Once decorated by Putin, now on the run: the fall of a Russian oligarch

It looks like a case of the bigger they are, the harder they fall: Konstantin Strukov, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen and once close to President Vladimir Putin, is now facing criminal charges and the threat of state asset seizure.

His flagship company, the gold mining firm Uzhuralzoloto, is set to be nationalized by the Russian government amid a broader wave of corporate takeovers by the state.

With an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion, Strukov comes 78th on Forbes' list of Russia’s richest people. In addition to his business ventures, he was also active in politics, having served as deputy chairman of the Chelyabinsk regional assembly, and in 2021, he was awarded the Order of Merit by Vladimir Putin—a sign of the influence he had amassed at the time.

But that chapter now appears to be closing. According to Kommersant, Russia’s Prosecutor General has filed a formal request in court to confiscate Strukov’s assets. The move came just one day after security forces raided the offices of Uzhuralzoloto, with investigators accusing the company of violating environmental regulations and industrial safety standards.

Strukov’s legal troubles may not end there. According to reports from the Telegram channel EZH, Russian authorities are preparing a personal lawsuit against the oligarch, accusing him of abusing his position to gain unfair advantages in business. He is also expected to be added to Russia’s wanted list while remaining under European Union sanctions imposed following Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The looming nationalization of Uzhuralzoloto appears to be part of a broader trend. Since the outbreak of the war, the Kremlin has ramped up efforts to bring private enterprises under state control.

In June, the Russian government finalized its takeover of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, while a month earlier, it seized control of Rusagro, one of the country’s largest agricultural firms.

These asset-grabbing moves by the Kremlin could well be part of what the Financial Times called earlier this year a “special operation for de-privatization” in the Russian economy. Since the start of the war, Russian authorities have attempted to nationalize 55 companies, with total seized assets estimated at 2.4 trillion rubles—roughly $30.4 billion.

So when is someone going to whack Putin and put an end to this prolonged nightmare?

It's probably not a nightmare for the Average Boris.

Russia's "privatization" program in the 1990s was a financial rape of the nation. State assets were transferred to well-placed and knowledgeable insiders (a Deep State), many with the assist of Western/Wall Street financiers.

The result was a few dozen overnight billionaires, while many average Russians ended up broke and unemployed or under-employed. They lost their socialist state pensions and guaranteed jobs (which were meager), but ended up with even less.

That was under Yeltsin. Putin came in and reversed some of that.

Putin is a thug, but he's a populist thug. I doubt ordinary Russians are shedding tears for Russia's billionaires. Indeed, one reason Putin might be doing this is to improve his popularity ratings.

This is how the powerful are treated in Russia imagine what happens to the common person who steps out of line.

Russian state is a mafia state

The Russians Killed My Lawyer. This Is How I Got Congress to Avenge Him.

Bill Browder, founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005

Sergei Magnitsky’s death provides a lens for everything that’s wrong in Russia today. The story started over a decade ago when I ran Hermitage Capital Management, the largest investment firm in Russia. I was very successful, but when I started to complain publicly about corruption at the companies in which my fund invested, President Vladimir Putin had me expelled from the country and declared a threat to national security. Eighteen months later in June 2007, my Moscow offices were raided by the police, and the documents they seized were used to fraudulently re-register the ownership of our investment holding companies as well as to create $1 billion of fake tax liabilities. In December, the corrupt officials used their new “ownership” of our companies and the fake liabilities to fraudulently reclaim $230 million of taxes we paid in the previous year. It was the largest tax rebate in the history of Russia.

After these raids I hired Sergei Magnitsky, then a 35-year-old tax lawyer, to investigate. Over the following months he helped us file criminal complaints against the police officers involved in the raids with a different branch of Russian law enforcement and was so brave that he even testified against them. In retaliation, he was arrested by two of the same Interior Ministry officers against whom he had testified.

He was held in custody for 358 days and tortured in an effort to get him to retract his testimony. He never did. When the officials involved finally understood he would never break, they had him chained him to a bed while eight riot guards with rubber batons beat him to death.

There was no plausible deniability to Sergei’s torture and murder. In his 358 days in detention, Sergei had written over 450 complaints documenting what had been done to him. We received copies of these complaints, and together they provided one of the most granular accounts of human rights abuse to come out of Russia in the last 35 years.

Because of all the evidence, I figured the Russian authorities, corrupt as they were, would have to prosecute the people involved. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, the Russian government exonerated everyone, and even gave some of the most complicit promotions and state honors.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/sergei-magnitsky-murder-114878/

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