Word: oligarchs
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...reason for turning the screws on Khodorkovsky may be that in prison, his political star seems to be rising. Recent opinion polls have shown growing sympathy for Khodorkovsky even among sections of the public that had previously dismissed him simply as another unscrupulous oligarch. "The Kremlin fears that Khodorkovsky will emerge from prison to unite left and right democratic opposition groups," Kondaurov speculates. If so, Khodorkovsky may be in grave danger: "He'll either walk out of the camp as the winner," says Kondaurov, "or they'll carry him out feet first...
...persecution may have actually helped Khodorkovsky's image in the eyes of ordinary Russians. Unlike other oligarchs who went abroad with the billions they'd amassed during the Yeltsin years, the Yukos tycoon returned to face a trial widely viewed as crooked, and ultimately prison. In many an eye, that may have transformed him from yet another sleazy oligarch into the latter-day equivalent of that Soviet-era icon of dissent: a prisoner of conscience. "The Kremlin has done free campaigning for him," quips legislator Alexei Mitrophanov...
...ease the burden of cleaning up after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster next door in Ukraine, which contaminated almost 23% of Belarus and still costs the government nearly 25% of its meager $3 billion budget. The Batska promised to prevent Russian-style plunder of the new nation by capitalist oligarchs. But voters never imagined he would take them back to the Stalinist past. Once in office, he rolled back privatization, stifled economic reforms, renationalized most banks, stepped up centralized controls and preserved collective farms. Minsk today looks like the set for a 1950s Soviet movie. Its broad boulevards, designed...
With just a month to go before the presidential elections, scheduled for Feb. 7, President Ferdinand Marcos and Opposition Candidate Corazon Aquino last week abandoned all pretense of civility. Marcos denounced Aquino as an "oligarch" and hinted that she has money stashed in foreign bank accounts. Scoffing at Aquino's vague plans for U.S. military installations at Subic Bay and Clark Air Base after 1991, Marcos accused his rival of playing "political football." He also charged that Aquino is backed by "pinkos and Communists...
...CONVICTED. MIKHAIL KHODORKOVSKY, 41, former chief of Russian oil giant Yukos, who became the country's wealthiest oligarch as state industries were privatized after the collapse of the Soviet Union; on charges including tax evasion and fraud; in Moscow. The conviction ended a long trial that critics claimed was part of a politically motivated campaign by the Kremlin to deter the billionaire from financing opposition to Vladimir Putin and discourage independent business. Khodorkovsky, whose now-dwindled fortune was once estimated at $15 billion, was sentenced to nine years in prison, which will remove him from the scene well past Russia...