By Ellen Pinchuk and Yuriy Humber
Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said subduing billionaires has never been his goal as long as their fortunes are earned legally and they contribute to the social good of the country.
“For some reason there is an opinion that I’m a destroyer of billionaires,” Putin said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I never had it as a goal to destroy billionaires. If a person within the law acquires considerable property, financial resources, God give him good health.”
Putin, a former KGB colonel, vowed while campaigning for the presidency in 2000 that “oligarchs will cease to exist as a class” under his leadership. Russia later sentenced Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, to eight years in a Siberian penal colony for fraud and tax evasion and confiscated his oil producer, OAO Yukos Oil Co., which was sold in pieces to help recover more than $30 billion in back taxes.
During Putin’s second term, which started in 2004, the number of Russian billionaires tripled to 110, the most in the world after the U.S., according to Forbes magazine. By May 2008, when Putin was succeeded by Dmitry Medvedev, surging commodity prices had pushed the combined wealth of those billionaires to $522 billion, or almost half of the country’s gross domestic product.
‘Social Responsibility’
Last July, Putin publicly rebuked coal producer OAO Mechel owner Igor Zyuzin for citing illness as a reason for missing a government meeting to discuss surging prices in the industry. Zyuzin, 48, better get well soon, “otherwise, we’ll need to send him a doctor and clean up all these problems,” Putin said at the time. Four days later, Putin accused Mechel of avoiding taxes, triggering a 50 percent fall of Mechel’s share price for the week, costing Zyuzin as much as $6.5 billion in estimated personal wealth.
By October, Putin’s attack on Mechel, plunging commodity prices, Russia’s five-day war with Georgia and the global credit squeeze had combined to reduce the collective wealth of the country’s 25 richest men, including Zyuzin, by at least $230 billion, according to Bloomberg calculations.
The kind of billionaires Putin said he’s ready to support include Vyacheslav Kantor of fertilizer maker OAO Acron. Putin visited an Acron facility near Velikiy Novgorod, the ninth century trading hub between Moscow and St. Petersburg, on the day of the interview, which was held in an Acron conference room.
Jobs, Sports
“The owners of this enterprise not only keep jobs in quite difficult conditions, they also develop the social sphere,” Putin said, adding that he was impressed that of the factory’s 5,000 staff, 3,000 were involved in sports programs that Acron sponsored. Putin, 56, a sports enthusiast, has a black belt in judo and oversaw the country’s winning bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.
In his meeting with Putin, 56, Kantor agreed to continue supplying Russian farmers with fertilizers at “prices coordinated with the Agriculture Ministry.”
“We, as members of a civil society, perfectly understand our responsibility before Russian agriculture,” Kantor said, according to remarks posted on the Kremlin’s Web site. “For us, it is not a burden, not some kind of order to jump to.”
Acron is among the Russian companies that have applied for some of the $50 billion in emergency funding the government has earmarked for paying off foreign corporate debt. Putin is the chairman of the supervisory board of VEB, or Vnesheconombank, the state bank that is dispending the funding.
“Owners of the enterprise are not poor people,” Putin said. “If those who deal with real production also have a feeling of social responsibility, we will support such people.”
