No one is immune in the Kremlin’s in-fighting
A PRIVATE JET carrying a Russian former minister and billionaire lands in a VIP Moscow airport from Italy where he resides in a plush villa. Lured to Moscow for the birthday party of a former colleague and friend, he gets into a limousine, but is quickly apprehended by the FSB, Russia’s secret police. They take him to jail, and charge him with stealing millions of dollars from Russian taxpayers.
He joined the government of Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, in 2012. He was put in charge of “open government”—an initiative to modernise government affairs by transforming them into electronic form. Like much of Mr Medvedev’s modernisation this was largely a show. The post was abolished in 2018, and Mr Abyzov left the government to enjoy the fruits of his labour. A few years ago his lifestyle would have served as a model for other ex-apparatchiks.
Mr Abyzov had also upset some powerful oligarchs. Mikhail Fridman, the billionaire banker who owns Alfa Group, is pursuing him through courts for a large credit repayment; Viktor Vekselberg, another oligarch, is suing him for $500m in a business dispute.
Each case may be different, but as Kirill Rogov and Nikolai Petrov, Russian political analysts, argue in their recent report on the first year of Mr Putin’s new term as president, “counter-elite economic repressions have become a systemic and crucial element of the political system.” Whereas only three high-ranking officials were prosecuted in the years between 2001 and 2005, the number of cases against senior members of the government and the Duma reached 35 in 2018.
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