For Alexander Lebedev, hardly a week goes by without a call from a crooked security-services agent or cop angling for a chunk of his $3.4 billion fortune. It’s not a lifestyle he wishes for his son, Evgeny.
“Business in our country is like wrestling with bears,” Lebedev said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek for its July 12 issue. “I’m not sure you’d want to pass that on to your son — would you?”
At 50, Lebedev is already pondering a dilemma that will confront the entrepreneurs and industrialists who amassed riches in the early years of post-communist Russia: What will become of their billions — sometimes acquired through unorthodox means — and how should they plan their successions?
By 2020, the average age of the nation’s top 50 businessmen will exceed 60. While the wealthy may outlive the average male lifespan of 62, the transfer of assets to the next generation is a pressing issue in a country where property rights can’t be guaranteed and corruption ranks on par with Cambodia, Venezuela and Sierra Leone, according to Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International.
“There is almost no such thing as private property in Russia,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, a former Kremlin adviser who now heads the National Strategy Institute, a Moscow-based think tank. “It’s no harder for the authorities to fire an owner than it is an employee.”
That was apparent in the fallout from a 2007 coal-mining accident in Siberia that killed more than 100 people, prompting the regional governor to insist on an ownership change. Georgy Lavrik, the pit’s general director, who had inherited the asset from his father a year earlier, sold his 40 per cent stake.
Russia ranks 143rd out of 179 countries in the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, with protection of private property “weak” and the judicial system “corrupt,” according to the Washington- based Heritage Foundation.
“The easiest asset to transfer to children will be cash in accounts outside of Russia, such as in Swiss banks, and property,” Lebedev said in his Moscow office. An ex-KGB agent who worked in London as the Soviet Embassy’s economic attache, Lebedev owns a house near Hampton Court Palace outside the city, a 13th-century castle in Italy, a French chateau and the Swiss Chateau Guetsch, with its own funicular and luxury restaurant.
Telecom magnate Vladimir Yevtushenkov has primed his son and daughter by giving them executive roles.
