| |
DANCES WITH
BEARS
Running for prime minister of
Russia
By John Helmer
MOSCOW
- When a man runs for the office of Russian prime
minister, he must first learn to crawl.
Former prime
minister Mikhail Kasyanov mistakenly imagined he was on
a high horse, when in early October he received a
delegation from United States oil company ExxonMobil and
allowed his guests to announce publicly that the Russian
government could find no obstacle to their acquisition
of a strategic stake in YukosSibneft, Russia's principal
oil producer.
That put him on the wrong side of
President Vladimir Putin at the very moment when Putin
decided to make the fight of his career, arresting and
jailing Mikhail Khodorkovsky, forcing chief of staff
Alexander Voloshin into the cold, and deciding there
will be no sales or share swaps of Russia's strategic
natural resources to foreign corporations.
If
Kasyanov had any hope of retaining the prime minister's
portfolio after the parliamentary elections on December
7, or the presidential poll next March, he appeared to
have lost it when, his eyes askance, he was obliged by
Putin to listen to a blunt warning to the entire cabinet
to stay out of the Yukos affair. Kasyanov's exit became
a certainty when on Halloween he publicly attacked the
court-ordered freeze of the 44-percent bloc of Yukos
shares that Khodorkovsky and his allies control.
By contrast, the three economic policy ministers
in the cabinet, which Putin inherited from ex-President
Boris Yeltsin in 1999, quickly understood that the
ExxonMobil deal was impossible, and Khodorkovsky
insupportable. German Gref, minister of economic
development and trade, appeared by Putin's side when the
president met with a group of investment bankers.
Since the Yukos affair began, Gref and Victor
Khristenko, the deputy prime minister in charge of the
oil sector, have become timid advocates of a new tax,
licensing and anti-trust regime for natural resources
that should eliminate the oligarchs as the dominant
force in the Russian economy. Timidity is the sound a
man lacking confidence makes when he is on all-fours.
It has been Alexei Kudrin, the finance minister
and deputy prime minister in charge of macro-economic
policy, however, who has made the loudest virtue of that
deportment. In defending the president from that
posture, he has appealed for selection as Kasyanov's
successor, Russia's new prime minister. A one-time
protege of Anatoly Chubais, Kudrin learned early how to
run and crawl at the same time. Responding to the exit
of Voloshin from the Kremlin, he declared that "this
marks the end of the Byzantine empire!" as if Kudrin's
humble service in Byzantium all these years has been
nothing if not dutiful, selfless, and unflinching in his
resistance to bad policy.
"Of course, we will
close that [tax avoidance] loophole, pay wages, and
reduce taxes," proclaimed Kudrin, once he had been
convinced by Putin himself that there was no reversing
course in the clash with Khodorkovsky. "But it never
ceases to amaze me why a far-from-impoverished oil
company should crave those loopholes so vehemently."
Irony is usually not a quality favored in Russian prime
ministers, as it doesn't comport well with unswerving
loyalty, and the ability to accommodate contradictions -
two higher qualities for the job.
How will
Kudrin's new support for the restructuring of the Yukos
shareholding, and for an end to tax privileges for oil
companies, lead him to treat the tolling privilege in
aluminum, which Kudrin conceded in favor of Oleg
Deripaska and Victor Vexelberg; or the privatization of
Alrosa, which Kudrin has been tempted to give away to
the President of the Sakha republic; or the
declassification of metals secrets which he awarded to
lobbyists from Vladimir Potanin, enabling him to prepare
to place his shares in Norilsk Nickel on the
international market?
These are only a few of
the policy contradictions over which Kudrin has presided
at the Finance Ministry until now. But they are
potentially serious vulnerabilities in his campaign to
win Putin's favor for the next prime minister, if they
prove that Kudrin's loyalty has been too easily swayed
by either foreign economic interests in Russia, or the
oligarchs. Sergei Stepashin, the current head of the
Accounting Chamber and briefly one of Yeltsin's prime
ministers, is a contender who can lay claim to greater
independence.
Stepashin even attempted to direct
his auditors into the Finance Ministry itself, which
Kudrin has preserved from any of the accountability or
public sector reform he has urged everywhere else in the
government bureaucracy. That ex-President Yeltsin should
go to great lengths to publicly belittle Stepashin, and
simultaneously promote Chubais - published in an
interview with the newspaper that Khodorkovsky recently
acquired - is a strong signal of what Yeltsin (and
Chubais) fears may happen in the prime ministry soon.
"It is not that he had some shortcomings,"
Yeltsin recently said of Stepashin. "He is a talented
and well-educated person. It was just that he did not
have all it takes to be prime minister and then become
president." What that meant in 1999 was clear -
Stepashin was too great a risk to Yeltsin and the
interests of his cronies. Now, and in the second Putin
term, that may be just what Putin needs in order to run
a government fully free of the Yeltsin group's
influence.
Another contender, Vladimir
Litvinenko, is possibly the most influential of the
Kremlin's advisors on natural resource policy, and the
most modest. As rector of the St Petersburg Mining
Institute, and one of Russia's leading academics on
resource policy, he has been biding his time and
nurturing the president's understanding of how to manage
Russia's resource wealth.
If Litvinenko is
chosen as prime minister, or as a super-minister for
natural resources, this would be a signal that the cash
flow methods and investment priorities of the oligarchs
who will remain after Khodorkovsky's case is over will
not endure either.
Neither Stepashin nor
Litvinenko is the sort of character who will crawl for
public office. Whether they are running is up to Putin
to decide. His decision may already have been taken.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
