Mikhail Khodorkovsky has just been sentenced to 9 years minus time served. To the West it appears that his guilt was presumed long ago and even Bush has chimed in with his concerns. While I have no doubt that he did not recieve a textbook fair trial, few people do. My uninformed feeling is that you don’t become a 41 year old billionaire in post Soviet Russia without having a great deal of blood on your hands. Did this guy get screwed by the Kremlin wanting to take over his business or was he engaged in a high stakes poker game which he lost? I would have considerably less sympathy for the man (as if it matters) if he was engaged in a dangerous game knowing full well the consequences of failure.
I’m not sure we can answer this question factually.
Moving to GD for discussion.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
I don’t know the exact answer to your question, though the evidence suggests that it’s impossible to make it to the top of Russian business without having dirty, if not bloody, hands. However, I can tell you that it’s basically impossible to play by the rules in Russian big business and still make money, partly because the rules still haven’t been defined properly (and certainly hadn’t been defined properly during the period when Khodorkovsky started making his fortune).
My grad school econ professor, a native Russian whose research specialization was transition economies in the former East Bloc (particularly the economics of the black market), told us that there were certain jurisdictions in the Russian Federation where if a business paid 100% of every tax that every taxing body levied on it, it would owe more than 100% of its gross revenues. Not profits, revenues. The division of responsibility/authority between Russian federal, regional, and local governmental bodies is not at all clear, even in the Constitution.
Sort of the latter. The Kremlin didn’t just up and decide to take over his business for the hell of it. Khodorkovsky backed Putin’s rival in the last election and spent a good chunk of change trying to unseat him. This is basically payback for that. Putin is using Khodorkovsky as an example to the other oligarchs to play by the Kremlin’s rules or else.
Not that I have much pity for Khodorkovsky. I don’t have many tears to waste shedding them for some rich guy who got that way by playing extremely dirty and illegally. He’s almost certainly guilty of what he’s being punished for. He just wouldn’t be on trial if he had backed the right candidate.