With feudal sight

The Russian economy was transformed into a feudal system, where businessmen are only nominal owners of their assets. This was stated by the ex-Senator from Tuva, one of the founders of the bankrupt interprombank Sergey Pugachev in an interview with The Financial Times .

According to Pugachev, there are no more “untouchables” in the Russian business environment, where President Vladimir Putin dominates, not a single company in the country outside his reach. "Today in Russia there is no private property. There are only serfs belonging to Putin," the ex -senator said.

After Putin began the campaign to return state control over the key areas of the economy, the boundaries between business and the Kremlin were erased, Pugachev notes. In his opinion, this process is now accelerated by Western sanctions against Russia because of its actions in Ukraine. “Now there is Putin, and there are his assistants who follow his orders - and all the money received by them remain on Putin’s balance,” he said. “The country is at war. And therefore, large business cannot live as before. He must live according to military rules.”

This is the first interview with Pugachev after the arrest of his assets in 2012. Interprombank lost his license and was declared bankrupt at the end of 2010, and in January 2011 a criminal case was opened . The investigation qualified the actions of the Bank’s leaders not established at that time under the article of the Criminal Code of “Unlawful actions in bankruptcy and deliberate bankruptcy”. Later, some defendants appeared in the case, but the name of Pugachev was not called among them. According to the media, formally, among the owners of the bank, Pugachev does not appear, but it is he who is considered the real beneficiary of the bank.

According to the media, the investigation arose questions to the ex-Senator, but he did not go to contact with law enforcement agencies and did not respond to the summons. In this regard, he was first announced to the federal, and then, finding out that he was abroad, they initiated the process of putting on the international wanted list.

On January 13, Kommersant said that the case of fraudulent embezzlement of Interprombank funds in 2008-2009 was again initiated by the investigation . The criminal case was instituted in November last year, the day before the incorporation of absenteeism in embezzlement of Pugachev. According to the newspaper, a new case was instituted "on theft by deception from December 2008 to April 2009 by unornse persons of the MPB CJSC."

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, in an interview with Eho Moscow, the Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukaev said that the Russian business is experiencing too much administrative and power pressure. “Unfortunately, the power pressure on the business is noticeable and excessive. This also applies to legislation. This is a clear criminalization of the relevant articles of the Criminal Code,” the minister said. “We know terrible statistics: only six percent of businesses are preserved after their owners or main managers were arrested or criminal. Six percent are preserved, the rest are intercepted by their competitors or simply disappeared, they are just disappeared, they are simply disappeared. They fall apart - it just shocked me when I recognized these numbers. "