[LINK] "Putin’s Friends Reap Billions in Deals as Economy Teeters"

[rfmcdonald]

Writing for Bloomberg, Henry Meyer, Ilya Arkhipov and Alan Katz note how the Russian economy has been taken over by an oligarchy linked personally to Putin. The pie might well be about to shrink, but they'll have more of it.

Having grown rich on government contracts during the boom in Putin’s Russia, friends of the president are benefiting anew as times grow tough. Lucrative orders keep rolling in for the favored few even as western sanctions and a collapse in oil prices push the economy to the brink.

The development has polarized Russia’s oligarchy and pitted Putin’s small circle against less well-connected rivals in a battle for money and privilege.

Companies linked to [Arkady] Rotenberg and another Putin confidant, Gennady Timchenko -- both targeted by U.S. sanctions for their ties to the president -- are landing a growing amount of state contracts. Together, they have won at least 309 billion rubles of work since U.S. sanctions were imposed in March, filings show. That figure -- which works out to about $8.1 billion at the average exchange rate over the period -- is 12 percent more than they received in all of 2013.

A Rotenberg-affiliated company is also about to secure a 228-billion-ruble order to build a bridge to Crimea, which Russia annexed in March, according to a high-ranking government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the contract hasn’t been officially awarded.

[. . .]

In all, companies linked to Rotenberg and Timchenko have received orders since March that are equivalent to more than a fifth of what the government spent on contracts in the first nine months of the year.