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Eastern Europe
September 28, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 16
Some of the ideas the Kremlin has been throwing around recently – such as presidential advisor Andrei Belousov’s “super tax” suggestion – sug- gest the Kremlin will simply force the oligarchs to invest. In a meeting with Belousov in August the collected captains of industry agreed to invest $4.5bn, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the $131bn that came by itself in the boom years. And that was ten years ago; if there was a another boom presumably the amount of return- ing flight capital could be multiple times higher.
Bloomberg ran a story this week entitled “US Sanctions Driving Russian billionaires Into Putin’s Arms” claiming that Russia’s top businessmen were moving their money back to the motherland. But the piece turned out to be controversial.
Tim Ash, senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, said in an email to clients: “The data just does not show this. Look at private sector capital flow data from the CBR. It’s shows the opposite, private sector flight capital increasing, if anything.”
CBR data shows that private capital outflows from Russia have fallen over the last year from $17.4bn for 1H18 versus $14.4bn in the same period one
Ukraine’s presidential election polls vary widely on candidates' popularity
Ben Aris in Berlin
The polls measuring support for the candidates standing in Ukraine’s March 2019 presidential election vary very widely. Kyiv-based investment bank Concorde Capital has suggested that President Petro Poroshenko is funding some polls that downplay the lead opposition leader,
year earlier. This is according to data captured by the CBR on the balance of payments method of calculation and clearly the CBR does not see all the money flowing in and out of Russia. However, as its clean up of the banking sector continues one of the main goals has been to close down the “money chute” used by businessmen to whisk their earnings offshore undetected by the authori- ties. According to the central bank the amount
of this money laundering has been massively reduced in the last few years.
It is very hard to get a clear picture of what is happening within the details of the capital flows. Certainly Putin’s deoffshorisation campaign has encouraged some oligarchs to bring their money home. In an interview with bne IntelliNews two years ago when the campaign was at its height Dmitri Mints, the CEO of the O1 real estate company, said he had seen hundreds of millions of offshore oligarch money flow into high-end Moscow real estate in the previous year.
But at the same time there are oligarchs that are more scared of a Kremlin appropriation than US sanctions and are sending money out in large amounts."
The polls measuring the support for the candidates standing in Ukraine’s March 2019 presidential election vary very widely.
former prime minister and head of Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party Yulia Tymoshenko has over him.
Two polls have come out in the last week that show radically different results and the differences between them are outside their statistical margins of error.