They were afraid of the Hasidim

On June 13, while presenting to the deputies a message on budget policy in 2014-2016, Vladimir Putin announced his refusal to create the Rosfinagentstvo

This body, the idea of ​​which the Ministry of Finance had been nurturing for several years, was supposed to manage budgetary reserves less conservatively than the Central Bank, which invests them mainly in government bonds of developed countries. Countries with excess foreign exchange funds tend to create public investment corporations that engage in direct investment, mainly investing money outside the country. The volume of the Reserve Fund and the National Wealth Fund is 5.4 trillion rubles.

Over the winter, plans to create an RFA caused a political storm in a teacup (see The New Times No. 3, February 4, 2013 ). The leftist opposition, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, suspected that the creation of the RFA would lead to the state losing control over the management of budgetary funds and even to covert privatization. The State Duma managed to pass the draft law on the creation of the RFA in the first reading, and then the matter stalled. The deputies insisted that the RFA should be a budgetary institution, and not an open joint-stock company, as the Ministry of Finance proposed.

Since the draft law on the creation of the RFA was written by the Ministry of Finance in an extremely vague way, it is easy to understand the deputies dissatisfied with it. The document did not spell out any forms of control or standard investment projects in which the RFA could participate with budget money. The real choice of the path was brought to the level of by-laws - government decrees and orders of the Ministry of Finance.

But the creation of the RFA had to be abandoned not because of criticism from the left, but for security reasons. By investing Russian funds abroad, the RFA could face the risk of seizing funds in cases against Russia. For example, this is the case of the former owners of Yukos, demanding compensation for the destruction of the company, and the case of the Lubavitcher Jews, demanding the return of the Schneerson library.

There is indeed a risk of arrest of state funds abroad. So, a couple of years ago, German courts seized Russian property in Germany at the suit of Franz Sedelmeier, who was trying to recover damages for the losses he incurred while organizing business in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. There may be more such claims: the judicial system in Russia is not improving, and foreign courts, not counting on the enforcement of their decisions in the country, are forced to resort to seizure of property.

Now part of the NWF funds (2.7 trillion rubles) will be invested along with pension money in infrastructure projects, which the government hopes will spur economic growth. In fact, this simply means transferring another part of the funds from the National Welfare Fund to Vnesheconombank, which can spend them on the construction of roads and railways, Olympic facilities and other projects that are not promising in terms of income. VEB has already recognized half of the facilities financed by him in Sochi as potentially unprofitable. This means that new injections will be required in order to close the hole in VEB's balance sheet created by previous "political" loans. This is a bad fate for both pension savings and the government's budgetary reserves.