St. Petersburg, Russia – Federal Judge for Primorsky Kray was attacked on Friday at 6:50 pm. The roadside bomb was directed at his car, and narrowly missed the judge.
Kogalym, Siberia – Yuri Skarzhinsky, CEO of Lukoil Zapadnaya Sibir (Lukoil Western Siberia) was attacked Wednesday at 9:10 pm; the story broke in the Russian media today. He was shot six times by an assailant with a pistol in the foyer of his condo complex. Yuri Skarzhinsky formerly served as the chief of the local police, and later the head of regional economical police department. His area of investigation had been the oil companies, and he managed to successfully prosecute quite a few executives for corruption, and return 7 million dollars back to the regional budget. After his successful police career, he was hired by the Russian oil giant Lukoil. He survived the attack but remains in critical condition.
Elsewhere, Vladimir Platonov, the former governor of Tverskaya Oblast, has been sentenced to 5 years of prison, along with two of his business associates, who will spend 11 and 12 years in jail. In 2002, the governor stole 17.5 million dollars from the regional budget. As a result, the region's schools and hospitals didn’t have enough heating fuel that winter. Winter temperatures frequently drop to negative 30 Celsius in that area of the country.
This is just another day in the life for the nation’s top “businesses”; so why do you think people in Russia are generally unhappy, and doing business legally is not safe?
