Russia 110214 Basic Political Developments

Record number of Russian billionaires

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/01862e52-3793-11e0-b91a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Duh0I2rv

By Charles Clover in Moscow and Neil Buckley in London

Published: February 14 2011 06:08 | Last updated: February 14 2011 06:08

Good news for art auctioneers, yacht brokers and Kensington estate agents: Russia’s oligarchs are bouncing back – and there are more of them than ever.

Russia boasted 114 dollar billionaires at the end of last year, according to an annual ranking of the country’s richest 500 published on Monday by Finans magazine.

The new record – the previous peak was in 2007, when there were 101 billionaires – represents a remarkable comeback for a breed that seemed endangered when Russia’s stock market hit rock bottom in February 2009. But the recovery is not entirely complete. The top 10 Russians in 2010 were together worth $182bn – up 30 per cent from $139bn in 2009, but still below 2007’s peak of $221bn.

Their resurgence is explained partly by a 20 per cent increase in the Russian stock market last year. It also reflects strong growth in Chinese demand for raw materials – still the root of the wealth of Russia’s richest.

The top of the list is dominated by Russia’s “steel kings” – owners, or sometimes ex-owners, of sprawling metals plants. Number one, as last year, is Vladimir Lisin, low-profile chairman of the board of NLMK Steel, based in Novolipetsk, with an estimated worth of $28.3bn.

Second is Mikhail Prokhorov, who sold his shares in Norilsk Nickel at the top of the market in spring 2008 – and thus was the only oligarch with any cash to spare when the markets collapsed.

Entering the top three is Alisher Usmanov, majority owner of Metalloinvest, another metals company, and a shareholder in London’s Arsenal Football Club.

Oleg Deripaska, head of aluminium company Rusal, which floated on the Hong Kong stock exchange last year, is fourth, with an estimated fortune of $19bn. That is a striking revival for an oligarch who entered the crisis particularly heavily leveraged.

Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea FC owner who sold his Sibneft oil company in 2005 but now has big steel holdings, was in fifth place – the first time Russia’s one-time richest man has been outside Finans’ top three since its rankings began in 2004.

Russia actually lost more billionaires than any other country during the financial crisis; the total, according to Finans, dropped to 49 at the end of 2008, before rising to 77 in 2009. This was mainly because of widespread use of shares as collateral for loans, which multiplied losses when the market soured.

The Finans list records one astonishing fall from grace: Elena Baturina, wife of former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was sacked from his post in September, fell farther than anyone – 47 places, to 94, with her fortune halved to $1.1bn.

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February 13, 2011

Russian Village Is Angry, but Not With Bomber

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/europe/14russia.html

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

ALI-YURT, Russia — Residents of this run-down little settlement in the Caucasus Mountains, in the south of Russia, speak only kindly about the Yevloyevs, a tightknit family of six who lived in a one-story, red-brick home at the edge of the village.

The eldest son, Magomed, 20, did not smoke, helped out with the cows and always greeted adults respectfully. His sister Fatima, 22, was remembered as a good student, bringing home report cards of fives — the equivalent of straight A’s. Neighbors called the younger brother, Akhmed, 16, a “good boy.”

The villagers offered these opinions knowing full well what the authorities say of the three siblings: that they built a bomb, which Magomed took to Moscow and detonated in the international arrivals hall of the capital’s busiest airport last month, killing himself and 36 other people.

“I will never say one thing bad about that family,” Alik Ganizho, a neighbor, said in an interview on the muddy sidewalk of Proletarian Lane, a few doors down from the Yevloyevs’ home.

In this village in the restive region of Ingushetia, anger turns instead to the Russian security services: people are still seething over a violent raid four years ago that spawned allegations of human rights abuses by the military, which went nowhere in the Russian courts.

Nobody answered the door on a visit to the family’s home last week; melting snow dripped languidly from the roof, and white lace curtains were drawn over the windows.

The Yevloyevs’ father, Mukhazhir, now lives there alone. Neighbors have been bringing him hot meals, villagers say.

Another daughter, Aishat, 17, fell ill after the suicide bombing. Her mother, Miriam, is now staying with her in a hospital.

What motivated Magomed Yevloyev remains a mystery, and rights groups that documented what they said were abuses in Ali-Yurt emphasize that what happened here does not in any way justify the bombing in Moscow.

Mr. Yevloyev’s personal problems may have played a role. He had recently divorced, and last summer police officers killed his brother-in-law, Fatima’s husband, a suspected insurgent. Young marriages are common in Ingushetia, about 1,000 miles south of Moscow.

Alienated villages like this one pose a tremendous challenge for the Kremlin. A separatist insurgency has raged across the North Caucasus since the Soviet collapse nearly two decades ago, and the Kremlin has swung between crackdowns and efforts to improve economic conditions in this impoverished region.

Meanwhile, what began as a secular independence movement in one region, Chechnya, has metastasized into a loosely organized Islamic rebellion throughout the seven predominantly Muslim regions of the North Caucasus.

Under Vladimir V. Putin, the prime minister and former president, the government has often succeeded in bottling up the rebellion. It has continued, but Russians were generally able to ignore it because it had little if any impact on the rest of the country.

Over the last two years, though, insurgents have once again vowed to take their fight to the country’s major cities. In 2009, they blew up an express train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 2010, two suicide bombers attacked the Moscow subway system. Then, on Jan. 24, the authorities say, Mr. Yevloyev paid his deadly visit to the unsecured arrivals hall at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow.

The Russian police say they found traces of explosives on the hands of Akhmed and Fatima back in Ali-Yurt, suggesting they aided their brother in building the bomb; they were arrested on charges of abetting terrorism.

But government efforts to shame the family, including public criticism of the parents, for failing to alert the authorities to the intentions of their children, if they knew, seemed to have had little effect in Ali-Yurt.

The village is a picture of rural poverty. In backyards, laundry flaps in the freezing wind. Cows meander in deserted, snowy streets. The village has two mosques and an abandoned Soviet-era factory, adorned with a faded mural announcing “Glory to Labor.”

Ingushetia’s unemployment rate is 51 percent, the highest of any region in Russia.

From behind locked doors, residents watch a few cars skid and bump over the potholes. Of the half dozen or so willing to speak with a foreign journalist, most said one thing: they are angry, not with the Yevloyevs, but with Russian security forces.

“They broke into our homes, they beat us with their fists, they beat our women, and they beat an old man,” said one neighbor, who asked that he be identified only by his first name, Omar. “People complained to the police, of course, but it was like talking to a wall.”

On a July night in 2007, still-unidentified gunmen fired at a government building from a nearby forest, killing one soldier. Soldiers then entered the village and indiscriminately beat at least 30 people, including a pregnant woman and an 83-year-old man, according to a report by the Memorial human rights group.

“In all documented cases, the forces behaved in a standard way: They broke into the home, without introduction, fired into the air, swore and beat people without reason,” the report said.

Still, the Russian courts rejected efforts to compel prosecutors to open a criminal case against the military commanders who ordered the raid.

Memorial lawyers are preparing an appeal to the European Court for Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France. That legal process could take years.

“The events in Ali-Yurt could have driven some young men into the underground,” said Tamerlan Akiyev, the director of Memorial’s office in Ingushetia. He added, though, that members of the Yevloyev family were not among the victims of the raid.