Reality bites Russia's 'minigarchs'

Russia's oligarchs have lost spectacular sums of money lately, and are being forced to confront a new reality.

The influence of Russia's oligarchs dwindles by the week. They have lost spectacular sums of money lately: more than £155bn "since the credit crunch came knocking on Russia's door", was Bloomberg's estimate in December. More billions have gone since then. But the "true casualties" of the credit crunch, as Celia Walden put it in The Daily Telegraph, will not be the oligarchs most of whom still have more than enough to get by on but the "minigarchs".

These are the rich Russians who have made fortunes of between £50m and £100m, not by wielding political influence, but simply by being sharp businessmen. Now, however, with the banks calling in old loans and less ready to make new ones, many of the minigarchs have either already been ruined or are facing ruin. London, viewed from Moscow, may once have seemed like a promised land to them, says the historian Yuri Felshtinsky. Now it looks more like paradise lost.

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