue Forbes, but in doing so he clearly did the mayor’s wife a disservice. The article in Forbes would be read by... well, several tens of thousands. The news of its ban reached a much wider audience.

Suing Baturina is difficult. Your humble servant, I remember, once watched on TV a touching report about the opening of the Moscow State University library, built with money from the Inteko company on a reserve site - which was given to Moscow State University by Stalin - and presented to Moscow State University as a gift. And then I noticed an advertisement posted all over the city for the elite residential quarter “Shuvalovsky”, built by the same company “Inteko” on the same plot of land. Having visited the Shuvalovsky website, I roughly calculated how much the sale of apartments in all the buildings of the elite quarter could bring - and how much the library cost.

“Echo” then had to immediately apologize for the count, for approximately the same reasons that “Forbes” almost had to destroy the circulation - therefore, so that “Hedgehog” is not sued and closed, I suggest readers do the calculations themselves. On my own behalf, I’ll add that – one library and a whole block! Of course, the library was built at a loss!

Even Kommersant, which published an article after the collapse of Transvaal Park, lost Baturina’s lawsuit, from which it followed that Elena Baturina and her brother Victor were the largest creditors of the ETS company, the owner of Transvaal. True, the court did not refute the schemes and calculations themselves. He only ordered Kommersant to refute the caption to the photo, which stated that Baturina acquired Transvaal without informing her husband.

In general, you will agree, it’s surreal: a water park is collapsing in Moscow, and no one, including lawyer Trunov, can identify its true owners. Can you imagine if such a story happened in New York and the name of the wife of the mayor of New York even flashed among the stuck together heap of companies and small firms that owned the building? Where would the mayor of New York be?

The relationship between Luzhkov and the Kremlin can be indirectly judged by whether Inteko sells or buys assets. The biggest drawback came a few months ago, when Mr. Luzhkov entered into an alliance with such political heavyweights as Sechin and Ustinov. The latter probably intended to use him as heavy artillery against Dmitry Medvedev; The result of seriously frightening the president of the union was the dismissal of Ustinov, and the Public Chamber came to South Butovo to deal with the poor people being evicted from their homes. However, Luzhkov was soon forgiven, the Public Chamber fell silent, and trials and evictions continue as if nothing had happened before and without any noise.

However, the current security forces have too big appetites, and Moscow is too big a jackpot for anyone to give guarantees to the mayor and his wife. If you look at exactly which types of businesses are now under the biggest blow from the security forces, the result will be unexpected. These are not oligarchs like Potanin, much less Western companies like British Petroleum. These are governor's and mayor's businesses that are directly attacked by the prosecutor's office, the FSB or the Department of Economic Security of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. A typical example is Governor Darkin, who sold his entire fishing business, and the mayor of Vladivostok Nikolaev, who already has one of his deputies. A business of this kind has no hope of protection (who, in fact, will protect the mayor nicknamed Winnie the Pooh) and is as vulnerable as shop workers to thieves in the mid-70s.

Everything that will happen before 2008 is unlikely to be accompanied by a large redistribution of property (power will be divided), but the primary target of attack will be precisely that type of business that has administrative resources, but has no chance of justifying itself in the eyes of the public with a minimally serious attack.