Help the Moldovan company RITLabs to survive
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As a rule, when Moldova is in the news, it is rarely good news.
> We think it is a deliberate attempt to destroy our company.
That would probably be true. Knowing how things work there.
This is the country which had $1B stolen from it. Not from a company, but from the country! Sounds too crazy to be true? Nope, it is true in Moldova.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/news/economy/moldova-stolen-...
That is a whooping 12% of its GDP. Imagine someone walking away with $2T away from US.
On the other hand, if you are a corrupt criminal, Moldova is a nice place to hang out. You can make your own laws, pay your way out of anything. Corruption attracts corruption.
EDIT: This is also a country were when I lived there, someone put a bomb under the door of someone they don't like in a 5 story apartment building. I was in the evening on the phone with someone and the whole building shook, thought it was an earthquake. Nope, apartment building next door was bombed. The part of the roof and the part of the wall was missing. Could see people's furniture inside and all after the dust settled. It was miracle nobody died.
That, unfortunately, is exactly true. I was lucky to emigrate as a child, and my sad, cynical reaction to whenever I see "Moldova" on a page out of a corner of my eye is "oh boy, this is going to be a good one" -- not because I wish them ill, but because the only real hope there is for individuals who can emigrate, not for the country. Fortunately, Romania is handing out citizenships to any Moldovan that cares to ask (in Romanian), and throughout the nineties and the naughts hundreds of thousands of Moldovans have been working throughout Russia, Ukraine and the EU. The remittances from emigres to their relatives left behind are a significant part of all money flows into the country.
I can't see any path forward for them until they become part of either Romania or Russia, whole or in pieces. That, in turn, won't happen, partly for geopolitical reasons, and partly because small new nations are fucked in the head and will rather cut their own balls off than let go of any territory. Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia are excellent post-soviet examples: to continue the unfortunate metaphor, the respective sets of balls (which Russia's got a firm grasp on through military presence and financial assistance) are the separatist Transnistria, Eastern Ukraine, Abkhasia and Ossetia. This is a clever technique, and the fact that it's by now simultaneously well-understood and consistently successful unfortunately suggests that these countries' geopolitical limbo is partly of their own making.
The kind of news that pop up are: - Moldovan police arrest a guy looking for a buyer for 2 kg of plutonium in his car - Moscow road police arrest a Moldovan for naked drunk-driving - A sad, sad, hopeless BBC documentary about an orphanage 30km away from the capital that the foreign volunteers come to renovate and donate mattresses and toys to, only to find the toys gone and building materials stolen when they come back for a visit six months later. - Moldova becomes one of the desperately poor countries chosen for Michelle Obama's program that supports the education of girls.
I remember being surprised when I saw Moldova declared the poorest country in Europe -- we were far from rich, but we lived in the capital and my parents shielded us well. Unfortunately, Moldova shows up at the top of that ranking year after year, except for apparently 2015, when Ukraine's economy took a hit bad enough to earn it this dubious honor. The underlying reality is that life outside the capital is extremely hard, life in the capital is just hard, and the rules of the game are set by the elites that own whatever little wealth is to be found in Moldova.
More to the point regarding the OP of the thread, the capital, Chișinău, and its power and business community, is so small that in the very best scenario of a successful intervention from the outside, their long- and medium- term survival chances are zero. Any Moldovan company's most valuable business asset is the right connections, and apparently that's the asset that RIT Labs no longer has. If they really don't have any funds stashed outside of Moldova, they're completely out of their minds. In any case, they really should realize they're de-facto already insolvent and focus on how to setup their business outside the country and ask their supporters to help them with that. It's extremely sad, but they couldn't have possibly not known what country they were operating in (for nearly twenty years now) and what the risks are.
What would happen if someone with more money than all the existing cartels combined were to very, very quietly arrive, made their existence and presence known, and use their power to enforce arbitrary new laws that worked to suffocate corruption and make it die out? Furthermore, what would this person benefit from doing this?
I'm not asking "would it work out or would it not," I'm just curious, from the perspective of an uninformed (and admittedly uneducated) bystander, what would play out, what the economical and societal kickback would be, and what would (or could) be gained.
I realize the economy is noteworthy enough that the list of potential candidates to fulfill this position is small, so this discussion is mostly theoretical and educational in scope.
More generally speaking, even as a thought experiment, the main obstacle is that the actual corruption is the tip of the iceberg -- or the flower that blooms from the plant and the roots of a civil society that operates in such a way. I don't know whether anybody ever succeeded in changing civic culture from the top down. I'd be surprised and I'd expect that this would require the use of violence unacceptable to anyone that minds corruption. My guess is that the only way towards a healthier social culture is evolutionary.
I think that the only way strong civil societies ever developed historically is in the conditions of gradually increasing prosperity or at least the standard of living above subsistence that gives the luxury of a bit of toil-free time and that little extra buffer of security that you're not constantly under the immediate risk of being hungry and homeless tomorrow if something goes wrong. In a man eat man environment, you do what you have to do to survive. There's significant evidence with multiple meta-analyses at this point that anxiety has strong effects on attention and cognitive performance (e.g http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08917779108248762). There's a good reason why, as per de Tocqueville's astute observation, revolutions occur not when bad conditions get worse, but when gradually improving conditions suddenly become worse.
The slightly better-off and the rich face different issues. Multiple studies suggest that the rich in societies with high inequality are a lot more anxious and less satisfied with their life. It's easy to imagine why that might be -- the costs of falling down the food chain in a highly unequal society are very serious, and the perceived threat from the have-nots is substantial. (Now, inequality in a society where the lowest incomes are far above the living wage is probably far less of a problem.)
Ancient Greece & Mediterranean, pre-industrial Britain and other European countries after the population-culling blessing of the Black Plague (I'm not kidding), the US, fertile North & South of China before and after 0 AD all had conditions of some sort that made starting down this road of growth a bit easier.
It's of course a catch-22. We don't really know how to engineer strong civil societies and prosperity, for all our chest-beating. The evidence is abundant. Because of that, I think that we ought to be a lot less dismissive about "increased standard of living without freedom" that China is often accused of. I think we know of many more examples of prosperity producing strong civil societies than the inverse.
Not so hard to imagine:
https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/want-cut-govern...
Moldova's $1 billion probably got "lost" in a similar way - corruption that doesn't appear in the books.
Speaking of which, any official GDP statistic is probably a number with zero significant digits. Figuring out what the off-the-grid money flows are is a difficult and personally reckless task, and there's a million reasons to suspect a great deal of artistic licence in any above-ground records.
You exhibit a severe case of reading comprehension disability. For these money to be stolen "from the country" it would have required the disappearance of funds from the Treasury or the bank accounts belonging to the central administration.
That was not the case: the money had been syphoned off from 2/two commercial banks, namely Banca de Economii (Savings Bank), Banca Sociala (Social Bank), and Unibank.
Except for the names, all this info in in the CNN linked to.
And to pre-empt a silly reply, no, the National Bank bailing out these banks doesn't mean the theft extended to the government. That's the government being either stupid or having no choice. The theft itself was from companies.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritlabs
"В 2013 году фирма удостоилась звания «Сознательный налогоплательщик»[4], учрежденного Главной Государственной Налоговой Инспекцией Республики Молдова."
translation:
"In 2013 the company was awarded the title "Conscious Taxpayer" by the Moldova State Tax Agency (ie. like IRS) "
and according to this http://logos.press.md/node/38228 the company was also given "Certificate of Trust" along with the title which meant official guarantee of absence of tax audits for the 2 years following that.
Edit: After spending some time Google-ing it seems just a simple case of extortion by the team consisting of a local police inspector, prosecutor and a judge, i.e. it looks like RitLabs, despite their good taxpayer status, has still missed (and seems to be stubbornly refusing) to pay some local "tax" :)
Focusing on the largely theoretical concepts of tax and law is an extremely inefficient way to try to understand Moldova, as well as a number of other countries.
Here's the full story:
I've seen publications in local[2] "press" about the case although it focuses only on corruption and there is no mention of internal company's politics there.
[1] at time I worked there it was the only source of revenue, not sure if any other product take off since
[2] yep, I'm in Moldova
In this case, it appears to be the result of a dispute between a former owner and current one. In that case, this appeal is only one side of the story, and the judge may well be proceeding based on evidence provided to back up any allegations.
I'm writing this because as much as I've witnessed corruption, I've also witnessed shady characters blaming everyone else for their misdeeds, especially the country, judiciary etc. "It's the oppressive regime that caused me to do something wrong, now they're repressing me" etc.
While I'm not suggesting the company is at fault, it is also not clear that there is no cause for what is happening. Calling for foreigners to apply diplomatic pressure to the Moldovan state without having the facts of the case is also a form of extra-judiciary pressure, much like the alleged conspiracy against the company.
Crowdfunding international pressure instead is a waste of time and their supporters' very scarce attention and interest.
Will help as much as I can, but a piece of advice to Ritlab team - Consider moving your company outside of Moldova and afterwards write a "Thank You" letter ;)