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Deputy Head of the Yabloko faction, Sergei
Ivanenko, thinks that the meeting
of the President of the RF Vladimir Putin with representatives
of
large-scale business should not be based on " purely
protocol". In an
interview with journalists on July 24, 2000, Ivanenko added:
"The Russian
authorities should move on in their relationships with business
from a state
of war at least to a state of truce."
Ivanenko said that the President: "who
enjoys at present the highest
legitimacy and trust of the population can and must determine
the strategy
and tactics for interaction with the so-called "oligarchs",
i.e. big capital
in Russia". Speaking about the issues raised by representatives
of big
business, Ivanenko noted that they are "quite easy
to realise".
He added: "Both sides should only display
the will to move forward."
Ivanenko also recalled that the need for such meetings was
raised as early
as 1996, on the threshold of the presidential elections;
a letter signed by
a number of prominent businessmen was prepared. It raised
virtually
identical issues. Ivanenko noted: "The very act of
repetition unfortunately
merely demonstrates the following: over the past few years
little has been
done to streamline legal relations, property rights and
establish honest and
fair rules of the game."
However, in any case, he stressed that the
round table meetings of
representatives of big business and the authorities "will
be useful". At
the same time Sergei Ivanenko also expressed his view that
the meeting was
unlikely to lead to the signing of any agreement: "Our
political practice
and political history has never had any precedents of collective
greements
between big business and the authorities."
The initiative to conduct a meeting between
the representatives of big
business and the President of the RF was proposed by Boris
Nemtsov, the
leader of the Duma faction, Union of Right-Wing Forces,
who said that it was
necessary to achieve an agreement between the sides to distance
equally all
oligarchs from the authorities.
Based on Interfax reports.
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