Only five people on Forbes's list of the world's richest individuals beat Oleg Deripaska, the 39 year old Russian oligarch, who recently raided his US$30 billion kitty to acquire a 5 per cent stake in General Motors. That despite the fact that he can't enter the United States due to the suspicious origin of his wealth.
For the record and just in case you wondered, Roman Abramovich, best known to Western audiences as the owner of the English Premier League football club Chelsea, is no longer the richest Eastern European. His ‘paltry' US$22 billion, the lack of love from the Putin regime, and a US$300 million divorce, have cost him the not-so-coveted position at the top of the Wprost list of the 100 richest Eastern Europeans (50 of whom are billionaires).
Not surprisingly, thirty-three of Wprost's top 50 are Russians. Ukraine comes in second with ‘only' ten newly-minted billionaires. Four of the wealthiest former citizens of the Warsaw Block and former Yugoslavia are from Poland, two from Serbia and one from the Czech Republic. Most of them have been accused of getting rich by privatising the national resources of their respective countries of origin. All of them are on the Forbes global billionaires list.
The process that allowed them to get there is described by good students of Marxism as ‘the primary accumulation of capital'; the International Community uses the euphemism ‘privatisation', and most Eastern Europeans now simply refer to it as highway robbery.
In most cases, it went something like this: the country in transition issued some form of certificate/voucher/coupon to all citizens, which would have allowed the formerly collective owners of all national resources to convert them into shares. Given the sorry state of the said economies and the collapse of social security infrastructures, citizens sold their certificates for a fraction of their real value to finance their day-to-day survival to industrious individuals or signed them over to mutual funds for a promise of good return on investment. The new owners of certificates/vouchers/coupons converted them into majority ownership of state-owned companies, public infrastructure and resources. But that's only the relatively transparent and relatively legal part of it.
The real storyline runs something like this. A young Czech sets up a mutual fund. Thousands of citizens invest their vouchers in it. The mutual fund buys shares in a formerly state-owned company, strips them of assets and transfers cash to off-shore accounts; leaving the formerly state-protected collective owner of the means of production without the said means. And without their vouchers too. He runs off to the Bahamas, where he's now fighting extradition to the US - but only because he defrauded some US investors too. And the hand of the US justice system is longer and stronger than that of the Czech Republic.
Others chose more "elegant" roads to wealth. In most cases (Abramovich is but one example), more ‘elegant' means friendship with governing political elites.
The third-ranking on the Wprost list, the 55 year old Gennadiy Timochenko, is a former KGB colleague of Vladimir Putin, now a citizen of Finland and a resident of Switzerland. In February 2004, he was named by Ivan Ribkin, the current President of the Russian Duma, as the person protecting Putin's oil interests (he owns Gunvor International Limited, a Russian oil company headquartered in Geneva and also registered on the Virgin Islands). His wealth is listed at US$20 billion; however, it is impossible to tell if this figure accurately represents the real value of his assets. Just like it's impossible to tell their origins.
What is possible to establish is that most (but not all) of the top 50 ‘newly minted' Eastern European billionaires, as Forbes once referred to them, acquired their wealth at a great cost to those in their way (legally or not). Whether they are an aberration (as most Western politicians like to profess), or simply good students of the long forgotten process or the ‘primary accumulation of wealth'; the fact remains that their money keeps finding its way into legitimate businesses of the developed world. And that their wealth is paving the way for their own ‘legitimisation' as ‘businessmen', ‘achievers' and the embodiment of the exported American dream.
Which makes the masses of impoverished, robbed and otherwise fooled Eastern Europeans from whom this wealth is being ‘transferred' just an unfortunate bit of collateral damage. Forbes doesn't ask questions about collateral damage. It simply counts the pennies and proudly announces who made the cut. After all, collateral damage can be offset with some charity work. It's a bit like carbon trading. As for the people, what people?