#5
Polit.ru
November 29, 2001
Herostrates' Business
Pending liquidation of TV-6 is a mirror reflecting Russia's defective economic order, where inferior enterprises can be declared good and competitive, whereas profitable business can be declared bankrupt
By Kirill Rogov
(therussianissues.com)

Political implications of the TV-6 liquidation yarn are clear and ordinary. The Kremlin wants to strip Berezovsky of TV-6 and other instruments of influence. With this aim in mind, a minority shareholder LUKoil (15% stake in TV-6) initiated a legal campaign to ensure the company's demise. This is the second such operation conducted by the oil major.

Years ago, the same scenario was implemented when LUKoil helped ruin the Izvsetia daily after they published a story about the then Prime Minister Chernomyrdin's billion-worth personal property. Just to remind you, LUKoil had a minor stake in the Izvestia, too. In other words, LUKoil while having no strategic interests in the media area and obviously having vested interests in the oil area, used to secure considerable stakes in media outlets in order to trade them to the state when necessary - and at a good price. The price is clear. LUKoil's key strategy today is to expand into the neighboring oil markets beyond Russia and they desperately need the Russian government's uncompromising and constant backing.

But in the current case, there is an exceptionally remarkable nuance. So, LUKoil is a minority shareholder in TV-6, and for many years they had been seeing the TV company suffering losses. After the new management and new team came to the channel, its business started growing fast and its ratings are on the rise. At this very moment, LUKoil that had been peacefully dozing away the TV-6 board sessions, wakes up and initiates the procedure aimed at devastating its own business.

That is to say, a minority shareholder is trying to close down an obviously successful company claiming it is unsuccessful. The situation that appears to be absurd from the market economy's standpoint, can be easily explained. The dividends the TV company gains thanks to its successes in TV industry are nothing as compared with the dividends gained on the market of state-given preferences and benefits. As a result, in this economic system, a good (competitive) enterprise turns out to be utterly non-competitive and unprofitable, and the bad one is just the other way round. Because a bad enterprise is created as a part of the non-competitive market with all its prosecutors from Sochi, Kremlin's corridors and PR managers.

The most remarkable thing about the TV-6 liquidation yarn is not the Kremlin's traditional plot covered with the fig-leaves of court sessions and arbitration rulings, but the outrageous indifference of the public (from President Putin to the avid spectators of he "Behind the Glass" reality show) to the good enterprise and the sheer habit for the economic system that is unable to provide for the good enterprise's competitiveness. The ongoing story about the TV-6 liquidation is an impressively shameful event form the standpoint of the work and business ethics.