I
venture that few outside the Russian Federation will even know the
name of Anatoly Chubais, today the CEO of a Russian high-tech company
called Rusnano. Following the high-profile November 15 arrest of
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s Minister of Economics, Alexei
Ulyukaev, on charges of accepting at least $2 million in bribes in a
state privatization involving Rosneft and Bashneft energy companies,
the spotlight has turned to the company of Anatoly Chubais, Boris
Yeltsin’s 1990s privatization czar, today CEO of state-owned
Rusnano. If charges are formally brought against Chubais–undeniably
one of the most hated of the Yeltsin-era kleptocrat “reformers”
who worked with the CIA during the 1990’s to plunder Russian state
assets worth hundreds of billions for just pennies – it will signal
that Putin feels in a strong enough position to purge the pro-free
market liberal mafia that still holds a lock grip on the development
of the Russian economy.
by
F. William Engdahl for the Saker blog
On 16
November, the day after the dramatic arrest of Ulyukaev, state
prosecutors and police raided the offices of Chubias’ Rusnano.
Notable about the reports of the prosecutors’ questioning Chubais
and other top officers at Rusnano, is the fact that several have fled
Russia in recent months to avoid prosecution. To the present, Chubais
remains, and vehemently claims innocence.
In my view,
there is vastly more at stake here than the innocence or guilt of
Chubais. This move, if combined with the arrest of Ulyukaev, signals
a major cleanup of corrupt elements who, beginning even before 1991,
organized to sell Russia to the CIA and Western speculators like
George Soros.
Some history
that has generally been blacked out in the West about the true role
of Anatoly Chubais and the Yeltsin Presidency are instructive to also
understand the irrational rage of Washington and US banks and
oligarchs directed at Putin and at everything he does to re-establish
Russian sovereignty and stability.
Part
3 - Soros to the Yeltsin Rescue
This left
many Russian citizens feeling cheated, royally screwed, furious as
their dreams of a promised share in “capitalist private property”
vanished, along with their savings, during the Central Bank
hyperinflation money printing, another part of George H W Bush’s
Operation Hammer. By 1993 the pressures from all sides including the
Duma were dramatically rising. The population was demanding action.
The Supreme Soviet, the upper house, was drafting a bill that would
freeze the entire privatization process. The opposition was becoming
so great that Chubais ultimately had to rely largely on Yeltsin’s
presidential decrees, not parliamentary approval, for implementation.
The Harvard HIID’s Moscow man, the CIA’s Jonathan Hay and his
HIID associates, drafted many of the decrees. USAID’s Walter Coles,
whose office funded the Chubais privatizations via HIID admitted, “If
we needed a decree, Chubais didn’t have to go through the
bureaucracy.” Russia’s nascent efforts to establish some form
of parliamentary democracy or even checks on dictatorial Presidential
power were of little interest to Washington officials or to Chubais
and his cabal around Yeltsin.
At that
point, as opposition threatened to get out of hand, Yeltsin felt
forced to agree to a national referendum on the entire privatization
process. The date was to be April 25, 1993.
The
referendum contained four yes/no questions: (1) do you support
Yeltsin, (2) do you support Yeltsin’s economic policy, (3) do you
want early elections for President, and (4) do you want early
elections for parliament?
Facing sure
defeat, Chubais, likely on advice from his Harvard mentors, arranged
to secretly meet with US billionaire George Soros. Soros agreed to
finance on behalf of Yeltsin the Referendum campaign. Soros funneled
$1 million, a huge sum on Russia at the time, to offshore accounts
set up for Chubais to use to buy media exposure. Yeltsin survived by
a slim 52% and privatization of major Russian industrial companies
went forward. Yeltsin was giving the Crown Jewels and much more to a
cabal of CIA-backed Russian oligarchs as well later to Soros himself.
From
Washington, Summers at Treasury architected the Chubais-Gaidar
privatization with Jeffrey Sachs and Andrei Schleifer serving to
directly convey the plans to their Yeltsin economic advisers. The
Chubais-Washington privatization of Russian assets was a theft on a
scale unprecedented in any nation, even in wartime. From 1992 to
1994, ownership of 15,000 firms was transferred from state control
largely to the new billionaire oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky and
Berezhovsky via the Chubais-Washington voucher program.
Source
and references:
Comments
Post a Comment