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To: limtex who wrote (6177)	7/27/1999 6:53:00 PM
From: Lu_Xun	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29987

limtex: Your point about the large number of Russians who turned out to be capable of buying and using a cellphone is very telling indeed and one that should be noted by all those sceptics who think there is not enough demand in the Third World to allow G* to succeed. In a similar vein, let me pass on one other little anecdote that I ran across sometime back on the Web. A couple of years ago a cellphone company (for some reason I seem to recall that it was Alcatel) got the contract to provide cellphone service in a remote Siberian city named Norilsk. Anticipating few people could actually afford the phones and the air time in a such an impoverished and remote location, they provided a limited number of phones for sale. If memory serves me right it was 8,000 phones. Guess what? They sold them ALL in ONE DAY. I continue to believe that all those sceptics who think there isn't enough demand in the Third World for G* just don't understand the Third World at all. People may be poor by American standards but they have more money than most Americans think they do and they are very eager, IMHO, for better communication with the world outside their city, town, or village. If they can't afford to buy the phone themselves, they'll split the purchase price with others and then share the phone. But one way or another, I predict they will buy and use the phones in droves. Lu Xun

To: limtex who wrote (6177)	7/27/1999 9:20:00 PM
From: Feathered Propeller	Respond to of 29987

L: RE:It used to be thought that there weren't any Russians who could afford mobile phones but experience has proved that there were quite a few more than expected. FWIW: Where Is the IMF Money to Russia Really Going? Stanislav Lunev July 27, 1999 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is poised to resume lending the Russian Federation (RF) funds frozen since last September. The IMF board could approve $4.5 billion in new loans at its July 28 meeting, permitting the RF to repay part of the $16.5 billion it owes this organization and to conclude talks to reschedule its other debts. The new loan is desperately needed to keep Moscow from defaulting on its past IMF obligations and to persuade Western governments and private creditors to ease repayment terms on another $140 billion in foreign debts and to clear the way for new World Bank loans. According to the American press, the IMF suspended a $22.6 billion loan package last fall after the government of Boris Yeltsin defaulted on its debts and used the IMF money in a losing battle to avoid devaluing the ruble. Unfortunately, this report isn't entirely accurate. The Yeltsin government didn't even consider using the IMF money to avoid devaluing the ruble. Moscow received $4.5 billion of the $22.6 billion package last August a couple of days before the financial collapse of Russia. This $4.5 billion disappeared the day after the money was transferred from the IMF to the Central Bank of the RF. The disappearance comes as no surprise, since the same thing happened with tens of billions of dollars that have been received by the Yeltsin government from international financial institutions, Western governments and private investors. The Russian press discovered that half of the $4.5 billion was transferred the day after receipt from the Central Bank via Swiss financial institutions to the Australian Bank of Sydney. The following day $235 million of this money was deposited into the account of an unknown Russian company that is under the control of Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. Victor Ilyukhin, national security committee chair of the Duma (the lower chamber of the RF parliament), said that the last IMF loan to the RF government was stolen by "The Family." He meant the family of RF President Yeltsin, who a couple of years ago described his country as a "criminal state." Of course, Yeltsin distances himself from the criminal society of the country that he has led since late 1991. But in real life he is the leader of the corrupt RF government and political elite, which have close connections with Russian criminal organizations and use criminal channels to funnel money from Russia to private accounts in Western banks. Maybe Boris Yeltsin doesn't accept bribes and other illegal payments directly, but he doesn't need to because everything is done by the members of his "family" - relatives, advisors, assistants and others close to him. In this context the recent incident involving RF Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov is not surprising. Early this year Skuratov began a criminal investigation of corrupt top-level government officials in the Kremlin who have one or more private bank accounts over $5 million. He requested the top Swiss prosecutor to prepare a list of high-level Russian officials who received bribes from Swiss businessmen (under Swiss law, declared bribes are legal and tax exempt) and to bring this list to Moscow. But when the Swiss prosecutor had prepared the list, she was refused a visa by the RF embassy. The office of the Russian Prosecutor General pressed the Foreign Ministry and the visa was granted, but after the Swiss prosecutor's arrival in Moscow, her security guards were removed by the RF government. Top-level law enforcement officers of the two countries finally met, but just before their meeting Boris Yeltsin fired Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov. Skuratov was removed from his position despite the fact that the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the RF parliament) voted three times overwhelmingly against his removal. Yeltsin may have easily halted criminal investigation in "democratic Russia," but his influence doesn't extend to Switzerland, where democracy exists in reality, not just on paper and in slogans. Last week, as the Russian political elite celebrated the reopening of the Grand Kremlin Palace after remodeling, Swiss Magistrate Daniel Deveau announced in Geneva that he had launched a criminal investigation into the contracts awarded by a leading Kremlin official to a Swiss firm, Mabetex, involved in the refurbishment of the Kremlin facility. The Swiss official announced his intention to investigate Pavel Borodin, Boris Yeltsin's long-term personal assistant, his wife and more than 20 other highest-level Kremlin bureaucrats in connection with allegations of money laundering through secret Swiss bank accounts. (By the way, the cost of the Kremlin restoration is one of Boris Yeltsin's top state secrets, but it is estimated to have run into many hundreds of millions of dollars. Last month an investigation revealed that the restoration of Catherine the Great's Senate Palace, another Mabetex contract that was much smaller than the Grand Kremlin Palace, had cost at least $472 million.) If the president's "family" is so deeply involved in criminal activity, what can possibly be expected from lower-level government officials? The internationally known Central Bank of RF used an obscure offshore bank to manage the Yeltsin government's foreign currency reserves, using profits from these operations to increase the private wealth of the country's elite. In other words, all money coming into the RF from Western countries and international financial institutions has disappeared and reappeared a little later in the private bank accounts of the "new Russians," a corrupt government and political elite with close connections to Mafia-type criminal organizations. Only a small amount of these credits and loans is being used for the development of new types of mass-destruction weapons systems and for the fulfillment of "projects" like the restoration of the president's residences in the Kremlin and elsewhere. The influence of criminals over the RF government is so great that RF officials now use criminal methods to extort money from Western countries and financial institutions. They don't ask for money, they demand it. They regularly inform Western leaders that the Moscow regime cannot exist without Western credits and loans, that the RF government cannot pay the salaries of military and security personnel, workers, scientists and others who depend on the state budget. And Moscow officials carefully explain that in this situation anything could happen in Russia, including a coup, revolt, revolution or social explosion, and a very dangerous person could come to power - in a country with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Who will refuse to pay big bucks after hearing this? Money is requested on the very reasonable pretext of helping Russia's economic, agricultural, banking and financial systems, but there have been no reforms. Moreover, the RF government has never reported to the IMF and other Western lending institutions where and for what purposes this money was spent. It's very easy to predict that all future money from Western countries and international institutions to the Yeltsin government will disappear the same way it has disappeared in the past. It is too much to expect the West to require that Moscow report how every dollar from credits and loans is spent and Boris Yeltsin's government to accept and honor such a requirement. Biography of Colonel Stanislav Lunev: newsmax.com