Manual control fruits

Last Friday, Vladimir Putin, by his decrees, dismissed the chairman of Vnesheconombank Vladimir Dmitriev and appointed Sergey Gorkov to this position. On the same day, the Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov said : the VEB or, as it is also called, the State Corporation "Bank for Development" will receive 150 billion rubles from the budget for its pre -capitalization this year. The amount of the current times for the budget is very sensitive, although for saving the VEB is clearly insufficient. She does not even cover the losses of the state corporation, which in 2014 lost about 250 billion rubles, and for the relatively prosperous first half of 2015, another 73.5 billion. In December last year, the same Siluanov estimated the amount necessary for the salvation of the VEB at 1.34 trillion, which will be required until 2020. Only the maintenance of external loans - and the VEB gained them by the middle of last year $ 20 billion - this year will cost the state -owned state corporation $ 3 billion in the pre -bankrupt state. And this is much more than 150 billion rubles, which it turned out to be able to allocate the Ministry of Finance.

So the change of leadership in the Russian "Institute for Development" does not change much. Even the most ingenious banker who worked under the leadership of the head of Sberbank German Gref, without massive injections from the state, is hardly possible to improve the situation. As for the previous leader, there can be no special complaints against him, since Vladimir Dmitriev has never been an independent figure. He was an executive official who clearly and conscientiously fulfill the requests and instructions of the president and the government in the hope that they would not abandon the state corporation in trouble at a difficult moment.

The recent history of VEB began in 2007, when the state decided to bet on the state corporations, new "locomotives" of authoritarian modernization. The “Development Bank” created on the basis of Vnesheconombank has a key role in this process. But the crisis soon struck, and VEB became the chief operator of the Anti -Crisis Program of the Putin government, conducted in manual control mode. It was the state corporation that saved the Russian stock market, the "russal" of Oleg Deripaska, took up the sanitation of "Svyaz-Bank" and the Globex Bank. And then there was preparations for the Olympiad and loans for the construction of Olympic facilities. The VEB issued such loans for 240 billion rubles, of which more than 180 billion today are estimated as problematic or irrevocable. There was also a purchase of metallurgical assets in eastern Ukraine for $ 8 billion, as a result of which the VEB received a loss of 250 billion rubles in 2014. Today there is no doubt that all these 8 billion dollars will have to be attributed to losses.

Who will count the money when it comes to the execution of the mission?

In all these "operations" the head of the VEB Vladimir Dmitriev performed the functions of the cashier. Economic expediency, profitability of projects, making profits - all this was for the state corporation, on which they entrusted the mission of the modernization and development of the Russian economy, far from the main criteria. Who will count the money when it comes to the execution of the mission? That's just to fulfill its purpose "Bank for Development" was not destined. The trillion more than a slave was thrown to the wind, and the Russian economy has been flying into the abyss for the third year in a row, without becoming either high -tech, nor innovative, nor even infrastructurally secured.

Today, the “development bank” must be saved, since it cannot go bankrupt, because the debts of the state corporation are guaranteed by the state. It will be necessary to save at the expense of money taken from the pocket of Russian citizens who have already gone through in recent years. The government will raise excise taxes, reduce social payments, if this is not enough, will print unsecured rubles. You look and cover losses directly related to "manual control". The only problem is that with the current crisis, Putin is going to fight in the same mode. Nobody is going to abolish the "Institute of Development". And this means that no one is going to change the system, the inefficiency of which the story with the VEB demonstrates very clearly.

Maxim Blunt - Economic Observer, Head of the Macroeconomic Analysis Department of Fingrad

Opinions expressed under the heading "Law" may not reflect the point of view of the editorial office