Sometimes They Really Are Guilty

It is interesting to read one day about Tyco shareholders picking up more than half of the tab for an absurd, $2 million birthday party for an executive's wife, to read the next day that a health care CEO used fraudulent accounting practices to inflate the value of his company by billions, and to note that the scandal surrounding corrupt management of mutual funds continues to grow. Meanwhile, there is no sign that the President's buddy, Ken Lay, will ever face serious consequence for his malfeasance at the corporate helm of Enron.

At the same time, we are assured by many analysts and columnists, that "the sky is falling" in Russia because of the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, on corruption charges. Apparently, Russia's system has undergone such a transformation since the fall of communism that, whatever the faults our version of capitalism may have, Russia's "oligarchs" would never dream of engaging in the slightest act of impropriety, let alone engage in widespread corruption or tax evasion. Let's ignore the fact that the "privatization" of Russia's economy favored the politically connected, former KGB agents, and organized crime - that was last week, and now it's all squeaky clean.

At the Washington Post, David Ignatius speaks of Loot Turned Legitimate, and suggests that it is time for Russia to ignore the means by which the oligarchs obtained their money - "the time has come for Russia to accept the oligarchs as capitalists and provide a solid legal framework for their companies." In London, the Guardian's official stance is wary, but they are also running an editorial by James Meek, Our faces in Russia's mirror which suggests:

Khodorkovsky did not create Yukos. He did not discover the oil, build the refineries, lay the pipelines, put up the oil towns on which the wealth of Yukos was built. That was done by the Soviet Union and its people. And yet in western financial circles Khodorkovsky is treated as if he was something like an entrepreneur, as if he had earned the moral as well as the legal right to suck hundreds of millions out of the Russian oilfields into his own pocket.

No wonder there is so much concern in the west about Khodorkovsky's humiliation. It's a smudged, cracked, crooked mirror, but the overpaid private bureaucrats running our privatised industries, who fantasise that, like Bill Gates, they are genuine entrepreneurs worthy of their share options, can just about recognise their faces in there.

I wonder how many of our nation's people would like to be told, "never mind that your money, your land, your nation's resources were taken from you and handed out as spoils to a corrupt, unbelievably wealthy elite. It's for the best that they keep it."

As usual, it seems to depend upon whose ox is being gored.

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