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Comment by AnonCoward4 | Hacker News Reader

In Germany this is called "Gratismut" (gratis bravery). It's the current thing to hate Russia, so they don't lose anything by doing a passionate write-up about it. McDonald's also wants to convince you that they have any values, but in reality they have no problem with horrendous human rights violations in other countries.

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Exactly. Same as Apple waxing lyrical about privacy, all the BLM bandwagon jumping in 2020, etc etc ad nauseam

Or, more commonly, „virtue signaling“.

Which is bullshit, of course. They are giving up doing business in a rather large country. It’s certainly not free.

What changed here of course is that after Putin gave Aeroloft the go ahead to seize aircraft they were leasing, western business lost any appetite for the Russian market. When your assets can be taken over at any moment and its encouraged by the state, its best to cut your losses.

A similar but more drastic example are the various communist revolutions in the 20th century. It was standard practice for the new governments to cancel any debts or obligations the previous government had and seize all sorts of foreign owned assets in country. That inevitably destroyed its diplomatic relations with many nations for decades.

So as you note, its not because McDonald's or any other corporation has morals, they are amoral entities. Its all just business and right now business in Russia is bad.

Do not forget that there was a wave of seizures of russian-owned assets in the west.

I would not be surprised, if Aeroflot still had to pay the leases they owe, but the proceeds would be paid to subjects who had their assets seized abroad. Until it evens out 1:1.

I could be mistaken but with the exception of Germany seizing the gazprom terminal, I think all of the other seizures have been to specifically sanctioned individuals. Of course in Russia they have a oligarchy so they probably see sanctioning a person the same as sanctioning a company.

There is no such thing as a yacht owned by a person; even if you wanted to operate some small one, you would create SPE (=special purpose entity, i.e. a company) for it. So they were owned by companies. Yachts are operated as businesses, especially larger ones.

And it is not just about yachts and airplanes. There were freezed accounts in usd and eur, i.e. the primary motivator for switching sale of oil and gas to rubles. These were owned by companies too.

So in this regard, there's no difference. The famous Bismarck quote about Russians comes to mind.

I understand how the ultra rich operate. There is still a difference between seizing personal assets that are in shell companies for tax reasons or what have you and seizing capital of real companies that do real business.

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