Then when Bill Browder muscled in, he showed everyone how the globe-trotting class could mess it all up. Of course, the Russian gov't didn't mind if the locals muscled in - as long as 10 percent went to the big guy! That’s more or less what happened - as per Browder’s claim in his book. He felt that he was “protected” by Putin - but he thinks that after Putin (big guy) made a deal with the local oligarchs, that protection evaporated. Eventually, Browder was kicked out of the country.
Recently, we saw here an article by Dave Reaboi, who says something similar happened in Ukraine - except the big players were Western oligarchs. They followed exactly the same playbook - bought up everything they could in Ukraine, for pennies on the dollar. After that, the task was to keep Ukraine in the Western sphere of influence - and wait for international help and other good things to raise the value of what they owned. Apparently, Ukraine's accession to EU membership would also be a great bonus.
They developed entire international networks of news people, experts, political powerbrokers… they had things under control. Kind of didn’t work out to well, though. After all those many years, Ukraine did not benefit from any of that - it is the poorest country in Europe. |
