Dagestan is in full swing in cleaning out its stables, banks continue to be bailed out by the Central Bank of Russia, and the interim results of import substitution in Russia have turned out to be predictably dismal.
Banksta
1. The Central Bank has revoked the license of the Siberian Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Its owners are the family of Sergei Korobov, former deputy mayor of Tyumen and former member of the Tyumen Duma. He is wanted internationally by Interpol.
Another co-owner of the bank was the family of Elena Romaniuta, vice-rector of Tyumen Industrial University, who was convicted for abuse of power.
The collapse of SBRR was linked to large securities transactions at the end of December 2017: liquid assets were replaced with knowingly uncollectible ones. Half a billion rubles disappeared from the bank’s cash desk.
Grigory Romaniuta, SBRR’s chairman, is a former deputy chairman of Tyumenenergobank. This bank, too, quickly lost liquidity due to questionable transactions and owed creditors almost 10 billion rubles.
2. After the Bank of Russia’s decision, FC Otkritie stopped paying rent for its head office, which is owned by Vadim Belyayev’s Otkritie Holding. Prior to the bailout, Belyaev was also a co-owner of FC Otkritie Bank.
The bank informed about the termination of lease payments on February 1 in a letter to the holding, a representative of FC Otkritie told RBC. According to the document, the bank considered that in 2016-2017 the bank “overpaid” for rent about 186 million rubles, so “suspends payment of the base rent”. The bank did not pay for rent in January and February 2018, the representative of Otkritie Holding specified.
According to our sources, a similar operation may happen with a number of other owners of buildings of troubled banks. We expect that the Bank of Russia may also do the same with the intractable ex-owners of Promsvyazbank, the Ananyev brothers; their company Promsvyaznedvizhimost leases offices from their company Promsvyaznedvizhimost to Peter Fradkov, son of the former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service.
Boiler room
In Dagestan, in fact, they are introducing external governance, taking a man from Tatarstan as prime minister and thus breaking the practice of appointing only local personnel to posts. Apparently, the federal center fears that the same mess with land fraud, etc. will start again. This is a very important experiment, because Dagestan can be regarded as a pilot project for the management of problematic, somewhat uncontrolled territories. Now they will be dealt with by putting completely new people in charge. So far, all of the republic’s neighbors have remained silent on this issue, and only the former head of the republic, Abdulatipov, has spoken out sharply, comparing the actions of the federal center to encircling Chechnya with barbed wire. However, this pass was not supported by those for whom it was intended.
I wonder what Tatarstan, which constantly claims to be in a special position, thinks about this. Today it became known that it is here that bloggers are most brutally persecuted and given real sentences. It is good that they do not stick bottles up their anus, as we know that the local police have long since mastered this tactic.
Lukoil is trying to buy itself time
Lukoil’s owner met with Putin and cheerfully reported that the company is going to invest $2 billion in the construction of a gas chemical complex in the Stavropol region. It was a good move by Alekperov to show the first person the creation of jobs in Russia, not somewhere abroad in West Qurna. Little is known about what Lukoil is doing, it is a company in itself, once it was considered a sleeping contender for Bashneft, with which there were joint projects, but Alekperov quickly jumped out. These oilmen don’t care about public opinion either – after the scandalous race in a Gelendvagen, the family of the offspring from Luchok didn’t even apologize
Lukoil doesn’t care about anything, this company keeps to itself. However, this meeting with Putin is not accidental, just like the statement about investments, Alekperov is trying to earn points, to show his importance for the economy, because he realizes that this is now the law of survival for him. Otherwise, he will have to move to Sofia Embankment. Similarly, at Trump’s shouting in the States, American companies in the United States quickly fucked Mexico and started working in their homeland, the latest example being Apple. No one is yelling at Lukoil, but former ministerial workers are quick to pick up on invisible signals. At least the workers in Stavropol will be lucky, and that’s good.
Oreshkin’s thoughts
Import substitution results: industry’s dependence on imports has increased to 92% – 93%. The Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration conducted research and this is what we learned:
In 2015, 30% of enterprises were ready to give up imported equipment and technologies, and now only 7% are ready to do so
In 2015, 22% of enterprises were ready to refuse imported raw materials, and now only 7% are ready to refuse imported raw materials.
In 2015, 62% of enterprises stated that it was impossible to switch to domestic products due to their unavailability, and now there are 69% of such enterprises.
According to the Federal Customs Service, in January-November 2017, purchases of machinery and equipment abroad jumped by 28%, and their share in the total volume of imports from non-CIS countries reached 51%.
RK
Any dissemination of information about Gazprom Mezhregiongaz CEO Kirill Seleznev and his friend Mikhail Sirotkin, head of Gazprom’s corporate cost management department, is an advertisement for drugs and pornography. It’s a bit of a surprise, but that’s exactly the ruling that was punched through by the sweet couple’s lawyers in Moscow’s Tushino District Court. It was on this basis that the court demanded that Roskomnadzor block articles on a number of websites that talked about inflated salaries of gas top managers and freezing regions of Russia. We would like to remind you that Mr. Sirotkin, by virtue of his position, controls all government purchases made both by Gazprom’s central office and its numerous subsidiaries. It is not hard to imagine what kind of money passes through there.
Thanks to these financial flows, a few years ago Mikhail Sirotkin bought a huge apartment near the Kremlin, a villa in France, a cottage on Rublevskoye highway and even a small yacht. Sirotkin and Seleznev’s revelry was so provocative that they even managed to get on the radar of Chechen “decision-makers”. A few years ago, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov and Ruslan Geremeyev, deputy commander of the North battalion of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Interior Ministry, and his friends literally dragged Seleznev out of a business jet at the airport and had a harsh conversation with him. As a result, the manager made money transfers from the Belgian bank ING Belgium Brussels to “help good people. Naturally, the determined Kirill Seleznev did not risk blocking the Chechen security forces. This is not the Internet, after all, and you could be killed here.