Showbiz went into politics and politics turned into a show. Following socialite Ksenia Sobchak, porn actress Elena Berkova, singer Katya Gordon, and artist Alexei Panin decided to stamp themselves on election ballots.
And this is not so bad, given that the serious candidate Zyuganov is over 70 years old and impresses as hopeless as his patron, embalmed in the mausoleum. Candidate Sobchak’s cheerful hipster talk with Meduza, which turns into cool radicalism and questions such as “should we put Putin in jail?” can be read in Rucompromat, noting the candidate’s business acumen, her unfocused view of things, and her human courage. She believes that “it would be the best flash mob possible in connection with these elections – if every person, every resident of the Russian Federation were to run for president. It would perfectly complete the picture of what our elections have turned into; I welcome it.” Sobchak also said that her task is to break the system, and that talking about paid medicine, pension reform, etc. is as appropriate now as discussing an economic program in guerrilla trenches.
Meanwhile, our medal chime may finally turn into a funeral chime. WADA announced that it had received from one of its informants a database of doping tests conducted by the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory between 2012 and 2015. As Rucompromat recalls, WADA had previously tried to obtain such a database in an official way, but the Russian authorities refused.
Recall, in 2016, Richard McLaren claimed that in Russian sports allegedly created a system of concealment of violations related to banned drugs and methods, and at the Olympics in Sochi in 2014 there was a large-scale “manipulation” of samples. At the moment, as a result of the McLaren report, six skiers have been suspended for life from the Olympic Games with the annulment of results. Now it is not ruled out that Russian athletes will be obliged to compete under a neutral flag at the next Olympics.
Whether or not to go to Seoul will become clear soon, but how to travel from the countryside to the capital and return on time at the end of the New Year holidays is now not very clear. In a dispute with the Federal Antimonopoly Service, the railroad stopped selling general and plackart tickets 60 days in advance and switched to a 45-day advance sale. The reason is that the railroads would like to raise ticket prices by 4 percent in 2018, while the regulator insists on a ten percent reduction.
As a result, because of the postponement of ticket sales, Rucompromat worries, not only private trips (the planning of which had to be postponed) were at risk, but also organized tourism – the parlor car is especially popular when transporting groups of children, as thanks to the layout of the carriage, all passengers in it remain in full view. Nevertheless, FPC promises that the demand for transportation during the New Year vacations will be met in full. In its turn, the FAS has already stated that there are no reasons for the cessation of ticket sales (without new regulations, fares should have remained at the same level) and threatened Russian Railways with a large fine.
No one is surprised by corruption scandals in our country, so we decided not to put the hype around the next dossier in the top. But we will not keep silent either. The new dossier, called Paradise Papers, includes Russian billionaires Alisher Usmanov, Roman Abramovich and, indirectly, Leonid Mikhelson, Gennady Timchenko and Kirill Shamalov. Everything came to light thanks to 13.4 million documents of the Bermudian law firm Appleby, which registers offshore companies in the Caymans, Bermuda, Guernsey, British Virgin Islands and other “offshore havens”.
About 400 journalists from 67 countries participated in the regular work of the international consortium of investigative journalists. So, the owner of the DST Global fund, Yuri Milner (#544 in the Forbes global ranking of billionaires, fortune $3.5 billion), turned out to be one of the Russian billionaires involved in the scandal caused by new revelations of offshore deals. It is possible that some Kremlin person invested in Twitter and Facebook through the billionaire’s fund, and then a state-controlled bank in Moscow helped Yuri Milner’s rise in Silicon Valley. Alisher Usmanov was clearly not involved in the purchase of social network shares. Other defendants in the dossier, while under sanctions, quietly conducted business with foreign companies through front companies.
Meanwhile, the Russian financial tycoon VTB, a state-owned bank, is not doing well at all. According to official reports cited by Rucompromat, in the third quarter the second state bank of the Russian Federation received 296 billion rubles from the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank. And yet at the end of the quarter VTB recorded a noticeable depreciation of assets, the rate at which land, buildings and intangible assets on the balance sheet are depreciating has tripled – for the quarter such losses amounted to 10.5 billion rubles. Investment property depreciated by 9.3 billion rubles. At the same time, the situation with loans has not improved: as of October 1, 6.4% of the portfolio, or Br614 billion, were loans overdue for more than 90 days. Over the quarter, their volume increased by Br13.1 billion.