SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1555 (16), Friday, March 12, 2010
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TITLE: Berezovsky Wins Poison Libel Case
In Britain
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former Kremlin powerbroker Boris Berezovsky on Wednesday won a libel case against a Russian state television channel that accused him of organizing the 2006 poisoning death of former security agent Alexander Litvinenko.
The Foreign Ministry said the British court’s ruling would not spark repercussions from Russia.
State-owned media company All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting, or VGTRK, claimed in a program aired on its RTR Planeta television channel in April 2007 that Berezovsky had orchestrated Litvinenko’s death and accused him of providing British authorities with false evidence to obtain asylum in 2003.
The program featured a silhouetted man identified as “Pyotr” as its primary source to back up its claims.
Berezovsky — who was known as a kingmaker during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency but is now wanted on multiple criminal charges at home — filed a libel lawsuit in May 2007 at the High Court in London against VGTRK and Vladimir Terlyuk, whom he claimed was a Russian intelligence agent posing as “Pyotr” in the broadcast.
Terlyuk testified during the trial that he was not “Pyotr.”
But Judge David Eady said in Wednesday’s ruling that Terlyuk and “Pyotr” were the same person and RTR had no grounds to implicate Berezovsky in Litvinenko’s death.
“There is no evidence before me that Mr. Berezovsky had any part in the murder of Mr. Litvinenko. Nor, for that matter, do I see any basis for reasonable grounds to suspect him of it,” Eady said, according to Reuters.
The court awarded ?150,000 ($224,000) to Berezovsky, a sum that is to be split between VGTRK and Terlyuk.
VGTRK called the ruling illegal and vowed to appeal.
Zoya Matviyevskaya, a VGTRK legal representative in the case, complained that the lawsuit had not been heard by a jury, even though VGTRK had asked for a jury when the trial began a month ago, and the verdict had been delivered in the absence of VGTRK representatives.
VGTRK was barred from the trial after refusing to disclose its sources of information to the court, a decision that it has criticized as a violation of internationally recognized principles of free media. VGTRK has also filed an appeal against the court’s decision to bar its representatives from the trial.
“VGTRK will appeal against this court ruling too, all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights,” Matviyevskaya said, Interfax reported.
Berezovsky made no public comments after Wednesday’s ruling, saying only in a statement released by his lawyers that the RTR broadcast had sought to mislead British investigators in their inquiry into Litvinenko’s death.
“I am pleased that the court, through its judgment, has unequivocally demolished RTR’s claims,” he said.
Litvinenko, a critic of then-President Vladimir Putin and a former Federal Security Service officer, died in London in November 2006 after coming into contact with the highly toxic and rare polonium-210 isotope. Shortly before his death, which led to an all-time low in relations between Moscow and London, Litvinenko accused the Kremlin of orchestrating his murder.
British police have named Andrei Lugovoi, another former Russian security agent who met with Litvinenko shortly before he fell ill, as the prime suspect in the poisoning. Russia has refused to extradite Lugovoi, now a State Duma deputy, to Britain to face trial.
Diplomatic tensions with Britain, which began soon after Berezovsky fled there in 2000 and started criticizing the Kremlin, eased last year as Moscow moved to “reset” relations with the United States and its allies.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov told The St. Petersburg Times that the court ruling on Wednesday would not prompt an immediate diplomatic response.
“This is a legal process going on in the courts between a private person, Berezovsky, and a Russian company. There is nothing here for diplomats to say at the moment,” he said.
Berezovsky was able to sue VGTRK in London because RTR Planeta is available to British satellite viewers. In his suit, he said the allegations had damaged his business reputation and threatened his asylum status and personal safety.
TITLE: Opposition Sidelined Ahead of Elections
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russians will vote this weekend in the first major elections since disputed polls in October triggered calls from President Dmitry Medvedev for smaller parties to receive better representation in regional legislatures dominated by United Russia.
But despite Medvedev’s rhetoric, regional authorities have continued to back the ruling United Russia party and derail the campaigns of other parties ahead of Sunday’s elections, opposition activists and election monitors said.
Voters will elect eight regional legislatures and 12 municipal legislatures on Sunday. About 84,000 candidates are running for about 40,000 open seats, according to the Central Election Commission.
The elections will be the last to use early voting, criticized by election observers as one of the most blatant ploys to manipulate election results, and regional authorities are once again taking advantage of early voting to collect votes for United Russia, said Grigory Melkonyants, deputy director of Golos, Russia’s only independent election monitoring organization.
“The most important thing for officials is to get the necessary results,” Melkonyants said. “They will only think about what will happen next tomorrow.”
Medvedev lashed out against the election-time use of “stupid administrative methods” during a session of his State Council dedicated to the issue in January.
Medvedev also urged regional governors to respect the public’s will and not interfere in the voting process.
In February, Medvedev sent a bill on electoral reform to the State Duma that, among other things, abolishes early voting.
The amendments, which will go into effect in time for the next major elections in the fall, will restrict early voting to people who live or work in hard-to-access places.
Currently, anyone can vote early by declaring that it will be impossible to vote on election day, and election observers often cannot observe how this voting takes place.
Melkonyants said early voting for the municipal legislature in Sochi, which will host the 2014 Winter Olympics, is of particular concern.
Several members of the local election committee have complained to Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in a YouTube video that local officials are forcing people to vote early.
“We are urging you to cancel the results of early voting in Sochi because of multiple violations,” committee member Yelena Zakaryan said in the video, which is also posted on the Golos web site.
The video footage shows Zakaryan standing with a group of election committee members and candidates.
Zakaryan said municipal officials were delivering voters by the busload to polling stations and forcing them to vote for certain candidates. Zakaryan did not identify the party affiliation of the candidates.
TITLE: Khasansky Traders Reject City Hall’s Proposal
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Despite official reports, most of the businessmen forced out of the city’s Khasansky Market will refuse to sign a much-publicized agreement with City Hall, the head of the market’s council of business owners Viktor Dovzhenko said this week.
The agreement had been presented as guaranteeing the businessmen trading space in the yet-to-be-built trade complex planned to replace the market.
“It’s simply nonsense,” Dovzhenko said by phone on Wednesday.
“They sent me a generic draft of an agreement that says that the leaseholders are obliged to leave the premises of the Khasansky trade complex in six days, and that [City Hall’s] enterprise and trade committee guarantees former tenants space in the new complex — at commercial rates. What kind of agreement is that?”
Although the entrepreneurs have removed their goods from the market, their equipment and the pavilions they built remain, according to Dovzhenko.
“We have buildings at the market that are our property,” he said. “Should we just give it up and hand it over to them?”
On Thursday, 21 businessmen signed the agreement at the first of three planned signing ceremonies, while more were expected to add their signatures on Friday and Monday, the press officer of the city governor’s Public Council for the Development of Small Businesses told local television channel 100 TV. Eighty-four were reported to have agreed to sign the contract.
The confrontation between City Hall, which wants to use the land for a new, city-owned trade complex, and the businessmen, who have invested in infrastructure and communication and do not want to leave the market, has lasted for years. The traders say the city authorities have used a range of tactics to drive them out of the premises, including smear campaigns in City Hall-controlled media, state inspections, fines, police raids, criminal cases and beatings. The market was fenced off last month in preparation for construction work, forcing the traders to clear out their stock and possessions.
Last month, Delovoi Peterburg newspaper quoted a market entrepreneur who claimed that Khasansky market’s problems stemmed from a conflict with St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s son, Sergei Matviyenko, whose fortune the newspaper estimated at $1 billion. Delovoi Peterburg was rebuked in a strongly-worded statement issued in response by City Hall.
Dovzhenko said the bureaucrats’ business interests were the only reason behind the market’s closure.
“Why should a successful trade complex that pays 50 million rubles ($1.7 million) a year to the state in taxes be demolished, only for a similar market to be built using budget funds?” he said.
“Perhaps somebody wants to pocket the budget funds and privatize the land. It’s the only explanation.”
Last year, Governor Matviyenko revealed the plans for the territory occupied by Khasansky market at a city government meeting.
“We have decided to build a market selling both food and merchandise,” Interfax quoted her as saying. “The market will be managed by the city. It will consist of light constructions — no reinforced concrete.”
The closure of Khasansky market left an estimated 4,000 businessmen, sales assistants and other employees jobless.
“They deprived several thousand people of their businesses and left them without work,” Dovzhenko said.
“We have been shouting for five years and saying that we exist and we want to work, but they would not listen to us. What can these people do now? Start a revolution?”
TITLE: Ombudsman to Visit Finland Over Russian-Finnish Boy’s Custody Case
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia’s children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov will visit Finland later this month to establish the details of the conflict surrounding the Russian-Finnish child Robert Rantala, whom Finnish social services have placed in a children’s home.
Astakhov will meet with representatives of Finland’s social services and the country’s ombudsman, as well as with Robert and his mother Inga Rantala, the press service for Russia’s children’s ombudsman said Wednesday.
Finnish Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Stubb also discussed the case with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov this week during a visit to Moscow. Russia expressed its hope that Finland’s foreign affairs representatives would assist in reaching a positive outcome, Channel One reported.
Stubb however told Russia’s Vesti 24 news channel that his ministry had no authority to interfere in the case.
Lyudmila Voinova, Robert’s Russian grandmother, picketed the Finnish Consulate in St. Petersburg last week in an unsuccessful attempt to talk to a representative of the consulate about the fate of her grandson, RIA Novosti reported.
Robert’s parents have very little contact with their son, and cannot understand why he has been taken away from them, Rosbalt news agency reported.
“Our son can’t understand why he has been isolated. In our turn, we do not understand what crime we have committed, or his Russian and Finnish grandparents, from whom the child is also practically cut off. The situation is horrendous; and we could never have imagined that such a nightmare could happen to us in nice, safe Finland,” Inga Rantala was quoted by Rosbalt as saying.
The parents are only allowed to see their son individually, and are allegedly only permitted to speak Finnish to him.
Social services in the Finnish town of Turku placed seven-year-old Robert in a children’s home last December, and have applied in court to deprive his mother of her parental rights. The social services allegedly decided that conditions at home were dangerous for the child after he said at school that his mother smacked him and that his family could take him to Russia since he has dual citizenship.
Inga Rantala told The St. Petersburg Times in a telephone interview that she didn’t beat or abuse Robert, and that the family was devoted to him.
TITLE: 10 Held For Nevsky Express Bombing
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court has sanctioned the arrest of 10 suspects in connection with November’s bombing of the Nevsky Express train that killed 28 people.
The Basmanny District Court issued warrant arrests for Zelimkhan Aushev and nine members of Ingushetia’s Kartoyev clan last week, but Kommersant broke the news about the decision Wednesday.
The 10 suspects were detained in an operation led by the Federal Security Service in the Ingush village of Ekazhevo on March 2, Interfax reported. Eight suspected North Caucasus militants were killed in the operation, including the militants’ chief ideologist, Said Buryatsky.
FSB director Alexander Bortnikov told President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday that investigators believe that the slain and detained rebels were behind the November bombing of the high-speed train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
The Moscow court authorized the arrest of Aushev, 25, on charges of terrorism and illegal weapons trafficking March 3. Police found detonation wires attached to a cell phone at Aushev’s house in Ingushetia together with components for explosives, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
The other nine suspects were placed under arrest on the same charges March 4.
All 10 suspects have pleaded not guilty, Interfax reported.
Two Ingush men were earlier convicted of transporting the explosives to the site of the Nevsky Express bombing.
Further details emerged Wednesday about the suspects slain in the FSB operation last week.
Among the dead were four Kartoyev brothers — Tukhan, Akhmet, Magomet and Nazir — as well as a relative, identified only by his last name, Dalgiyev, and the militant group’s banker, who also worked at Ingushetia’s Treasury, Interfax reported.
Investigators said one Kartoyev brother killed in the operation was suspected of being involved in 15 terrorist attacks and attempted murders.
The Kartoyev clan has a reputation in Ingushetia of being well-off and closely linked to Ingush law enforcement officials.
In addition to running a network of gas stations and car repair shops, the clan is believed to have engaged in illegal activities like stealing expensive foreign-made cars for resale, Kommersant reported Saturday.
TITLE: Asylum Seekers’ Death Leap Leads to Protests
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Demonstrators have appealed for more compassion in Britain’s immigration policy after a family of three, apparently Russian, asylum seekers committed suicide after being denied refugee status.
About 30 protesters gathered outside an immigration office in Glasgow on Tuesday following the deaths of the father, mother and son who plunged 15 stories from a block in an impoverished Scottish housing complex on Sunday. The family — Serge Serykh, 43, his wife, Tatyana, and stepson, aged about 20 — were among thousands of asylum seekers living in public housing in Glasgow.
A charity, Positive Action in Housing, said Britain had rejected the family’s application to stay.
“We are calling for a public inquiry into the suicide that took place as there could be more instances like this,” said the group’s director, Robina Qureshi. “No one knows what happened in that flat, but we need to know what the role of the U.K. Border Agency and Strathclyde Police was.”
Russian diplomats were waiting to receive confirmation from British authorities Wednesday that the family was indeed from Russia. British media reports have identified the family as Russian.
Strathclyde Police said the family had been living at the Red Road flats in Glasgow’s impoverished Springburn area since February and confirmed that their deaths Sunday are being treated as suspected suicide.
Qureshi said the case might not be isolated. It was normal for families fearing deportation to come to the charity threatening suicide rather than return to their home country, she said.
“There is a great deal of mental strain, and it is normal currency for people to talk about ending their lives as a viable alternative to destitution or removal,” she said. “The public has a right to know if we have a fair asylum system, or one which terrorizes vulnerable people to the point they would take their own lives.”
Fellow asylum seekers housed in the same complex held a candlelit vigil for the family on Monday and Tuesday nights, mourning the deaths with a makeshift shrine of candles and messages of condolence.
More than 5,000 asylum seekers live in Glasgow, according to the Scottish Refugee Council, with the main countries of origin being Eritrea, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Sudan.
Asylum seekers in Britain are placed in public housing while they make complicated appeals through the British immigration system, which may take years. Most are rejected as economic migrants seeking a better living, rather than as refugees fleeing persecution in their home country.
Only 13 percent of applicants were granted refugee status out of about 6,400 decisions made in the last three months of 2009, Border Agency figures showed.
(AP, SPT)
TITLE: Kremlin Orders Probe Into LUKoil Car Crash
AUTHOR: By Scott Rose
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday ordered Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev to investigate a fatal car crash involving a LUKoil vice president that caused public outrage over a perceived police cover-up.
Earlier in the day, a group of well-known cultural figures signed an open letter to Medvedev asking him to personally oversee an investigation into the accident, which killed Olga Alexandrina, 35, and her 72-year-old mother-in-law, Vera Sidelnikova.
“The president ordered Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev to sort it out and report back on all of the circumstances of this tragedy,” Medvedev’s press secretary, Natalya Timakova, told reporters.
The order comes at a difficult time for Nurgaliyev, who must report back to Medvedev by the end of the month with plans for a sweeping reform of his scandal-ridden ministry. This is also at least the third time in recent months that Medvedev has personally intervened in a law enforcement controversy.
“In recent years, a double standard has reigned over our country’s roads, and people driving cars with special license plates and special signals have become a constant and unpunished threat to ordinary drivers,” the open letter said.
TITLE: Kremlin Prepares to Unveil Its Version of Silicon Valley
AUTHOR: By Valery Kodachigov, Natalya Kostenko, Bela Lyauv
and Maxim Tovakaido
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — In nine days, President Dmitry Medvedev will indicate where the future Russian Silicon Valley will be created, and one of the early favorites is the area near the business school Skolkovo in Moscow.
Among the possibilities for the Center for Research and Development, as it will be called, are St. Petersburg, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Obninsk, Dubna and an area near the Skolkovo business school along Novorizhskoye Shosse and Leningradskoye Shosse, presidential aide Arkady Dvorkovich said Wednesday.
Rusnano head Anatoly Chubais will be charged with developing the project, and the president will likely announce the details of the project when he meets with Chubais on March 22, Dvorkovich said.
The president will consider several criteria in making the choice: Infrastructure development, size of the territory, proximity to educational centers and attractiveness for business, Dvorkovich told Vedomosti. If the land belongs to the federal government, it would simplify the process, but it is not a decisive criterion, he said.
The development of a business plan and the issue of financing will be worked out by a managing company that the president has ordered to be created, Dvorkovich added.
The federal budget is ready to spend money on developing nonprofit projects and scientific infrastructure. The other facilities, including social facilities, will be built using co-financing. “Construction may start next year, but probably only in the second half,” Dvorkovich said.
The list is very long — only Chukotka and Yakutia do not meet the criteria, one government official joked. Nearly every area named complies with the criteria stated.
A source close to the government said the discussions on obtaining land will be carried out with private landowners. Four Moscow projects were considered: Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye (430 hectares on Novorizhskoye Shosse that are owned by Mikhail Shishkhanov and Sberbank); A 101 (13,000 hectares near Kaluzhskoye Shosse, owned by Vadim Moshkovich); Konstantinovo (more than 1,000 hectares near Kashirskoye Shosse, owned by Yevrasia); and the land near Skolkovo.
The project requires hundreds of hectares of land, and the center should be world-class, a source at a federal agency said. Both sources said the most likely candidate was the land near Skolkovo, the owners of which they declined to name.
The land near Skolkovo could cost $20 million to $25 million per hectare, according to an estimate by Ilya Terentyev, CEO of Zemer Group.
Konstantin Rykov, a member of the State Duma’s Science Committee, told Infox.ru that the United Russia party had opened talks on the Silicon Valley project with Japanese construction company International Dome House, which makes cheap houses from Styrofoam. The company could build a “city of the future” in Russia.
A former Moscow region official said a similar center had been built in Dubna about two years ago. “Offices, factory space and conference centers were built on a huge plot of land, and about $1 billion was invested in it. It’s not clear why they have to start a new project,” he said. The land in Skolkovo belongs to a federal official, who has long lobbied for this project along with Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s holding company Sistema.
Skolkovskoye Shosse is one of the shortest highways, and now it is one of the most elite areas of the Moscow region, said Yevgeny Ivanov, managing director of Zagorod. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and former Mayor Gavriil Popov both live in Skolkovo, a Moscow realtor said.
Members of the United Russia party and two officials in the presidential administration said there was a 90 percent chance that construction of the innovative city would be in the Moscow region, probably near Zelenograd: It’s close to Sheremetyevo Airport, the new Moscow-St. Petersburg highway and the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology.
Making Zelenograd a center for the Silicon Valley would be logical — the city was created as a center for innovative development, a source in Sistema said. The idea to build the center in Zelenograd, which has been lobbied by Yevtushenkov, was rejected, a Kremlin official said.
The Skolkovo option is advantageous from the location point of view, but there are no scientists there, an official taking part in the discussions said. Not only is the location important but so is who will lead the project. Chubais is charged with choosing a candidate, another source in the presidential administration said. “Otherwise it will be the Silicon Gulag.”
TITLE: Anti-Monopoly Service Plans Gas Station Cap
AUTHOR: By Irina Malkova and Alexander Tutushkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service wants to ban oil companies from buying and building gas stations in regions where they have at least 35 percent of the market.
Retail sales of oil products are currently divided almost evenly between independent gas station owners and oil companies with their own refineries. “It’s an alarm bell, since not long ago independent sellers had 65 percent of the market,” said Anatoly Golomolzin, deputy head of the anti-monopoly service.
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service decided to regulate the shares of vertically integrated companies in the regions and has prepared a bill with the working name, “On the sale of oil products.” If a company crosses the 35 percent threshold, then it would automatically be prohibited from buying or building new gas stations in that region, Golomolzin said.
There is already a dominating company in 54 regions across Russia, according to anti-monopoly service figures. The service is not going to force companies to sell their gas stations in such instances, but it will recommend that they swap retail assets with competitors who have dominating positions in different regions.
Golomolzin said he was sure that the ban on expansion would be enough to make other operators develop more dynamically and change the relative strength of companies’ positions.
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has used the 35 percent threshold, spelled out in the law on competition, to prohibit gas-station deals in the past. In 2007, it refused permission to a LUKoil subsidiary to buy 19 gas stations in the Volgograd region to add to the 41 it already had. Last year, the service allowed Gazprom Neft to buy 11 gas stations in the Sverdlovsk region on condition that it would sell some stations if its market share were to surpass 50 percent.
But those decisions could be contested by the oil companies, Golomolzin said, whereas setting the rules down in the law would prevent the rulings from being challenged in court.
Rosneft spokesman Nikolai Manvelov said the company would follow the law if it came into effect. LUKoil and Gazprom Neft declined comment. A source at one of the companies doubted that the idea of swapping gas stations would work, since oil companies would be reluctant to pay for the rebranding.
TNK-BP spokesman Nikolai Gorelov said the anti-monopoly service’s proposal would help create a civilized market and that similar practices were used around the world.
Golomolzin said similar limits exist in Italy, which also has the right to fine for sales violations.
In 2008 and 2009, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service issued fines totaling 26 billion rubles for inflated prices on oil products.
There are also restrictions in the United States. One of the conditions for Exxon and Mobil’s merger in 1998 was that Mobil sell 795 gas stations on the East Coast.
The bill could be sent to the government for consideration as soon as this week, Golomolzin said.
TITLE: The Real Four I’s
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Ryzhkov
TEXT: President Dmitry Medvedev was elected president two years ago on March 2, 2008, with 70 percent of the vote, so this is a good time to analyze his midterm results. In a word, they are dismal. Medvedev did the right thing in not even mentioning his anniversary. Just like when he chose not to attend the Olympic closing ceremony in Vancouver after Russia’s miserable results, there are certain things that are certainly better left ignored.
But what is definitely worth remembering is his infamous “Four I’s” speech that he delivered at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum in February 2008, just weeks before he was elected president. He called for the immediate development of Russia’s “Four I’s” — Institutions, Infrastructure, Innovation and Investment. It is important to remember this speech only because it underscores the huge gap between his grandiose but absolutely meaningless, empty slogans and the sorrowful state of affairs in Russia.
1. Institutions. According to the latest annual Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum, Russia’s institutions have not only failed to improve, they have gotten worse. Of the 133 countries ranked, Russia dropped 12 slots to 63rd place. What’s more, the country’s rating based on the development of a fair and impartial judicial system — Medvedev’s pet project — dropped from 109th place to 116th. Protection of property rights — a key prerequisite for economic development — fell to an equally shameful 119th place. Moreover, Russia has turned into one of the world’s most closed economies, ranked 109th of 121 in this category in the World Economic Forum report and falling behind even Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia.
According to the World Bank, conditions for doing business also worsened, with Russia dropping eight notches to 120th of 183 countries ranked. Only one country in the world had more onerous procedures for obtaining building permits — Eritrea, a dictatorship that is subjected to United Nations sanctions.
Political institutions remain in a state of coma. At the recent Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum, participants were unable to name a single state institution that functions properly.
2. Infrastructure. In 2009, Russia suffered one of its worst disasters at Sayano-Shushenskaya, the country’s largest electrical power station. Moreover, it built only 1,000 kilometers of roads, as compared with the 47,000 kilometers of roads China built in 2007. Russia has allocated 18 percent less funding for the construction of roads in 2010 than it did last year, and it plans to build only 942 kilometers of roads this year. In contrast to Russia, most other countries are trying to stimulate their economies during the crisis by allocating more money for infrastructure projects. Over the next three years, for example, China will extend its railways by 31,000 kilometers, 13,000 kilometers of which will be built for bullet trains.
At the same time, the cost of building roads in Russia remains the highest in the world, and it continues to climb by 30 percent to 40 percent annually. Although hundreds of billions of dollars were allocated for infrastructure projects, as always, only a small portion of these funds has ultimately made it to its “destination point.”
3. Innovation. According to the State Statistics Service, 30 percent of Russian firms are developing innovative products or technologies. But this is a highly deceptive figure because all that’s required to be considered “innovative” is for a factory to buy a new industrial machine, for example. This is clearly an attempt by the authorities to inflate the country’s “innovation quotient,” but few people are fooled by this. The real innovation quotient, which is much closer to 1 percent or 2 percent, is evident to any Russian consumer or businessperson.
The country’s scientific rating also continues to fall. Recent findings by Thomson Reuters show that Russia now publishes fewer scholarly papers and journals than India and China. Russia is even lagging behind in Medvedev’s favorite area: information technology. The World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report put Russia in 70th place in 2007, and at 74th of 134 countries in 2009. That does not mean that IT is not developing in Russia — only that it is progressing far more rapidly elsewhere.
4. Investment. The global average decrease in direct foreign investment was 39 percent in 2009 as a result of the crisis, but in Russia it was 41 percent. With Russia’s low quality of government institutions, aging infrastructure and high cumulative foreign debt, Russia will not see an influx of foreign investment anytime soon.
To sum up Medvedev’s Four I’s, Institutions are corrupt to the core, Infrastructure is falling apart, the country’s homegrown Innovators are abandoning Russia in droves, and Investment is evaporating. Perhaps it would be better to redefine his Four I’s to better reflect Russian reality: Illusion, Inefficiency, Instability and Incompetence.
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Un-Soviet Sports
AUTHOR: By Konstantin Sonin
TEXT: After Russia’s dismal performance at the Olympic Games in Vancouver, there has been a prolonged, heated discussion about who should be blamed for the failure. The “collapse of the Soviet system of preparing athletes” is the phrase most often used to describe Russia’s Olympic crisis. But putting so much emphasis on the words “Soviet” and “collapse” distorts the issue.
Of course, success at the Olympics and other international sporting events was extremely important for Soviet leaders, and they devoted huge resources to training athletes to make sure that the Soviet Union excelled on the world stage. But there was another factor that had an enormous influence and remains almost entirely overlooked today — the closed Soviet borders.
Young Soviets ran up against countless restrictions when choosing their careers. Everything connected with commercial activity was prohibited, diplomatic service and the top political positions were reserved for the chosen few, and most creative, scientific and scholarly work that we now take for granted simply did not exist then. A career in sports was one of the very few ways for the “unchosen” to live a little better than the masses, to achieve the acclaim and adoration of the public, or simply to travel outside of the closed borders of the Soviet Union. This is not an exclusively Soviet phenomenon. In many countries the majority of aspiring athletes come from poor families. What made the Soviet Union unique was the extremely large number of children for whom sports were the only path to glory and prosperity, at least in comparison with their fellow countrymen.
The collapse of the Soviet Union turned this dynamic on its head. With the emergence of a relatively free-market economy and open borders, the number of opportunities for Russians to make money and travel abroad increased exponentially. Sports were no longer one of the very few outlets for ordinary Russians to catch a glimpse of the Western world. To make matters worse, the birthrate fell significantly in the early 1990s, lowering the pool of potential athletes. The demographic factor could have played a role in Russia’s poor showing at the recent Olympics.
During the Soviet period, young athletes had no idea what motivated their counterparts in the United States and other Western countries to train 10 hours a day, seven days a week because they did not know how children lived beyond the Iron Curtain. For all they knew, Western governments had the same fundamental approach to cultivating their athletes as part of a larger political battle in the Cold War.
Thus, we have a large paradox: Russia is pouring huge amounts of money into its Olympic sports program but is enjoying fewer returns on that investment than other countries. As Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said when he grilled top sports officials on March 5, “I have got the impression that the more money we spend, the more modest the results are.”
One of the main reasons for these modest results is that the government is resorting to the old Soviet approach to develop sports. The problem is that young athletes today are living under very un-Soviet circumstances — circumstances that hopefully we will never see again.
Konstantin Sonin, a visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, is a professor at the New Economic School in Moscow and a columnist for Vedomosti.
TITLE: Hitting the high notes
AUTHOR: This year’s ‘Dedication to Maestro’ festival pays homage to composers including Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The State Hermitage Museum will play host to the 4th ‘Dedication to Maestro’ international music festival from March 12 to March 20, once again celebrating renowned composers and musical diversity.
A unique aspect of the festival is its openness to varied genres. Rather than limiting itself to the classical music normally heard in its two venues, the Hermitage Theater and the Winter Palace’s Heraldic Hall, the event has developed a reputation for attracting both jazz and classical stars to pay tribute to outstanding composers — the “maestros” of the festival’s title.
The program comprises six concert performances and, in another of the event’s traditions, each of them is scheduled to mark the anniversaries of historic events.
On Friday, the festival will open in the Heraldic Hall of the Winter Palace celebrating the 170th anniversary of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s birth with the State Hermitage Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Ziva, performing extracts from the opera “Yevgeny Onegin” and the ballets “Swan Lake” and “The Nutcracker.”
Tchaikovsky spent most of his life in St. Petersburg, having been sent to the School of Jurisprudence in the imperial capital at the age of ten in preparation for a career in civil service. After graduating, Tchaikovsky only worked for the civil service for three years, choosing instead to study his real passion — music — at the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory. He composed a range of pieces including symphonies, operas and ballet scores up until his death at the age of 53 in 1893. The composer’s death is commonly attributed to cholera but some theorize that it was actually suicide.
On Saturday, an evening of piano music, titled “Dedicated to Chopin”, marking the 200th anniversary of the French-Polish composer, will be performed in the Heraldic Hall by soloist Vladimir Mishuk.
Monday’s performance at the Hermitage Theater promises to be a more experimental affair. Jazz pianist and composer Rolf Zilk (Germany) will perform with his Handel Jazz ensemble (also comprising bassist Ulrich Moritz from Germany and percussionist Guillermo da Silva Castro from Brazil), improvising on themes taken from the composer’s works on the occasion of Handel’s 325th anniversary.
The Handel Jazz ensemble blends the measured Baroque melodies of Handel with Latin American rhythms, improvisation and even drums.
“There’s no point in getting hung up on classical jazz trends,” says Zilik, who has also performed at the international Handelfestival with his original interpretation’s of the composer’s work. “You have to broaden your mind, play with the material outside the jazz canon and make use of Germany’s musical history.
At the same venue on Wednesday, the renowned jazz musicians Bugge Wesseltoft (Norway) and Lars Danielsson (Sweden) will be accompanied by the State Hermitage Orchestra under the baton of Vytautas Sondeckis. Danielsson plays double bass, electric bass and cello and has released eight solo albums, predominantly backed by the Lars Danielssons Quartet, while pianist Wesseltoft is famed for his future or nu jazz recordings.
Thursday’s concert in the Heraldic Hall of the Winter Palace is, quite fittingly, “Dedicated to the Hermitage,” and features a winner of numerous international music competitions and festivals, pianist Oleg Vainstein, accompanied by the State Hermitage Orchestra conducted by Arkady Steinlucht. The concert’s program will feature works by Chopin, Schumann and Sibelius.
The closing of the festival falls on Saturday March 20, with a “Dedication to Maestro” gala concert, bringing together the State Hermitage Orchestra, conducted by Saulius Sondeckis, soloist Nikolai Petrov (piano) and a Lithuanian boy’s choir to perform Bach’s clavier concert in D minor and Vivaldi’s magnificent choral work Gloria.
The “Dedication to Maestro” festival starts Friday and runs through March 20. For full program details, see www.pcdomus.ru. Tel: 970 2240.
TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: Yury Shevchuk slammed the Kremlin during an appearance by his rock band DDT at a music radio awards ceremony in Moscow on Sunday.
Speaking to thousands at Olimpiisky stadium, Shevchuk, 52, recalled the na?ve illusions of the 1980s Russian rock revolution and attacked his fellow musicians for “heralding the cops’ power on Red Square,” referring to a concert celebrating President Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential victory in 2008.
Shevchuk described the current Russian authorities as “cruel and inhuman” and spoke on behalf of the imprisoned businessman and Kremlin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
“People are suffering not only in prisons and camps, but in orphanages and hospitals as well,” he said.
“How many scum feed off the authorities — the ones with shoulder straps and flashing lights ... — they rob us, run us over in the roads, shoot us in shops, and nobody has really been held responsible.”
Shevchuk’s speech is now a hit on YouTube, just like a rap video by a much younger Russian artist Noize MC, 25, that blames a high-ranking oil executive for a car crash that left two dead and that Shevchuk also referred to.
The video is to a song called “Mercedes S666,” about a Feb. 25 car accident involving Anatoly Barkov, vice-president of state-owned energy company Lukoil. Barkov’s Mercedes smashed into a Citroen carrying two women, who were both killed.
Although witnesses said that it was Barkov’s Mercedes that crossed over into oncoming traffic in an apparent attempt to overtake a traffic jam, the police were quick to put the blame on the other driver.
In the video, Barkov is depicted as a modern-day Satan and compared to Major Denis Yevsyukov, a police chief who went on a shooting spree in Moscow killing three and injuring seven last April.
“I think it’s a very rare, simply unique case when a successful Russian pop artist sings an honest song about what is happening right now,” Moscow music journalist Artyom Troitsky said by phone late last week.
“Our artists as a rule are sycophantic toward the authorities, and extremely dependent on them. They are loathsome in their dependency, greed and groveling, so when an exception from this virtually universal rule appears — and not a romantic from the 1980s, but a young man and a very successful one at that — it is amazing. I only hope that this tendency will continue to deepen and grow.”
The video, complete with phone numbers for witnesses to call, appeared on YouTube on Feb. 28, three days after the accident. “If you don’t draw attention to the situation then everything gets hushed up,” Noize MC said on Radio Liberty last week.
“[The police] acted quickly and with one specific aim, saying the driver of the Citroen was the guilty party. If I hadn’t drawn attention to it quickly, then it would have been easier to cover this up.”
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Holy Russia in the spotlight
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS — Russian icons, with their somber tones and gold-framed visages, perplex many Western art viewers. The Louvre Museum is seeking to lift that mystery by throwing its influential spotlight on the icons and nearly 1,000 years of Russian history and art.
In an exhibit unlike any ever mounted and tinged with diplomatic ambitions, the Louvre has pulled together artworks that have never left Russia and other pieces from around Europe — from carved cathedral doors to gold-woven robes and precious iconostasis panels. “Holy Russia” opened to the public last Friday.
“My hope, and the Louvre’s hope, is that people coming to the exhibit and visiting it can catch the specificity of Orthodox Russian art. Because it’s not Byzantine art, it’s not Christian art, it’s not oriental art, it’s Russian art. This is the heart of the matter,” curator Jannic Durand said last week.
Irina Lebedeva, director of Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery and a key contributor to the Louvre exhibit, agreed. “We would like to offer the possibility to Western viewers of understanding our mentality. We are distinct.”
Western visitors accustomed to illuminated rapture in images of saints, such as those found in masterpieces upstairs in the Louvre’s permanent displays, find in the “Holy Russia” exhibit something quite different: saints bearing steady, subtle gazes, their faces darkened by shadows, their poses rigid.
The first major image in the exhibit, a 14th-century painting on wood of Saints Boris and Gleb, shows two martyrs standing in identical poses, framed in rich, textured gold leaf. Their father, Prince Vladimir, formally converted Russia to Orthodox Christianity in the 10th century, and the two were killed by a half brother.
That sets the historical stage for the exhibit, which begins with Russia’s conversion and runs through Peter the Great’s assumption of power at the end of the 17th century — cutting off just as Russian art undergoes a revolution, turning toward western influences.
On the way, the exhibit traces the emergence of Novgorod as a seat of Russian power via such items as a jewel-laden, 12th-century procession cross. The spiritual center Suzdal contributed critical items to the exhibit, including soaring bronze doors to its Cathedral of the Nativity, made in the 13th century by pouring mercury over etchings of tales from Jesus’ life.
“Such an exhibit has never happened before, in Russia or anywhere,” Lebedeva said. Bringing together pieces such as the doors, carefully transported from monasteries, churches and museums around Russia “is a very expensive, very difficult project.”
A guardian angel watches over much of the exhibit: icon painter Andrei Rublyov.
“There is painting before Rublyov, and painting after him. There is something new in the painting after Rublyov. There are new dimensions, a simultaneous softness and strength, that make Rublyov’s role essential,” Durand said.
Two icons attributed to Rublyov, the Virgin of Vladimir and one of Saint John the Baptist from the early 15th century, are on display, and his influence is felt in many of the later pieces.
The most eye-catching item of the exhibit is an oklad, or “covering,” designed for Rublyov’s famed Chronicle of the Trinity icon.
The solid gold piece, set with pearls, diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires, was a gift from Tsar Boris Godunov in 1599 to the church. This exhibit marks the first time it has ever left Russia, Durand said.
The curators take pains to illustrate Byzantine inspirations but also how Russia developed its own artistic style.
Religion defined Russian art throughout the period on display. “These works are not just aesthetic but religious. They give a spiritual basis for what is Russia,” Lebedeva said.
The last two items tell a powerful tale. On the left hangs a life-size funeral portrait of Tsar Fyodor III, painted in 1686 in tempera and oil on paneled wood, his head framed in gold and his body draped in floor-length medieval robes.
On the right hangs a portrait of similar proportions of Fyodor’s half brother, Peter the Great, painted just 12 years later in London. He stands in a flowing, open cape, his head bare and eyes gazing off into the distance, his assured stance mimicking those in paintings of other European monarchs of the time.
The provenance of the painting reflects Peter’s drive to Westernize that revolutionized Russia and its relations with the world: It comes on loan from Queen Elizabeth II’s personal collection.
The “Holy Russia” exhibit runs through May 24. www.louvre.fr
TITLE: The Other Russia
AUTHOR: By Matthew Brown
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “I see an era in which stale cafeteria food being served on golden glittering plates at high prices is gradually coming to an end.” So says U.S. chef and author Greg Easter, surveying the state of the dining scene in St. Petersburg. “Ornate decorations are always appreciated, but you can’t eat fleurs-de-lys.”
Easter is behind a new, once-a-week dining night at the popular downtown gastro bar The Other Side that aims to combine cuisines from around the world with Russian cooking traditions in a new style he calls Nouveau Russe. Every Tuesday, up to 16 diners who have booked in advance are treated to five innovative courses devised and prepared by Easter in what promises to be one of the most intriguing culinary adventures in St. Petersburg in 2010.
“There is a growing interest in exploring new flavors and the cuisines of other nations [in St. Petersburg],” says. Easter. “There are many fusion restaurants now, but one thing that has not been done well is the fusion of Russian food with the ingredients and styles of other countries.”
A recent Nouveau Russe menu illustrated Easter’s innovative approach, combining such ingredients as shrimp and salo (pork fat), cabbage and smetana (sour cream), forest mushrooms and foie gras, and blini made to a traditional potato-flour recipe but served with sweet toppings of berries and chocolate.
Based on the dishes that Easter created from this diverse list, he is living up to the lofty aims of his project.
A triumphant first course comprised large freshly cooked shrimps, wrapped in a fine slice of salo to give them the subtle taste of bacon, and placed on rounds of grilled black bread. Accompanied by a powerful chili confit and a dreamy white bean puree, the juices really began flowing in anticipation of the following courses.
A cabbage and smetana pizza that followed was more bland but no less satisfying, while a pasta dish after that proved the highlight of the evening. Blending wheaty pasta with meaty chanterelles, nutty roast chicken livers and a creamy foie gras sauce, the dish was redolent of a walk through a Russian forest in autumn after the rain.
The fourth course of pork and onion meatballs in a strong tomato sauce was also a great success with top notes of anchovy, fennel seeds and black pepper.
After more than an hour of gorging on such hearty and stimulating fare — each course comes with a suggested wine choice priced at 200 rubles ($6.70) a glass — a relaxed conviviality among the members of the dining group is guaranteed. As a setting for the culinary journey, The Other Side provides just the right atmosphere of informal friendliness and bonhomie. One drawback, however, is that the bar’s subdued lighting makes it difficult to appreciate the thoughtful and artistic presentation of the dishes.
The victory lap — berries and chocolate blini dessert — was served with a pitch-perfect iced lingonberry cocktail to round off a hugely enjoyable evening. Easter certainly knows how to make a good cocktail — the chef is a master mixologist and the author of “Cocktails of the South Pacific and Beyond” (2009).
Easter, who hails from San Francisco and whose 25-year career as a chef has seen him specialize in French, Italian, Chinese and other world cuisines, has also written on the sociology and history of food, and plans to produce a book based on the Nouveau Russe project.
Running for approximately 25 weeks, the regular Tuesday night event means that Easter will have accumulated more than 100 new recipes based on his Nouveau Russe idea.
As for the national cuisines that he is planning to marry with Russian traditions, Easter says he is now looking as far as the South Seas for a Polynesian-Russian feast unlike any other seen in St. Petersburg.
Eventually, Easter hopes to open his own restaurant in the city based on his unique approach. “It would be a tragedy if the future here was just gummy pizza, bargain sushi and fast-food franchises,” he says.
TITLE: Religious Hatred Leads to Carnage in Nigeria
AUTHOR: By Jon Gambrell
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JOS, Nigeria — Christians and Muslims once shared their lives together in Nigeria’s fertile central belt, buying each other’s goods in mixed neighborhoods and cultivating each other’s farms across a sun-baked plateau.
But growing religious hatred, political and ethnic rivalries and increasing poverty have led to two outbursts of savage violence this year in which men, women, children and even babies were butchered, and that harmony seems lost forever. Now, many people carry weapons and man impromptu road blocks, fearful of the military, the police and each other.
Various factors have been weaving a tapestry of violence here but the most recent bloodshed on Sunday was mostly about revenge. Christian villages near the city of Jos were attacked before dawn, less than two months after Muslims were targeted and a mosque torched, with hundreds killed, their corpses stuffed into wells and sewage pits.
Witnesses say Sunday’s pre-dawn silence was broken by gunfire. Simple, one-room houses were set ablaze, the flames illuminating villages that have no electricity. People ran from their burning homes. Assailants with machetes were waiting. Many of those who were cut down were children. At least 200 people died.
One 20-year-old man arrested for allegedly taking part in Sunday’s attacks said his family members died at the hands of rioters in January. Of those who were attacked on Sunday, he said: “There are some people that kill all our parents. We went to avenge what they did to us.”
Nigeria, a nation of 150 million people, is almost evenly split between Muslims in the north and the predominantly Christian south. The recent bloodshed has been happening in central Nigeria, where dozens of ethnic groups vie for control of the nation’s fertile “middle belt.”
“Jos is a mini-Nigeria. All segments of Nigeria are here,” said state police commissioner Ikechukwu Aduba.
National leaders appear to have little control over this region in Africa’s most populous nation. The police and army failed to prevent these horrific massacres. Acting President Goodluck Jonathan promised security forces will bring peace to the city and outlying areas where 1 million people live under control, but many Christians fear the Muslim-dominated police force and military. Local youths armed with kitchen knives and machetes have formed self-protection gangs in neighborhoods and scrutinize each passing vehicle.
Sixty kilometers (38 miles) from Jos, in the village of Ku-Got, men armed with machetes, homemade swords, slingshots and bows and arrows stand guard amid arid cornfields. Barricades made of boulders and cacti manned by frightened locals block many roads. Nigerian security forces rarely, if ever, patrol these areas. They’re usually beyond cellphone range and there’s no electricity.
“It’s clear these people are unprotected here. If you have to carry a bow and arrows in your own town, you are unprotected,” said Mark Lipdo, who leads a Christian foundation in Jos.
Despite once working on farms belonging to the Muslim Fulani ethnic group, the people of Ku-Got now look out over the silhouetted mountains and worry that armed Fulani herders will be coming down the ridge. Villagers say they buried two old women killed by Fulani raiders Sunday. The attackers razed their homes, broke a glass pulpit at the Christian church and destroyed the community’s only satellite television receiver.
“They want to inherit the land,” said the Rev. Joshua T. Dafom, who preaches at the church. “They want to wipe us out to inherit the land to graze their animals.”
For their part, the Fulanis now watch over their herds of cattle in groups of armed men numbering into the dozens, instead of going alone, unarmed, to watch over the animals as they once did, Fulani community leader Sale Bayari said. The men now fear a “guerrilla war” against the ethnic group that left many of them dead during the January rioting but are prepared, Bayari said.
“My people have an instinct for survival,” he said.
Plateau state, of which Jos is the capital, has long been known as “The Home of Peace and Tourism.” It has unspoiled savannas, wild animals like leopards and hippos, waterfalls and curious rock outcroppings. But this monicker is now a sad irony.
“Plateau state has become a jungle,” said Bayari, who is being sought by police for the Sunday attacks. He spoke by mobile telephone from a neighboring state.
TITLE: Greece May Lead Way For U.S. Economy
AUTHOR: By Tom Raum
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Greece is a financial basket case, begging for international help. Is America heading down that same road?
Many of the same risky financial practices that now threaten the Greeks were at the center of the all-too-recent U.S. meltdown.
As with Greece, America’s national debt has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past decade, to the point where it threatens to swamp overall economic output. And in the U.S., as in Greece, a large portion of that debt is owed to foreign investors.
Not good, if these investors begin to wonder if they’ll be paid back. A foreign flight from U.S. Treasury securities could sow financial chaos in the United States, as happened when many investors lost faith in Greek bonds.
It’s something that could affect all Americans. The U.S. has never defaulted on a debt, and even the hint of such a possibility could send interest rates soaring and choke off a fragile recovery.
How long can the United States remain the world’s largest economy as well as the world’s largest debtor?
“Not indefinitely,” suggests former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. “History tells us that great powers, when they’ve gotten into very significant fiscal problems, have ceased to be great powers.”
After all, Spain dominated the 16th century world, France the 17th century and Great Britain much of the 18th and 19th, before the United States rose to supremacy in the 20th century.
“Unless we do things dramatically different, including strengthening our investments in research and education, the 21st century will belong to China and India,” suggests Norman Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin who chaired a 2009 bipartisan commission studying the nation’s top challenges.
The Greek government has taken stiff austerity steps in an effort to get a lifeline from the European Union, sparking strikes and violent demonstrations. Greek unions say a second nationwide strike in a week — planned for Thursday — will shut down government services, close schools and halt public transport and ground flights for 24 hours.
Some of the same risky strategies used by U.S. hedge funds and other professional investors in a failed effort to profit from subprime mortgages in the U.S. — and which led to the 2008 financial near-collapse — are now being employed by those betting that Greece will default on its debt.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, who met with President Barack Obama at the White House on Tuesday, is calling for “decisive and collective action” here and in Europe to crack down on such rampant speculation and unregulated bets. He is also seeking more favorable European interest rates for loans. Speaking at the White House, Papandreou welcomed support from Obama and some European leaders for such efforts and for the austerity measures taken by his own government. He said it shows the “labor and sacrifices are not wasted. Of course, our struggle has not ended, it continues.”
TITLE: Mexico’s Slim Succeeds Bill Gates as ‘World’s Richest’ Person
AUTHOR: By Mark Stevenson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MEXICO CITY — Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim is the first man from a developing nation to become the world’s richest person — a shift that underlines the loosening of America and Europe’s stranglehold on the top spots in the billionaires’ club.
Slim’s arrival at the top aroused both pride and anger in Mexico, where many see his fantastic wealth in a poverty-afflicted nation as a sign of what ails it.
With a recovery in the value of his cell phone holdings pushing his estimated fortune to $53.5 billion, Slim jumped past Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett when Forbes magazine released its 2010 list of the world’s wealthiest Wednesday.
The rise of Slim, the 70-year-old son of an immigrant shopkeeper, is just a part of the emergence of billionaires in developing countries, Forbes reporter Keren Blankfeld said. She noted this year’s top 10 richest also include two billionaires from India and one from Brazil.
“They’re kind of spread. It’s a nice spread,” Blankfeld said of the list, which has long been dominated by Americans and Europeans.
The full list showed Taiwan tripling its number of billionaires to 18, Turkey more than doubling to 28, and Brazil increasing by 50 percent to 18. Russia also rebounded, almost doubling its number of billionaires to 62 after stock markets there recovered from severe setbacks.
Still, it is hardly time to mark the passing of U.S. dominance: The number American billionaires rose by more than 40 to 403. That is more than six times second-place China with 64 billionaires.
That the single richest man on the list should come from Mexico has drawn frequent criticism given the country’s ongoing battles against poverty.
“This is shameful,” said Ernesto Villanueva, 45, of Mexico City. “This is part of what is wrong with the Mexican political system and corruption in the circles of power, that allow there to be a few rich people and millions of poor.”
While Mexico belongs to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose 30 members constitute the world’s most important market economies, it is also a developing nation. More than 50 million of Mexico’s 107 million people live in poverty, defined as not having enough money to meet housing, transport, education and other normal expenses. Extreme poverty — defined as not having money to buy enough food — afflicted 19.5 million of them.
But some Mexicans give Slim credit for knowing how to take advantage of the situation and make money.
“He was intelligent enough to get to where he is, while we, as a people, have never known how to unite ourselves,” said 17-year-old student Manuel Santibanez.
Whatever their attitude toward Slim, Mexicans have learned to live under the tycoon’s long shadow.
Slim’s conglomerate of retail, telecom, manufacturing and construction companies dominate the Mexican commercial landscape so much that it is often easy for Mexicans to find themselves talking over a Slim-operated cell phone at a Slim-owned shopping center waiting to pay a bill to a Slim-owned company at a Slim-owned bank. If the line is too long, they can catch a quick coffee at a Slim-owned restaurant.
His Telmex telephone company controls 83 percent of land lines in Mexico and is the leading Internet service provider. Another of his firms is the top cell phone operator, and he wants to get into convergence services to offer television and interactive media.
Slim also owns the Sears and Saks retail stores operating in Mexico. Last year, he announced a $250 million investment in The New York Times.
Arturo Elias Ayub, the billionaire’s son-in-law who is an executive at Telmex, welcomed Slim’s arrival at the top.
“The reaction is one of satisfaction, that this confidence in Mexico exists, and this confidence in our group’s companies,” said Elias Ayub, who frequently acts as Slim’s spokesman.
But he said Slim was not breaking out the champagne.