Nemtsov lives on Gazprom Money!
Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:04PM A while back I wrote on the Kremlin Stooge blog that I suspect Nemtsov has millions. I didn't explain why, but to be frank I have an eye for that. Now we have some more info on where these millions come from. ;-)
And no, these millions do not come from Soros or NDI, these are very Russian state millions. In the video below, Nemtsov tells how in 1998 (a great year indeed) he bought shares of Gazprom for 10 cents a piece, now they cost $14 dollars. He also said that he invests in Russian companies, because he is a 'Russian patriot.'
I didn't return to the piece I uttered my comment under until now and found somebody linking to this piece. There is a long list of Russian companies. I am not keen on Russian business, it is not my field of interest, and I have no time to do some research into the companies at the moment, but I suspect many, if not most, of them are 'Kremlin connected.'
Now, I must certainly commend Nemtsov on good choices of where to invest. But most of these companies made big money under Putin, some even appeared during Putin's era. Simply put, this guy makes money on the economic success of Putin's Russia, all the while publishing pamphlets on how Putin's Russia sucks...
I do not know why this discovery made me think of this Anatol Lieven's classic...
Tragically however, many Russian liberals in the 1990s-through the policies they supported and the arrogant contempt they showed towards the mass of their fellow Russians-made liberals unelectable for a generation or more across most of Russia; and to judge by these and other writings of liberals like the ones under discussion, they have learnt absolutely nothing from this experience. They think that they form some kind of opposition to the present Russian establishment. In fact, they are such an asset to Putin in terms of boosting public hostility to Russian liberalism that if they hadn't already existed, Putin might have been tempted to invent them.
Reader Comments (3)
I wouldn't be surprised if he has money invested in the BTC pipeline or any other western sponsored energy development projects that the US is pushing either.
Well we don't have evidence of that so far, but we have evidence of a Nemtsov's investments into Russian energy companies. I mean some liberal idiots like Kasyanov might be making overtures to the West...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/19/russia.nickpatonwalsh
But Nemtsovka sure knows where to put his money...
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say Nemtsov deliberately drove GAZPROM shares down in order to profit from snapping them up. However, that was a tried and true method of getting rich by many in and around the Yeltsin government. Note, here,
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/29/world/foreign-investors-need-good-news-top-russian-official-says.html?ref=boris_y_nemtsov
that Nemtsov (quoted here as "an architect of Russia's fiscal strategy" said the stock-market slide was "a public-relations problem stemming from a vacuum of reliable information about the recovery". He also specifically said the rouble would not be devalued. Only a few weeks later the bottom fell out of the rouble, and people who listened to him lost their shirts. The sale by the government of a seventh of its shares in GAZPROM is also cited here. Nemtsov stated that the government would not sell its shares in GAZPROM until the stock price had recovered. Perhaps not publicly.....