According to Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, the model of state capitalism built by the Kremlin for two decades is failing.
Since 2018, Deripaska has been on the US sanctions list, and the US authorities consider him one of the closest oligarchs to Vladimir Putin. The businessman claims that the resources to finance the economy are close to exhaustion, the situation is “very difficult” and will remain so until at least 2025. At the economic forum in Krasnoyarsk, he said, quotes The Moscow Times:
“State capitalism, GosGazMyas is a road to nowhere. I am horrified to see the resources that have been spent over the past year, obviously, in vain. I used to think it was in the billions, but now, I see, the bill is already in the trillions.”
According to the billionaire, plans to transfer the economy to the rails of state planning and state control are doomed to failure, as well as an attempt to live in isolation from the world:
“There will be no money next year. We will need foreign investors.”
However, according to Deripaska, Western companies have left Russia “for a long time”, and attempts to develop exports to the markets of “friendly countries” are fraught with difficulties, since the rules of the game are “different”. And at the same time, within Russia, gigantic resources are being spent on maintaining the security and bureaucratic apparatus: in the new year, the government increased spending on special services, the police and the National Guard by 1.5 times, and taking into account the army, it spends every third ruble of the federal budget on security forces.
Deripaska considers this a “serious burden on the economy”, suggesting reducing the number of officials by 2-3 times, and the number of law enforcement officers – “a couple of times”:
“The question is already ripe that there is too much of this state apparatus and state capitalism. We need more freedom, really more freedom of competition.”
The richest Russian businessman, who was included in the world’s top 10 Forbes, Deripaska was one of the first victims of US sanctions and lost his aluminum empire, knocked together, the newspaper recalls, in the bloody chaos of the 1990s. According to Forbes, now his fortune is estimated at $ 1.7 billion, the businessman ranks 50th in Russia.
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