Why Russia Locks Up So Many Entrepreneurs
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Corruption is like an infectious disease. It infects the body from the head to the toes. Corruption is involved in every stage of a person's life. When a person is born, in the hospital bribes need to be doled out to nurses, doctors and staff if appropriate care is expected. In school starting from kindergaden and all through highschool teachers and principles are bribed to ensure good grades are assigned.
Then bribes are given to government officials. Say, if you take a driver's exam (this happened to me) they will fail you on purpose expecting that you will realize that you need to pay them a bribe in order to pass it. It is not that are you good or not, it doesn't matter, because others pay, pay is expected always and those that don't pay get failed until they pay.
There is a price you can pay to get away with murder. There is a price you pay to the court DNA tester to either fabricate or deny a paternity test. There is a price for every single piece of certificate or license issued for conducting a business( and, not surprisingly the number of said certificates and licenses never decreases ).
It is not just bribes. It is also nepotism. There is so much freakin' incompetence because people who are not qualified are put in position just as a result of being related to some higher-up.
This corruption is also transmitted to offspring. Children observe their parents interact with the corrupt system and they learn to do the same, in the process also become corrupt.
To get back to the article. I think a lot of businessmen get locked up because they did not play by the un-official rules and thought, perhaps some thought, they could function like they would do in the West or in America.
Whilst the situation in Russia is undoubtedly horrific, let's not pretend that corruption isn't endemic in the rest of the world; some counties have just legalized it to some extent.
Crony capitalism is criticised but rarely has action taken against it, and political campaign donations are seen as being perfectly acceptable. It doesn't appear to matter whether it's giving money to US senators, or joining "donor's clubs" that guarantee access to the UK's prime minister, e.g.:
And yes, that kind of problem seems to be present all around the world. Probably, it's something related to human nature. And sometimes, it looks like the system is trying to encourage that behavior. We learn of the importance of knowing certain people, pertaining to certain circles, making contacts, grow our social network, and so on.
As a simple example, things like LinkedIn are essentially encouraging the use of our contacts, to get an advantage in our professional careers. Doing that in public service, would be unethical (and most probably, illegal). But doing it in the private sector, seems to be fine. So, that dichotomy blurs as long as it doesn't go too far away. But then, you'll eventually end up in that crony capitalism... unless something or someone stops you. And sadly, the law doesn't seem to be stopping anyone.
wikipedia: The word "crony" first appeared in 18th century London, according to the Oxford English Dictionary to be derived from the Greek word χρόνιος (chronios), meaning "long-term".[2]
The worst part about the article is the fact that there is no fair trial in Russia.
Imagine a fictitious world where everything is corrupt, but the legal system. It isn't a perfect place to live, but, you know that at the very least your freedom is protected, your contract if breached is remunerated etc.
Imagine a fictitious world where everything is not corrupt, but the legal system is. In such place, one has no freedom, for out of spite perhaps, out of jealousy, out of greed, someone could simply send you to prison.
7 acquittals in 1000 cases, and even then 5 overturned, so practically only 2 people being acquitted in 1000 cases is a practical tyrannical state.
In the west, at least, the legal system protects against corruption by itself not being corrupt. If such bastion of freedom fails, then the land is no longer free.
Is it? I think it's hard to argue that it ISN'T. How else can you justify poor people getting 20+ year sentences for relatively minor crimes, while white collar criminals can steal MILLIONS, and get a slap on the wrist? When's the last time you saw a major celebrity or pro athlete actually A: Get convicted for something, and B: Serve real time?
I think America may be a bit of an exception actually since you guys elect your judges. That sounds ridiculous to me. It is like electing your doctor or your engineers. Some things simply are best left to technocrats.
That said, in the UK at least, you have the choice of five appeals before a final, conclusive say is given in your case.
Take for example Assange, the Wikileaks founder. It is difficult to find a more political example. He went up to the highest court. That final hearing was held in public, as all hearings are, it was televised, again as all hearings are, you can read the judicial decision, as with all judicial decision. No one was corrupted. You can't corrupt them, because there is complete transparency.
Now take the hacking scandal. At least 10 people have been imprisoned and are awaiting trial I think. Maddof is another example. We will see what comes out of Libor, etc. We don't live in a perfect world, but we are the closest to it I think.
In regards to your point about 20+ year sentence for a relatively minor crime, I think you will find that the media often sensationalises things to get attention. If you delve into these cases, by for example, reading the judicial decision which are available to everyone, you will most probably find that the decision if not to your agreement, is reasonable and justified.
To conclude with clearly showing that there is no comparison between America or the West and Russia, if you look at 1,000 cases, you are very likely to find way more non guilty verdicts than in 2 cases.
Have a little crack on you? 5+ year minimum, quite possibly more, especially if it isn't your first time.
Whereas the rich will pay some high-priced lawyer with connections, and get a plea deal, probably for probation, for just about anything short of murder.
I don't know about unknown rich with connections. But a lot of celebrities got pretty harsh treatment. Michael Vick served more time than his co-defendants.
Except for federal courts. All federal court judges are appointed by the president for life after confirmation from the senate. Only state courts have an election process, in some cases.
> That final hearing was held in public, as all hearings are, it was televised, again as all hearings are, you can read the judicial decision, as with all judicial decision. No one was corrupted. You can't corrupt them, because there is complete transparency.
Not all court hearings are televised, as you stated. The court hearing for repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was not televised. Most federal trials aren't televised.
Also, just because you can read the judicial decision, doesn't mean that it wasn't a result of corruption during the trial. And once you get the decision, its not like you can fix it if something wasn't right in the decision. Complete transparency would only occur if all court cases were televised and unedited, giving the people access to all evidence.
Once you get a decision, you can fix it. You appeal it. If the court was wrong, then the higher court is likely to overturn it.
The point about being able to read the judicial decision is that if the judge applied the law incorrectly, whether because he was corrupted, because he did not like the defendant or anything, if you are a trained lawyer, you can see that the law was applied incorrectly, so you appeal it. If that appeal is successful, the judge below would loose a huge amount of reputation, especially if it was blatantly obvious that he applied the law incorrectly. So no judge would do it. They are paid very handsomely. They probably practised as lawyers before becoming a judge so made quite a bit and therefore they have nothing to gain and everything to loose if they accept being corrupted.
Most, but not all. The judge can hold a private session if he chooses.
Space is limited in a court room. That's why I was talking more about televised sessions.
> Once you get a decision, you can fix it. You appeal it.
Good luck with that. That's all I can say.
> They probably practised as lawyers before becoming a judge so made quite a bit and therefore they have nothing to gain and everything to loose if they accept being corrupted.
That's the problem. Lawyers aren't very good and the laws aren't very clear in a majority of the cases. I have yet to see a judge lose their reputation from having one of their cases appealed. Also, private deals are made with lawyers all the time that are protected by client confidentiality. Do you honestly believe that they would have nothing to gain by exploiting such deals?
Furthermore, corruption - at least in the US - is taken pretty seriously. Where as a matter of course one might offer a bribe to a policeman in certain countries, it's actually pretty rare here. And in the cases corruption does come to light, it almost always ends public service careers, even (especially?) for high ranking officials.
This is the system, and it isn't fair.
The outcome of a criminal trial being strongly correlated with your bank balance is pretty much the definition of an unfair legal system.
How that system can be corrupted, even by the skills of persuasion, is beyond me. Some facts are simply facts and no gift of communication can change that.
Lawyers are not magicians. Lawyers can't by simple force of intellect persuade the jury to acquit someone when the fact clearly show to any impartial reasonable observer, as normally is the case with a jury of 12 people, that the person has committed the crime.
You might have a stronger argument in regards to how decisions are made as to which case is prosecuted, how much resources are allocated to gathering the facts to prosecute a case related to drugs as compared to a case related to financial fraud, but in my opinion, once the person charged is in court, I think there is no corruption at all.
In the UK you get 33% off the sentence if you plead guilty at the first opportunity, i.e. at the police station or the first time you appear in court, 20% at the second opportunity, etc.
Public defenders get a bad rap because most of their clients are--get this--actually guilty of the crimes they are charged with. The vast majority of defendants accept their guilt and are unwilling to pay thousands for a private lawyer who will not produce a better outcome. For these defendants, the public defenders are merely there to make sure that their rights are protected (at this point, usually procedural rights, i.e., due process).
A lot of the remaining clients go to trial simply because they can without having to pay for it (i.e., go down fighting). These clients have no chance of winning (multiple eyewitnesses, caught on video, caught with the goods/drugs/weapons, DNA/fingerprints, unsolicited confessions, etc.), but the public defender goes to trial anyway because that is what the client has demanded. (Private attorneys would simply inform them that their rates for trial are usually double their standard rates; at this point most clients either switch to public defenders or plead out.)
Interesting! Do you have a source?
Blue states have high-quality public defenders because they receive adequate support from the state. Certain Southern states also have high-quality public defenders, as a result of the civil rights movement (for example, Atlanta, Georgia).
In a lot of smaller counties (including in California), public defenders are private lawyers operating under contract (because there is not sufficient need for a full-time public defender). They're usually selected because they are extremely competent and/or have cozy ties to the D.A., but either way, they also produce good results.
Not all public defenders are good. In some states (specifically Ohio and most Southern states), public defenders are employees of the "county" but are paid minimum wage base salaries and receive the bulk of the compensation as commissions per-case (regardless of outcome). In those states, public defenders generally have little to no budget to hire experts or investigators, but face off against prosecutors who have essentially unlimited resources (and market-rate salaries with pensions). As a result, these public defenders are overworked and simply do not have the time or resources to do a good job on any of their cases.
If you're looking for the actual numbers, I don't know of a freely available source. There are usually a few law journals that publish these stats every year or two, but my current legal database subscription does not include access to these journals.
Those laws are effectively a eugenics program to weed out low IQ and impulsivity. If you cannot figure out how to beat a cocaine rap or not knock over a gas station, boom, your peak reproductive years get spent in a single sex environment.
a) a system in which paying a third party to spend their life understanding that system aids in better navigation of that system
versus
b) a system in which you must pay representatives of the system in order to engage with the system.
Yes, in both situations, more resources will get you better results, but process matters. System A is a whole lot closer to redemption than System B.
Every time there's a discussion of corruption, people make this statement, and it bothers me (I'm originally from India, which has a lot of corruption too). You cannot just equate the two. Corruption as described by the GP is like a cancer which has metastasized all over the body; corruption in the West is like an isolated blotch of melanoma on the skin.
So yes, there is corruption everywhere I guess ( perhaps even in Sweden and Norway and Switzerland); but it's not at the same level as that in Somalia and Russia.
The thing that draws entrepreneurs from all over the world to the US is that it is almost trivial to register and start a business here; and even if you're wildly successful, your "corruption overhead" is minimal (the occasional $35K dinner for $PRESIDENTIAL_CANDIDATE notwithstanding). This may not be the case in ALL industries, but in general it's true.
Consider for example Google. Till a few years ago, despite revenue in the billions, Google didn't even have a lobbying presence in DC.
This is not to say that we should not be alert. The way lobbying (i.e. corruption) is playing out in DC is a troubling trend. If things are left unchecked, there could come a time when, for example, instead of putting a competitor in jail (as in the article), companies would just get laws passed which kneecapped the competitor. We're not there yet (there might be exceptions), but we have to be vigilant.
I think Google is an exception, because it is a technology company. I would say the amount of corruption depends on the age of the industry and the vested interests, technology is so new it just isn't there yet. On the other hand, you have the financial industry and the big New York banks. The SEC is bought and paid for, they will never prosecute one of the big banks, and a judge will never rule against them either.
One of the most interesting stories is Martin Armstrong (perhaps the only person in the world who actually understands how the global economy works imo) who was held in contempt of court in jail without trial for like 7 years because the government wanted to silence him.
In the US you won't really see the corruption at the lower levels, but the higher up you go, the more corruption you will find. The corruption is hidden and more sophisticated. The real corruption occurs at the highest levels, behind the curtain. Governments are simply tools used by those who are really in power. It's more profitable to make your competitor (unknowingly) become your economic slave than it is to put them in jail.
The courts in US regularly rule against big banks in various cases, so it is just plain wrong to claim judge will never rule against the bank. The SEC is more problematic, since high knowledge requirements for regulating banks and security industries leads very quickly to the situation when all SEC experts are industry people, and thus defend the industry interests. This is inevitable problem of state regulation - the only way to know what the industry does is to work there, and finding somebody that is both impartial and competent is next to impossible. Yet even SEC regularly issues rulings against banks.
Of course, there's a lot of corruption is US, including the highest levels of government - so, former House Ways and Means Committee chair Charles Rangel was caught fraudulently evading taxes, getting huge donations from companies directly benefiting from rules he was promoting, taking lavish Caribbean trips paid by lobbyists, etc. He finally had to step down from the position and was censured by the Congress ethics committee, but still was reelected. So I think the problem here is the people that vote for corrupt officials as much as the corrupt officials themselves. If the people would refuse to vote for corruption, people like Rangel would not be able to persists in power for as long as they do now.
I mean, yes... some things are common: police taking money from prostitution and even from drug dealers in some places, Union leaders getting rich and powerful by using union's money as if it was of their own, politicians contracting companies owned by friends or family members while public prosecutors and judges turning a blind eye... and so on...
But taking money to put innocent people in jail? Maybe there's hope yet...
But then, somebody else coming from a different country would read my message and would also say: Wow!
Surely, that's an advantage of having a highly banked system as in some places of Europe and the US. I think that most of this "low level corruption" problems would be solved if people used less cash. I don't know in Russia, but here, most of the transactions are made in cash. Even when buying a house, most people go to make the transaction carrying USD 150,000/250,000 in cash. People do not trust in banks (mainly after the 2001 crisis), and lots of people have safe deposit boxes instead of savings accounts, just to avoid the government from knowing how much money they have (tax evasion). But, if people used less and less cash, it would be harder to have these kind of corruption in lower levels, simply because of money laundry's complexity for most people would be just too much, or too risky.
I'm not so sure. All of those things you list in your first paragraph happen in the UK all the time and nobody cares, and I imagine it is the same in most other countries.
As usual, there's probably some Scandinavian place where everyone behaves exemplarily.
He seemed to enjoy "having problems" here (yeah, that sounded strange to me too). Maybe those problems add adrenaline and emotion to our lives? Or maybe he was just crazy.
Maybe he should try living in Copenhagen or Stockholm.
Really? How hard are you looking?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Haughey#Retirement.2C_t...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Burke_(Irish_politician)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lowry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_Ahern#Controversy
At least 2 former Irish PMs (Taoiseach) were up to their eyes in it.
No country is totally free of corruption. It would be no problem to find cases in Swedish media as well. That you find corruption cases in the media is a good sign, because it indicates society does not accept it.
Corruption is not in any way crippling Irish economy like it does many other places.
(Source: http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/ )
Am I wrong to find it fishy that Julian Assange wants to hide in Ecuador (rank #120, score 2.7) rather than face a trial in Sweden (rank #4, score 9.3)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/italys-cap-on-cash-paym...
The limits are quite low, too.
I have a somewhat unreasonable hatred of banks, which stems from some unfortunate incidents - they basically lost my meager money back when I was starting out and they literally left me with nothing to eat for a few days; some unreasonable fees, awful hours, anti-customer service, etc.
So so far I've made all my large transactions in cash - I bought my car in cash, for example, U$ 9000. It's actually a tiny pile of money.. I'm pragmatic and I do use all banking services, but I'd love for them to be disrupted (and even had a tiny try at them myself befare I despaired at the humungous amount of red tape)
1) An entrepreneur pays off someone in the position of power (police, local government, tax collector) to facilitate quick problem resolution.
2) The aforementioned person in the position of power realizes that instead of the paltry fee they could lay claim on a large share of the business or entire 100% stake.
Anyway, you are wrong. Five of that ten comments would be about how their authors hate Russia and are eager to abandon it.
And you are wrong twice because both kinds of comments seem to originate from real people. This is much more sad than any propaganda machine.
I am not making light of corruption in Russia, it is one the top three most serious issues that Russia faces. However, the BBC article seems disingenuous in translating an extremely loaded Russian word "businessman" into entrepreneur and dropping its tremendous criminal baggage.
Bribery of police is so endemic in Russia that the state's most effective counter to this so far has been to simply bribe the police more and reclaim the losses from the perp - so for a traffic offence, the policeman would get a bonus from the state for not taking the bribe and the offender would have his car sold.
Paying police more in the first place might be a good start.
Here in the US, police are paid quite well and retire with a nice pension. They also win a free-paid vacation if they kill an unarmed civilian. They call it "suspended with pay".
Despite all that, they also taser the elderly and teens half their size: https://www.google.com/search?q=police+taser+elderly++&o... I read a blog for priv. prop. anarchists and they never run out of stories like those.
You're right however, the 3 million figure seems very high.
Russia is a lost cause. Police/government can (and regularly do) take over any business, especially any small business.
Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country.
So you're saying there's a violent class struggle between the populist system and the oppressed business class - and that the only way the downtrodden business owners can rise up and free themselves from their chains is through full scale revolution?
This sounds like it's straight out of Monty Python - but hey, good luck with that.
While I'm not supporting his assertion that this is the case, if such a thing were to happen anywhere, well...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_russia
Aside from a few people who made a lot of money a couple decades ago from rapid deregulation, I don't think business owners in Russia are worried about taxes, reasonable regulation, etc. hurting their businesses -- they're worried about totally random extortion.
Very few businesses would rather operate in Equatorial Guinea or Somalia instead of (heavily regulated country of choice: depending on context, could be Germany, the US, Denmark, ...).
Conditions will deteriorate until the point where there will be a class struggle though.
I do see why it may seem funny and Monty-Python-like, but it's extremely sad. It's a huge country ruled by thugs and talking heads, and they want more and more for themselves, while talking about helping the population.
Thank communism, because corruption was the only way for business to do any kind of transaction
It's all just semantics really:
1) In the US, 'socialism' is a dirty word, but don't you dare mess with Social Security or Medicaid.
2) China's 'communist' regime is called the "People's Republic of China."
3) Burma is now called "Republic of the Union of Myanmar" after a military coup.
4) China and the former USSR are both referred to as "Communist," but the governmental structures seem vastly different.
5) The Khmer Rouge were known as the 'Communist Party of Kampuchea,' but referred to their country as 'Democratic Kampuchea' even though they implemented forced relocation and confiscation of private property.
But it's hard to miss the pattern - we have yet to see well run communist (not socialist) state. Every country that tried communism failed, and either are poor backwater countries (Kuba, North Korea), reverted to capitalism (Central and Eastern Europe), or kept communism on banners only, changing most of economy to capitalism under the hood (China).
We even have a few case studies, where one country is divided into 2 parts, and one half is made communist. Both in East/West Germany, and North/South Korea the differences are quite obvious.
Maybe it has sth to do with the system itself, after all?
I'd recommend this fascinating story from NPR's Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-secr...
Background: a group of farmers in a small Chinese village secretly agreed to start keeping their surplus crops for themselves.
=============
Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.
"We all secretly competed," says Yen Jingchang. "Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person."
It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.
At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.
I also think that in modern-day practice, the lines between what we term communist, capitalist, socialist, etc. are much blurrier than we tend to admit. The gp post demonstrates how so-called capitalist countries can enact strongly "socialist" or "communist" behaviors and polices, and vice versa--they just do so with different rationalizations and rhetoric. If you could somehow find an absolute measure for the success level of each country in the world and plot it according to the political system they supposedly espouse, I don't think you'd find nearly as much cohesion compared to if you plotted them according to measures like the strength of judicial and education traditions, beneficial geography, balanced ethnic makeup, and so on. These labels get applied after the fact, they aren't the structural drivers that make various governments and societies function the way they do.
> Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-
> existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption
> are more likely to give rise to communist regimes
Why do you want to over-throw $despot? You must be
an enemy of 'the people.'Communism was introduced by force in many countries, in few cases it was introduced to half a country, and the half that stayed capitalist, benefited. You'd need to assume countries with high probability of dictatorship and corruption are more probable to be forced to become communist states by others, and that the difference between West and East Germany, North and South Korea regarding authoritarianism and corruption tendencies are bigger, than the same differences between for example East Germany and Russia, or West Germany and Spain.
I think from the data we have it's more probable, that communism just don't work.
> The gp post demonstrates how so-called capitalist countries can enact strongly "socialist" or "communist" behaviors and polices, and vice versa--they just do so with different rationalizations and rhetoric.
Communism is "from everybody according to their needs, to everybody according to their needs". So salary and employement doesn't depend on productivity, free market doesn't dictate prices and volumes of produced goods and services.
Public road system, army, health care system and free education are implementation details, compared to centrally planned economy.
Marx explicitly advocated a dictatorship. Dictatorship is what they got in the real world, too.
Everyone would be better off with Putin and the FSB crowd having their own licit and overt wealth, power, and perks, but then using their power to enforce fair laws on everyone else in exchange, vs. the system where they officially don't get as much benefit from their jobs, but extract personal benefit through corruption, and where others in society can use the state as a tool against other people.
(which is why it makes sense to pay police, judges, etc. quite well, and to give them high social standing, in exchange for competence, professionalism, and lack of corruption)
You could probably get that from the top echelon (I don't think Putin is at all corrupt, in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that, and would be surprised if his direct reports did), but it's hard to get that down to the lowest level of law enforcement.
Haha. Here's a little about Putin: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8175406/... And here a little about his former minister of health: http://en.novayagazeta.ru/society/8682.html There's much more where that came from. You can pretty much pick any high-ranking official in Russia and start digging.
With all that, I still don't think that a "revolution", which is to say a violent seizure of power, followed by the displacement of the current elite, is called for. It would result in years of bloody war. (Do you think the men who own these billion-dollar enterprises built on nothing other than government connections will just settle down and start raising turnips?) And the elite which it brings to the top might be no better. You are unlikely to end up with true rule of law.
The fact is that Russians are not without non-violent means of achieving change. The presidential elections were less corrupt than the preceding parliamentary elections, largely because far more citizens organized and became observers. Putin has had to allow popular elections of governors of Russia's regions, after years of personally appointing them, because of pressure brought about by the outrage over the elections. The idea of destroying everything and building a better version is tempting, but it has produced disaster again and again.
The sad thing is Russia has so much hydrocarbon fuel that they can probably go on like this for a long time. US and Europe having open immigration for talented Russians seems like the best we can do.
The same happened with recent elections to Duma (over 100% people voted in many regions of Russia).
This is ~0.5% at a given moment. 2% over 10 years doesn't sound too much.
I bet that a lot of poor countries down there share the same reasons (and maybe, some lack the money to build more).
"Just today (june 29) a Court ruled the feminist punk rockers must remain in jail while police slowly investigate them for the crime of allegedly chanting a 'punk prayer' against Putin from a church pulpit." http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20120627165225580
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O%27Connor#Saturday...
"NBC did not edit the performance out of the West coast tape-delayed broadcast that night, but reruns of the episode use footage from the dress rehearsal"
Where's the difference? Talking about media.
> The incarceration rate in the United States of America is the highest in the world. As of 2009, the incarceration rate was 743 per 100,000 of national population (0.743%).[2] In comparison, Russia had the second highest, at 577 per 100,000,
I recently was accused of something here in USA along with a ton of other people (copyright troll... I share my internet connection w/ my tenets).
The local news found out about it rather quickly and wanted to do an investigative report. I have to say I have never really liked local news but I'm glad things like this attract their attention.
Is whistle blowing a cultural thing?
In other words can Whistle Blowing be a counter virus to the Corruption virus?
First are the owners of small- (and medium-) scale businesses which they built by themselves.
Second are the owners of companies which were previously state-owned during USSR and then they were suddently privatized and "somehow" landed into a hands of very select few.
I don't think it's correct to call the latter group "enterpreneurs". I think it's bad for the former group to have both groups mixed together in one article. What you really have is using some real and ugly problems of the first group to pitch some ongoing cases featuring persons from the second group.
Those cases being ugly too not makes this spin a good thing. My mother owns a small cloth shop, she has quite a few problems as a small business owner, but I doubt she wants to be used as a lever in the favour of Hodorkovsky or Kozlov. She might sympathise them, she might not. She's NOT on the same field anyway.
Found this: http://blog.transparency.org/2011/12/07/what-makes-new-zeala...
The most important thing though is that people think bribery is wrong which means they won't hesitate to report and prosecute you.
That sums up the ethical viewpoint of most of the Russians I know.
Not to mention that it should be the other way around. People are innocent by default, so it should be innocent until proven guilty.
What's about Parascript (acquired for $50M in 2008)? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/parascript
Abbyy? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/abbyy
Evernote? Badoo? Parallels?
Also, the fact that a 50m company even needs to be mentioned among the "top" should be sufficient proof of the country's impact on the rest of the world (again, I'm not counting Russia-specific Yandex/Rambler/Odnoklassniki/[...] here)