OVERVIEW
MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE
POSSIBILITIES
CAPITALS
ACTIVITIES
ACTORS
BURGESS
|
SANCTIONS
RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS W5 video: The mind-boggling wealth and privilege of Russian oligarchs Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jau12r-jIK4 Burgess COMMENTARY After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and the Soviet satellites were flooded with Western consultants ... including myself. In 1995, I was recruited by KPMG Policy Economics Group (PEG) to join their team working on Government Financial Management funded by organizations like USAID and the World Bank. When I joined PEG in early 1995 it had changed its name to the Barents Group. This particular part of KPMG was not a happy team. The year before they had negotiated the sale of the tobacco company in Kazakhstan to Philip Morris for which a substantial fee was paid, but instead of that fee being credited to the partners of this unit of KPMG (PEG) the fee was spread around all the thousands of partners of the KPMG organization. The name change from KPMG (PEG) to Barents Group was an attempt to separate the audit side of KPMG from the consulting work, but I don't think the US Government and regulators bought this facade. Physically, the Barents Group was in the same physical premises as KPMG, the accounting firm in Washington. I was assigned to the Barents team working in Kazakhstan to reform the Kazakhstan Government Financial Management in their Treasury Department in Almaty. Years before ... when I was training with Cooper Brothers in London in the 1960s some twenty years before I had done some work to develop a series of booklets about the state of accountancy around the world, I was assigned the research on a number of countries including the former Soviet Union. One of the characteristics of accountancy in the former Soviet Union was that the recording of data was very detailed and very accurate ... the penalty for making mistakes was simply far too high. At the same time, the reporting of summarized accounting data was very very different from the Generally Accepted reporting of the UK, the USA and others in the 'West'. This was exactly the situation that existed with the Government accounting system in Almaty on Kazakhstan. The detail was meticulous, the reporting was meaningless. Unlike the other international consultants working in Almaty at the time on this and related assignments I had been a corporate CFO responsible for both recording the accounting data and reporting the data in prescribed ways to suit regulators and other users. In many ways, the most difficult part is getting the data in an organized form. How it is formatted for reporting is relatively easy once the data are organized. Better yet, in the former Soviet Union of which Kazakhstan had been a part, the data was well organized and the staff had already set in motion the idea that electonic data processing (EDP) was the way to go. They already were using a 'pirated' version of FoxPro database software to convert the accounting data to their government reports ... but, of course, it was being reported in Russian. I knew enough FoxPro coding to be able to enable all the government reports to be produced in English as well as Russian, which than made it possible for the community of international consultants to be able to see a lot more than would otherwise have been possible. After several months I travelled back to the USA for the Christmas holiday season during which KPMG informed me that I would not be going back to Kazakhstan. I was told that there had been complaints about me and the 'client' had asked that I not return. I was never told much beyond this, and I assumed it was something to do with some of the consultants on the KPMG team who were not happy with me. There were two in particular who had good reason not to like me because we had crossed paths before in Africa. One of these consultants was holding himself out as a 'budget' expert after doing a two week assignment on government budgeting in Liberia and the other was serving as a macro-economic expert in Kazakhstan. Previously I had interacted with him in Bamibia where he was representing the IMF and giving advice that was inconsistent with reality ... specifically the World Bank and the IMF were recommending actions that completely ignored the fact that at the time South Africa and Naminbia were using the same currency. At the time I was part of the three-person team that was preparing and coordinating the first development plan (and financing) for Namibia after its independence (which was then used to raise a record amount of money for Namibia's development at a pledging conference in New York and which I subsequently administered as Namibia's acting aid coordinator). Looking back with the benefit of hindsight and especially what we now know about the emergence of the oligarchs in the early 1990s, I am fairly certain that my removal from Kazakhstan was much more to do with the fact that my work would have resulted in a level of transparancey and acocuntability that those with the real power in Kazakhstan did not want to see. While it is possible that the two consultants I referred to above were concerned about me, they did not really have much weight. The staff in the accounting departments who were mainly of Russian origin rather than Kazakh were pretty happy with me in that I was attempting to make use of their work in a constructive manner. There was some tension with the head of their department but in retrospect I think I understand this better years later and the benefit of hindsight. I was aware that corruption was going to be a problem ... and was probably identified as an individual that knew something about it and would work to reduce it if not eliminate it. I know about the Boeing 747 that had been 'gifted' by the United States to the Head of State of Kazakhstan in return for the nuclear missile stocks in Kazakhstan being moved to the safe keeping of the United States. While this was a 'corrupt' transaction, it seemed to make geopolitical sense ... but it should have raised a red flag. So we are now where we are! The Russian oligarchs and Putin have become very very wealthy ... and it is getting to a very interesting and dangerous stage. The 'West' has behaved in a greedy incompetent way for a long time ... my experience in Kazakhstan was more than 25 years ago ... and right now the behavior of the 'West' with the heroic leadership of Ukraine is better than anything that has happened in that 25 years. Personally, I worry that the people of the USA are far too soft and comfortable and disconnected from global reality that they will 'want out' before there is a decisive win for democracy and the rule of law and human decency. There is a lot to ponder ...... Peter Burgess | ||
|
W5: The mind-boggling wealth and privilege of Russian oligarchs
492,817 views April 2nd, 2022 Official W5 ... W5 takes an in-depth look into who Russia's oligarchs are, and whether sanctioning them would stop President Vladimir Putin's invasion in Ukraine. Subscribe to W5 to watch more videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPTD... Connect with W5:
10 of the richest oligarchs in the world.
| The text being discussed is available at | and |
