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The problem was that Russia's bankers were playing the same game, possibly with loans from the International Monetary Fund. In the mid-'90s Russia's central bank transferred more than a billion dollars of hard currency to an overseas company called FIMACO. After Russia's chief prosecutor leaked word of the suspicious off-shore company, the bank eventually apologized, explaining politely that the money had been hidden to protect precious Russian assets from foreign claims and insisting that no laws had been broken. But Russian Duma Deputies charge that the central bank hid the reserves to lure more cash from the INF. The INF has so far uncovered no evidence of illegal diversion of its loans, but is now looking hard at how Russia has managed the entire $21 billion it has been lent since 1991.
Swiss and Russian officials are investigating two other cases with far smaller dollar values but with huge political stakes. In one instance Swiss authorities raided two companies, named Andava and Forus. They were allegedly used by Boris Berezovsky--one of Russia's richest titans and an intimate of Yeltsin who helped bankroll his 1996 re-election, and reputedly handles the Yeltsin family finances--to misappropriate hard-currency receipts diverted from the Russian airline Aeroflot. In the other instance a Swiss-based construction company called Mabetex allegedly paid bribes to government officials, notably Pavel Borodin, another Yeltsin intimate and manager of the Kremlin's vast properties, to win lucrative renovation contracts. One witness has told Swiss authorities he saw credit-card receipts for personal purchases made by Yeltsin and his daughters paid by Mabetex. Yeltsin, Borodin, Benex and Mabetex all deny the accusations. And the Russian President even repeated his denial two weeks ago directly to Clinton.
WHO ROBBED WHOM?
Americans naturally feel outraged at crime and corruption, but never more so than when these acts seem to undermine our best intentions. We wanted to help Russians build a government, society and economy just like ours, but we don't like to feel swindled in the process. And we don't like it when their crooks use our banks to do it.
What gives the scandals political resonance here is the way they refract the shock that our own effort to stage-manage Russia's successful transformation might have failed. The expectation of quick and miraculous success was naive when applied to a country with a scant history of capitalism, no experience with democracy, and no tradition of the rule of law. Whatever Washington did was a crapshoot. Russians have always cheated the system to survive or thrive, first the Czars, then the Party, now the elected government. Men who were once at home in the old regime hold power in the new, leaving little ground for reform to take root. Since the whole economy collapsed in August 1998, Russian politicians have been more interested in whom to blame than how to get out of the mess.