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Khodorkovsky Warns `Bureaucratic Greed' to Cause Crisis by 2015
Bureaucratic greed and dependency on raw materials will cause a new crisis in Russia by 2015, said Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former head of Yukos Oil Co.
“The impossibility of modernizing the economy is caused by the ineffective system of governance, which is archaic and thoroughly corrupt,” Khodorkovsky said in an interview with Novaya Gazeta newspaper that was published on his defense team’s website today. “For many reasons the next crisis will arrive sometime around 2015.”
President Dmitry Medvedev, who has wooed foreign investors and vowed to fight corruption as he seeks to diversify the Russian economy away from dependence on oil, gas and commodities, is making “quick fixes,” Khodorkovsky said. Russia’s “backward economy and bureaucratic greed” will remain the key challenges for the president elected in 2012, he said.
Khodorkovsky, 47, once Russia’s richest man, and business partner Platon Lebedev face up to 14 more years in jail on charges of stealing 350 million tons (2.57 billion barrels) of oil from Yukos. The trial is due to end this week, and the judge may take up to two months to announce the verdict. The two men are already serving eight-year jail terms for fraud.
Khodorkovsky said his 2005 conviction was motivated by his opposition to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was president at the time of his 2003 arrest. Putin said Khodorkovsky “deserved his punishment” in an interview with Kommersant newspaper in August.
‘Rest of His Life’
Yukos was bankrupted under a $30 billion tax claim and sold off in pieces to state oil company OAO Rosneft.
Putin, who hasn’t ruled out seeking a third term as president in 2012, won’t allow the jailed businessman to be freed because he could pose a political threat, said Vladimir Ryzhkov, an opposition politician.
“Putin continues to take a very uncompromising stance toward Khodorkovsky,” Ryzhkov said by telephone. “He’d prefer to keep him in jail not only past 2012 but for the rest of his life.”
Russia is the world’s most corrupt major economy, according to Berlin-based Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index released on Oct. 26, sliding to 154th among 178 countries and placing it alongside Tajikistan and Kenya.
Russians pay bribes totaling $300 billion a year, equivalent to almost a quarter of gross domestic product, according to Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti- Corruption Committee.
To contact the reporter on this story: Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Amanda Jordan at ajordan11@bloomberg.net; Willy Morris at wmorris@bloomberg.net
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