Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor,…Your Yukos, Your Yachts: Internationalization of Predatory Raiding

• In Event: Global Responses to the Russia-Ukraine War

Abstract

While the US appears to be less interested in tired and poor, including primarily migrants from developing countries, the interest for foreign assets is growing rapidly. Among those assets are Russian oligarchs’ yachts and industrial giants. Courts in western democracies work actively on adjudicating cases regarding both privately owned and state-owned assets, resulting in arresting, seizing, and auctioning these sanctioned assets. Some oligarchs denounce their Russian citizenship or hide their yachts in safe jurisdictions, feeling victimized by the West, while the Russian government fights for its assets in foreign courts. The Yukos court trials saga combined with criminal prosecution of Khodorkovsky remains a most notorious case in the string of state orchestrated predatory raiding campaigns that raise serious concerns about the system of property rights in Russia. At the start of the market transition, both domestic and foreign investors were acquiring the most valuable Soviet industrial giants for a small portion of their market value only to lose them to predatory raiders later in transition. Institutional bottlenecks and lack of market infrastructure combined with high levels of corruption and bureaucratic delay made many Russian businesspersons victims, and now they are under attack in western democracies, which they considered safe haven for their money for a long while. The controversy of the mass privatization of the 1990s and loans-for-shares auctions on one hand, and western sanctions on the other hand bring to the fore issues of legitimacy of property rights and internationalization of predatory raiding, as discovered in this study.

Author

• Ararat Osipian, The New School