Our money in America

About what the current, Putin, emigration in the United States differs from the previous

His wife is studying in Colombian and dancing swing. His children with Anglo-Saxon names go to a private school, and after lessons they walk in a Central Park with a Russian nanny so as not to forget their native speech. He lives in a quarter of multimillionaires with a view of the Columbus monument, reminding him of the Alexander column. At night, he descends a cup of coffee in Starbucks at night at night, where no one pays attention to him. At night - because in Russia, where he is leading a completely successful business, the day has come. And he is forced to rely again to the Skype screen, which replaced him with the luxurious office of the president of the Russian company, on the door of which his name is engraved in gold letters.

In the "Big Apple", as New York is called, investors from Russia are invested in promising development projects

In the den of the enemy

This Russian (he categorically refused to publish his name) is quite a patriot on the official scale of values, condemns the anti -Russian sanctions of “American Hawks” and is sincerely convinced that “our Crimea!” He is even ready to pay a certain price for this. But the arrest of the head of the AFC “System” by Vladimir Yevtushenkov forces him to nervously fingering the “mouse”, clicking on the news from Russia. He catches himself thinking that his family summer holidays in New York were unusually dragged on, and all because in the "lair of the enemy" he feels calmer than in his homeland.

“In Russia, they can be arrested under any plausible pretext and, most interestingly, on quite legal grounds,” this capitalist, who arranged a new tribal nest in a foreign land, admittedly. He is Russian, his little son is an American.

Each Russian wave of immigration in the United States entailed symptomatic consequences. The Jewish outcome from the pogroms who swept through Russia after the murder of Tsar Alexander II and the first Russian revolution (then 1.5 million people left), blew up a new light with the ideas of leftist and anarchism. The flight of the aristocracy from the Bolsheviks (according to various estimates, from red terror fled from 1.4 to 3 million people who settled in different countries of the world from China to the USA) were accompanied by the cultural flowering of the United States and Baletomania. The mass immigration of the times of “developed socialism” (more than 600 thousand) came around the phenomenon of the “Red Mafia”, the first post -Soviet years are also the mafia, only “Russian”. The latest Russians wave bears money to America and take off the prices of Lux class real estate. Frightened by events in their homeland, they are ready not only to spend in America, but to earn.

For Cordon

“Recently, I have not an office, but a“ hot line ”. The old partners calls who bought apartments or villas, but were never interested in how to establish a business in America. Money was made in Russia. Now the Russians are looking for a quiet harbor in New York. Money does not like instability, ”the New York lawyer Marlene Kruzhkov told The New Times. Its butyer company specializes in investment projects for foreigners. Russian-speaking is increasingly dominated by the visitors of his office on Wall Street. “The worse there, the better we are,” this native of Odessa, who was brought by parents to Brighton Beach at the age of five, says.

Previously, wealthy and very wealthy Russians preferred, without ado, just to invest in housing - only one purchase made in December 2012 by the Russian student Yekaterina Rybolovleva, at the Central Park West House 15, for $ 88 million, raised the housing market in the area at least a quarter. The richest person in the world Carlos Slim* limited his needs for the New York dwelling Townhouse is half the cheaper-for $ 44 million. Buying the daughter of a Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev (formerly a co-owner of Uralkali, No. 100 in the list of billionaires according to Forbes) set an absolute record for a square meter on a square meter on Manhatten. Now, however, this dwelling will become the subject of litigation between the former spouses fishermen, dividing property **.

*The Mexican businessman of Arab origin, whose fortune, according to Forbes, increased in 2014 from $ 74.5 billion to $ 79.6 billion.

** Dmitry Rybolovlev (a fortune of $ 8.8 billion, according to Forbes), according to the decision of the Geneva court, must pay $ 4.5 billion to his ex -wife Elena - exactly half the fortune.

Prior to this, the record in New York belonged to the producer and composer Igor Krutoy, who created, among other things, a hike with the iconic name “For Cordon”. The acquisition of apartments with an area of ​​about 557 square meters. meters in the Plaza Hotel residential complex worth more than $ 40 million marked the yield of the housing market of the metropolis from the crisis of 2008-2010.

All this is the completed stage. Now the Russian-speaking clients of Marlena Kruzhkova are truly part of American business. With its help, the Russians bought in the “Big Apple” a residential complex of the Lux class on Union Square-an area inferior to a celebrity only Times Square, but decent people will unite in a Timesovsky crowded one? Another luxurious condominum near Empire State Building, the sign of New York, also became a “Russian”. Our compatriots also acquired an office complex in the middle part of Manhattan. Well, then they moved to Brooklyn - transfers the transaction circles. The smallest of them was $ 30 million, the largest was $ 218 million. And these are only transactions concluded through one company in 3 months. Representatives of American consulting companies assure that in the last weeks the flight of Russian capital is acquired by panic features.

Emigration of modern times

The policy has made adjustments to the business strategy of the most entrepreneurial Russians, who today prefer reliability, and not dizzying profits, which could only be removed at home. In America, they will have to work differently, not hoping for communication and patronage at the top, in conditions of more severe competition.

“The political situation broke the mood of Russian businessmen. Previously, our clients were invested in luxurious apartments, now everyone wants commercial projects to preserve capital, ”Edward Mermelstein, who has the experience of selecting apartments worth up to $ 100 million.“ We offered the same Russian gentlemen, told the new Russian gentlemen, but they didn’t even want to look at the same Russian gentlemen: they didn’t want to look! Now they say-4-5 % of the profit for us Okay, if only it was reliable, ”the lawyer admits.

According to him, a year ago, businessmen from Moscow and St. Petersburg moved to New York with their capital, now it is “all of Russia and Ukraine”. Russians are actively withdrawing money from offshore, fearing that the government will soon tighten the freedom of movement of capital: “Russian money goes to New York from offshores, very little directly from Russia. This is understandable - businessmen do not need unnecessary questions from representatives of the authorities about why they transport money to a “hostile camp”. I see that people are worried and that the mood of my customers do not coincide with propaganda slogans in today's Russia, ”says Mermelstein. His wards with contributions of $ 15-60 million are actively entering the market for the construction of luxurious condominimums in New York, and the most wealthy Russians replace local banks as lenders.

“The development business on Manhattan is today a new Switzerland for Russians,” Mermelstein is sure, waiting for the heating of commercial real estate prices in Manhattan because of the influx of Russian money from offshores.

Aginsky Consulting Group assures that Russians are fussing not only in the traditional places of acquisition of real estate-New York and Miami, but are already actively mastering California, which the Americans themselves are trying to bypass due to the unfavorable tax climate established during the governor of Arnold Schwarzenegger. On the Coast of the Pacific Ocean, Russians are buying private schools, fitness clubs and even hospitals.

New York, a quarter of millionaires with a view of the Columbus Monument-some of the immigrants of the latest Russian wave settled here

“The newest Russians”, like twenty years ago, love to conduct business in the evening, and not in the morning early-like Americans, they want to “be friends” with clients and partners and bring an element of informality to business contacts, American businessmen say. However, the classics of the 90s-“vodka, bathhouse, girls”-no one has been offering in New York for a long time. The freshest generation of Russian-Russian refugees goes to fitness clubs, eats organic foods, does not indulge in alcohol, or even does not consume at all,-Marlene Kruzhkov notes with a note of respect, who knew the quirks and oddities of the very first investors from Russia. Although it happens that the client will drag $ 3 million in the portfolio when making the purchase of an apartment, and with the full documentation that they are obtained honest and legal. “In the light of the introduced American sanctions, Russians will check for the purity of the origin of capital with particular care,” American businessmen warn.

Lawyer Marlene Kruzhkov: "Russians are looking for a quiet harbor in New Yoirk"

By the way, according to the sources of the magazine in San Francisco, the US government and governments of the Russian Federation, frantically trying to purchase technology and equipment in Silicon Valley, poured in the United States, "until they completely blocked oxygen."

“The expectation of even more severe sanctions from the USA and the EU caused a Russian shopping boom,” says Nikolai, a former Russian working on a computer field. - Clients from the Russian Federation buy equipment for the production of microelectronics, programs for designing microcircuits and licenses for technology. Russia is trying to emit the import substitution of the final products. Officials who previously ignored domestic developers are now inviting them to their rooms and unfastened large budgets. ” According to Nikolai, the American and European governments are closely observed for “shopping”, “which begins to bifurcate the individual”: they prohibit some transactions for political reasons, then, under the onslaught of their own lobbyists, they resolve again.

Nikolai - from the galaxy of those who have taken money from Russia, not raw materials, but their own brains. The new Russians who have put on the state in the IT market invest in what they know - high -tech startups, in the American Silicon Skolkovo. Most personnel in these growing projects are also Russians. “Technical intelligentsia,” Marlene Kruzhkov romantically calls them, preserving the phrase in exile, supplanted from Russian everyday life with all sorts of “creatures”, “ITishniki” and “managers”.

“These Russians are no longer chasing profits, they just want to save what they are,” the lawyer explains. “They run here for one simple reason: in America no one will tell them tomorrow -“ Give it, this is not yours! ”

And now Donetsk ...

“The flight of capital is just about me! - the old Donetsk friend Vasily Vodenko, not so long ago deported to his homeland after six years of imprisonment in the Manhattan prison, was known as a “tomb”, joyfully. He served the first term in the United States for conducting financial transactions without a license, at the end of it immediately received a new charge - that the Western Express stole and washed $ 47 million as part of the Clinical Criminal Group.

Vodenko repented only that he was mistaken, without a criminal plan and not knowing his summary customers - at the time of their arrest there were about 300 thousand, mainly in Russia. In the end, he was forgiven, scraped, scored and - pushed him to his homeland.

Now Vasily is quite deservedly considered in the Donetsk circles a prominent expert in doing business in the United States. On his business card, it would be quite possible to place an Empire State Building type, on the 44th floor of which his office was located at one time. The automatic device on the cheapest telephone cards of New York still broadcasts a characteristic voice of Vodenko with a soft Donetsk dialect: "Please introduce your pin code."

America is now closed for Vodenko, the motherland met something awkwardly. “The DPR confiscated the money in banks, the people are hiding so that they would not put it under the gun, and the roads here are shit,” the former American businessman and prisoner outlined the shortcomings of the infrastructure and business climate.

The businessman Vodenko began his career in his native Donetsk, in a party of local musicians who shared the opportunities to earn extra money to the left, together who were involved in the purchase and sale of instruments. Here he received the first "baptism" on the thorny path of entrepreneurship. “Glory that you will never forget,” Vasily introduced himself by phone the buyer of the very first ordered batch of guitars. With a novice businessman, Glory paid a “doll”.

"It is necessary to drape from here further than the eyes see!" - Today, Vasily recommends local colleagues. Donetsk businessmen have enough reserves, but with foreign languages ​​there is a tense. Therefore, Vodenko has already joined the conveyor of training fellow countrymen for American realities. He translates training films, trainings and programs, willingly enriching didactic material with examples from personal experience. Donetsk moves to the USA and Canada, realizing that in their homeland they can’t see stability for a long time.

“The first Donetsk businessmen are already in New York, they are successfully entering the developer business of the city,” the lawyer Marlene Kruzhkov vouges for his new clients.

Photo: Andrew H.Walker/Getty Images/North America/AFP