Tag Archives: vladimir putin

Rich with the talents of Russia

When I was 21, more than a year or two ago, I wanted to be a professional oboist. It wasn’t an utterly unrealistic ambition, but I soon realised that I wasn’t good enough to win one of the very few orchestral places available to oboists, and I certainly wasn’t brave enough. I’ve enjoyed playing as an amateur for the last 35 years and musical moments have been amongst the happiest in my life. It isn’t all or nothing. You can be a businessman and an amateur musician, or indeed a musician and an amateur businessman. If I didn’t have to spend hours making oboe reeds, I would play more often.

In retrospect, I don’t regret abandoning my musical ambitions. You can’t do everything, and what I’ve done I’ve enjoyed. As a business software consultant, software designer, and entrepreneur, I’ve led a less terrifying life and certainly a more secure and materially rewarding one.

The life of a professional classical musician is insecure, often uncomfortable, and it’s generally poorly paid, considering the talents and diligence required to make a success of it. Sadly, classical music is a minority interest, so it’s hard to argue for massive salary-boosting state support. The average age of audiences at concerts of classical music creeps ever upwards. At an opera house I can still feel young.

Few musicians become rich, but if they do, it’s usually because they find a wider audience. Take the Three Tenors, for example: Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras. When they came together regularly in the 1990s for acrobatic displays of the tenor’s skills, they made millions, deservedly.

In Eastern Europe, particularly, the life of a classical musician is hard. The best flee westwards, but those who remain must play and teach every hour or every day if they are to keep the wolf from the door. They can rarely buy the musical instruments they need and deserve, without help.

How wonderful, then, to hear that a modestly successful Russian cellist, Sergei Roldugin, is one of the richest musicians in the world. In 1980 he won third prize at the Prague Spring international Music Festival, went on to lead the orchestra at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg and taught at the St Petersburg Conservatory. He’s worth many tens, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. Unsurprisingly he’s described as a ‘musician and businessman’, and certainly it’s hard to see how playing the cello alone could have brought him such prosperity.

cello

In the musical world, as in all other worlds, you need talent, hard work, luck and good connections to succeed. Sergei Roldugin has been fortunate in all of these, not least in the last. He’s one of Vladimir Putin’s closest friends, godfather to Putin’s daughter, Maria. They’ve known each other for 40 years.

Best friends forever

roldugin

I hadn’t thought of Vladimir Putin as a fan of classical music. I’d understood that Abba was his cup of tea. But clearly he’s a fan of the cello and it appears that Roldugin’s friendship with Putin has put him in the way of some irresistible business opportunities, if the recently hacked Panama Papers are to be believed. Roldugin, who has no background in complex financial transactions, appears to have taken full advantage of them.

In 2014, when other close friends of Putin were alleged to have become immensely rich through their association with the President, Roldugin claimed to be the exception.  ‘I’ve got an apartment, a car and a dacha. I don’t have millions,’ he sais.

The Panama Papers suggest otherwise. They show that he’s involved with several offshore companies that have been wheeling and dealing with verve and imagination. Such expertise has little to do with playing the cello, and more to do with the borrowing and lending of vast sums of money for massive gain.

His gain? Who’s to say? Perhaps he doesn’t even know what’s being done in his name. Some suggest he’s merely the guardian of his old friend’s money.

Nyet is the usual stonewalling response to accusations of this nature in Russia. Roldugin, even Putin, are practised Nyet sayers. It seems that these complex financial transactions are all to do with providing musical instruments for Russia’s young musicians.

Five days ago, breaking his silence on the issue, Roldugin explained everything. He’d been regularly asking rich businessmen for donations.

‘Of course I went around to everyone I could and asked for donations. There’s nothing to catch me out on here; everything is open. In any case I am indeed rich; I am rich with the talent of Russia.’

Certainly classical musicians in Eastern Europe need support. But from whom, in the West, have these instruments been bought, and for whom in Russia? Will someone step forward to reveal a whole orchestra of fabulous Stradivarius instruments? If so, I’ll happily eat my oboe.

The Inane Idea of Leadership

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I’ve heard and read more than I can bear about ‘Leadership’.

leadership

Browse through the Group posts on LinkedIn and you’ll see hundreds on the subject (these are from the Project Management group):

These took me just five minutes to find.

I’ll never read a single one of them, not only because of the split infinitives, and the incorrect capitalisations, but because the entire concept, like its twin ‘success’, is utterly inane and entirely chimerical. Though I have to admit that ‘The Leadership Style of Anna Hazare’ does tickle my fancy a little (it turns out that he’s a 74-year-old former soldier fighting corruption in India, but I couldn’t read beyond the point where the writer introduced ‘four types’ of leadership).

I suspect that ‘leadership’ is originally an American concept, even if it’s caught on like a global epidemic amongst those who read and write for LinkedIn. I think of strong-jawed pioneers leading waggon trains into the unknown, slaughtering Indians as they go. I think of the ‘right stuff’ that took America’s astronauts to the Moon. I think of George W Bush leading the nation on a futile expedition to Iraq and of Donald Trump vowing to ‘make America great again’, by which he means ‘the greatest’. It’s essentially a military ideal closely linked to conquest, and it’s lauded in a country where too many Generals have made it to the White House.

I don’t believe in ‘leadership’. I don’t believe there’s an important quality you can distil from the mess of other qualities and characteristics that ordinary or exceptional people possess that is the very essence of ‘leadership’. Those who define it, train themselves in it, or chase after it are deluded. Those who crave it in others, wanting merely to follow, are yet more foolish.

Leaders find themselves ‘leading’, the best of them reluctantly, in virtue of their ideas, their courage, their determination, their principles, and their intelligence, sometimes entirely in virtue of their ability to delegate decision-making to others, or to achieve a consensus amongst their peers. The best are cajoled into the role (just as the UK’s Speaker of the House of Commons must be dragged to his chair following his election). The best don’t shoulder their way forwards and upwards. Sadly, it’s all too often delusion, ignorance, obstinacy, ruthlessness, self-interest, cruelty, skilful myth-making or obsession that inspires obedience in some and makes others into leaders. I think of Putin.

Let’s not forget that what we admire in today’s leaders we might revile or reject in them tomorrow. ‘Fred, the Shred’ who led the Royal Bank of Scotland to supremacy amongst the UK’s high street banks was later stripped of his knighthood when the bank nearly failed. Even Churchill, the right leader in 1940, was defeated at a General Election before victory was won in the East. Cecil Rhodes is not what he was.

Political leadership usually ends in failure. In business too, elevating the concept of ‘leadership’ to pre-eminence in the Pantheon of business ideals is plain stupid. Let’s hear much less about it and about its equally inane, intellectually vacuous twin, ‘success’.

Sitting Pretty

Monday’s edition of the BBC’s Panorama programme, Richard Bilton’s report on Putin’s Secret Riches, was a surprisingly sloppy and bitterly disappointing piece of mudslinging, at least by the BBC’s generally high standards of reporting, so it’s hardly surprising that spokesmen for Vladimir Putin, Russian’s President, were scornful.

putin mud

I am no fan of Vladimir Putin. He presides over a government that is inefficient, corrupt and shockingly illiberal, and he’s leading his country into relative poverty and isolation. Russia is a country where the judiciary is once again a mere instrument of Government, where racism and homophobia are institutionally entrenched, where bureaucracy and the rent-seeking of bureaucrats and elected officials stifles free enterprise, where organised crime thrives, where most of the media are state owned and controlled, where critics are shot or poisoned in foreign countries and where plausible accusations of meddling in the affairs of other countries are denied with aplomb.

At the heart of this horror stands an ever more popular President, firm in his denial, contemptuous of his enemies., immune to the mudslinging of local and foreign media, and impervious to the opinion of other Governments and the international community.

When accusations of corruption were made in 2008, Putin employed some wonderfully colourful and strikingly unstatesmanlike language to describe them. ‘It’s simply rubbish,‘ he said. ‘They just picked all of it out of someone’s nose and smeared it across their little papers.’

Monday’s BBC Panorama programme accused Putin of corruption on a massive scale. It alleged:

  • That Vladimir Putin is the richest man in Europe, with a personal fortune of more than 40 billion dollars
  • That he owns (or owns by proxy) vast swathes of shares in some of the country’s largest oil and gas companies
  • That he was given a 35 million dollar yacht by Roman Abramovich, the yacht’s running costs covered by the state
  • That he owns a vast palace on the Black Sea coast, built with money diverted from oligarchs’ donations for health care

The programme’s narrator and reporter interviewed businessmen and advisers who had once been close to Vladimir Putin, most of them now cowering in exile. But the sensationalist style of the programme, which included the clicking and whirring of a ‘spy’ camera as if capturing surreptitious stills of the protagonists – contrasted strikingly with the absence of real evidence.

Impudent Russian journalist, Stanislav Belkovsky, claims on camera that he’s seen evidence of an offshore company used to handle Putin’s wealth, and that ‘recorded conversations about ‘Mihail Ivanovich” (Putin’s nickname) prove this. Hearsay within hearsay, but no substantial documentary evidence.

In Nice, at a secret location, Sergey Pugachev makes similar claims but provides no evidence. He’s a banker wanted in Russia for ‘looting’ his own bailed-out bank. Richard Bilton fails, conspicuously, to mention that judgements made against Pugachev in the British Courts in 2014 (following a case brought by the Russian state) led to the freezing of much of his wealth, and that he fled Britain to France despite a court order that he should remain. Reliable witness?

Retired St Petersburg policeman, Andrei Zykov, claims there’s evidence Putin was given a villa in Spain by criminals in return for favours granted whilst Putin held public office in St Petersburg. There are ‘wire taps’ to ‘prove’ it, but we don’t hear them.

Another man, who also ‘fell out with the Kremlin’ claims that Roman Abramovich gave a 35 million dollar yacht to Putin, though the nominal owner is an offshore company. No evidence other than hearsay is offered to support the claim that Putin is the real owner.

And so on. Desperate stuff.

But, most sensationally, Adam Szubin, who oversees the imposition of sanctions at the US Treasury, announced that the US has long believed Putin to be corrupt. But he offered only accusation, and no evidence.

Of course, I don’t doubt that much of what Panorama alleged is true. But if Russian public opinion is ever to be turned against the President, and if the mud is ever to stick, they’ll have to do better than this.