On February 25, there was a serious car accident in Gagarin Square on Leninsky Prospect in Moscow. The accident, described in this piece in the Moscow Times, involved a senior Lukoil executive whose Mercedes collided head-on with a Citroen, killing two women in the Citroen.
Anyone who has ever been to Moscow can tell you that traffic is generally pretty orderly except when some Putin friend / executive travels down the road in their Mercedes and decides that a government-issued siren allows them to set their own rules. While it is clear to the Russian public that this accident was the result of wanton and willful conduct by the Lukoil Mercedes, Russian authorities recently cleared the executive and Lukoil of any wrongdoing and put the blame for the accident purely on driver of the Citroen. The Russian public is now expressing their rage on the airwaves, blogs and in chatrooms.
This incident epitomizes who nobody in their right mind should dream of investing in Russia. The reality is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Russians come from a culture or history of getting what they want at any cost and those in control are never wrong. Under Putin, the new ruling class that controls the wealth, assets and companies can dictate whatever rules they want and all those around them shall be damned.
If you invest in Russia, you are always headed for a head-on crash and you will never have any recourse to the Lukoil executive who hit you. It happened in 1998 and it will happen again.
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