Crime And Corruption Part 4

Even the IMF reluctantly admits: "Capital transferred abroad from Russia may represent such legal activities as exports, or illegal sources. But it is impossible to determine whether specific capital flows from Russia-legal or illegal-come from a particular inflow, such as IMF loans or export earnings. To put the scale of IMF lending to Russia into perspective, Russia's exports of goods and services averaged about $80 billion a year in recent years, which is over 25 times the average annual disburs.e.m.e.nt from the IMF since 1992."

The Enrons of the East Hermitage Capital Management, an international investment firm owned by HSBC London, is suing PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), the biggest among the big four accounting firms (Andersen, the fifth, is being cannibalized by its compet.i.tors).

Hermitage also demands to have PwC's license suspended in Russia.

All this fuss over allegedly shoddy audits of Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth with over $20 billion in annual sales and the world's largest reserves of natural gas. Hermitage runs a $600 million Russia fund which is invested in the shares of the allegedly misaudited giant.

The accusations are serious. According to infuriated Hermitage, PwC falsified and distorted the 2000-1 audits by misrepresenting the sale of Gazprom's subsidiary, Purgaz, to Itera, a conveniently obscure ent.i.ty. Other loss spinning transactions were also creatively tackled. Stoitransgaz - partly owned by former Gazprom managers and their relatives - landed more than $1 billion in lucrative Gazprom contracts.

These shenanigans resulted in billions of dollars of losses and a depressed share price. AFP quotes William Browder, Hermitage's disgruntled CEO, as saying: "This is Russia's Enron". PwC threatened to counter-sue Hermitage over its "completely unfounded"

allegations.

But Browder's charges are supported by Boris Fyodorov, a former Russian minister of finance and a current Gazprom independent director. Fyodorov manages his own investment boutique, United Financial Group. Browder is a former Solomon Brothers investment banker. Other investment banks and brokerage firms - foreign and Russian - are supportive of his allegations. They won't and can't be fobbed.

Fyodorov speculates that PwC turned a blind eye to many of Gazprom's shadier deals in order to keep the account. Gazprom shareholders will decide in June whether to retain it as an auditor or not.

Browder is initiating a cla.s.s action lawsuit in New York of Gazprom ADR holders against PwC.

Even Russia's president concurs. A year ago, he muttered ominously about "enormous amounts of misspent money (in Gazprom)". He replaced Rem Vyakhirev, the oligarch that ran Gazprom, with his own protege.

Russia owns 38 percent of the company.

Gazprom is just the latest in an inordinately long stream of companies with dubious methods. Avto VAZ bled itself white - under PwC's nose - shipping cars to dealers, without guarantees or advance payments. The penumbral dealers then vanished without a trace. Avto VAZ wrote off more than $1 billion in "uncollected bills" by late 1995. PwC did make a mild comment in the 1997 audit. But the first real warning appeared only three years later in the audit for the year 2000.

Andrei Sharonov, deputy minister in the federal Ministry of Economics said, in an interview he granted "Business Week" last February: "Auditors have been working on behalf of management rather than shareholders." In a series of outlandish ads, published in Russian business dailies in late February, senior partners in the PwC Moscow office made this incredible statement: "(Audit) does not represent a review of each transaction, or a qualitative a.s.sessment of a company's performance."

The New York Times quotes a former employee of Ernst&Young in Moscow as saying: "A big client is G.o.d. You do what they want and tell you to do. You can play straight-laced and try to be upright and protect your reputation with minor clients, but you can't do it with the big guys. If you lose that account, no matter how justified you are, that's the end of a career."

PwC should know. When it mentioned suspicious heavily discounted sales of oil to Rosneft in a 1998 audit report, its client, Purneftegaz, replaced it with Arthur Andersen. The dubious deals dutifully vanished from the audit reports, though they continue apace. Andersen claims such transactions do not require disclosure under Russian law.

How times change! Throughout the 1990's, Russia and its nascent private sector were subjected to self-righteous harangues from visiting Big Five accountants. The hectoring targeted the lack of good governance among Russia's corporations and public administration alike. Hordes of pampered speakers and consultants espoused transparent accounting, minority shareholders' rights, management accessibility and accountability and other n.o.ble goals.

That was before Enron. The tables have turned. The Big Five - from disintegrating Andersen to KPMG - are being chastised and fined for negligent practices, flagrant conflicts of interests, misrepresentation, questionable ethics and worse. Their worldwide clout, moral authority, and professional standing have been considerably dented.

America's GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) - once considered the undisputable benchmark of rect.i.tude and disclosure - are now thought in need of urgent revision. The American issuer of accounting standards - FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) - is widely perceived to be an incestuous arrangement between the clubby members of a rapacious and unscrupulous profession. Many American scholars even suggest to adopt the hitherto much-derided alternative - the International Accounting Standards (IAS) recently implemented through much of central and eastern Europe.

Russia's Federal Commission for the Securities Market (FCSM) convened a conclave of Western and domestic auditing firms. The theme was how to spot and neutralize bad auditors. With barely concealed and gleeful schadenfreude, the Russians said that the Enron scandal undermined their confidence in Western accountants and the GAAP.

The Inst.i.tute of Corporate Law and Corporate Governance (ICLG), having studied the statements of a few major Russian firms, concluded that there are indications of financial problems, "not mentioned by (mostly Western) auditors". They may have a point. Most of the banks that collapsed ignominiously in 1998 received glowing audits signed by Western auditors, often one of the Big Five.

The Russian Investor Protection a.s.sociation (IPA) and Inst.i.tute of Professional Auditors (IPAR) embarked on a survey of Russian investors, enterprises, auditors, and state officials - and what they think about the quality of the audit services they are getting.

Many Russian managers - as avaricious and venal as ever - now can justify hiring malleable and puny local auditors instead of big international or domestic ones. Surgutneftegaz - with $2 billion net profit last year and on-going dispute with its shareholders about dividends - wants to sack "Ros.e.xperitza", a respectable Russian accountancy, and hire "Aval", a little known accounting outfit. Aval does not even make it to the list of 200 largest accounting firms in Russia, according to Renaissance Capital, an investment bank.

Other Russian managers are genuinely alarmed by the vertiginous decline in the reputation of the global accounting firms and by the inherent conflict of interest between consulting and audit jobs performed by the same ent.i.ty. Sviazinvest, a holding and telecom company, hired Accenture on top of - some say instead of - Andersen Consulting.

A decade of achievements in fostering transparency, better corporate governance, and more realistic accounting in central and eastern Europe - may well evaporate in the wake of Enron and other scandals.

The forces of reaction and corruption in these nether lands - greedy managers, venal bureaucrats, and anti-reformists - all seized the opportunity to reverse what was. .h.i.therto considered an irreversible trend towards Western standards. This, in turn, is likely to deter investors and r.e.t.a.r.d the progress towards a more efficient market economy.

The Big Six accounting firms were among the first to establish a presence in Russia. Together with major league consultancies, such as Baker-McKinsey, they coached Russian entrepreneurs and managers in the ways of the West. They introduced investors to Russia when it was still considered a frontier land. They promoted Russian enterprises abroad and nursed the first, precarious, joint ventures between paranoid Russians and disdainful Westerners.

Companies like Ernst&Young are at the forefront of the fight to include independent directors in the boards of Russian firms, invariably stuffed with relatives and cronies. Together with IPA, Ernst&Young recently established the National a.s.sociation of Independent Directors (NAID). It is intended to "a.s.sist Russian companies to increase their efficiency through introduction of best independent directors' practices."

But even these - often missionary - pioneers were blinded by the spoils of a "free for all", "winner takes all", and "might is right"

environment. They geared the accounts of their clients - by minimizing their profits - towards tax avoidance and the abolition of dividends. Quoting unnamed former employees of the audit firms, "The New York Times" described how "... the auditors often chose to play by Russian rules, and in doing so sacrificed the transparency that investors were counting on them to ensure."

The Typology of Financial Scandals

I. Overview Also published by United Press International (UPI) The recent implosion of the global equity markets - from Hong Kong to New York - engendered yet another round of the semipternal debate: should central banks contemplate abrupt adjustments in the prices of a.s.sets - such as stocks or real estate - as they do changes in the consumer price indices? Are a.s.set bubbles indeed inflationary and their bursting deflationary?

Central bankers counter that it is hard to tell a bubble until it bursts and that market intervention bring about that which it is intended to prevent. There is insufficient historical data, they reprimand errant scholars who insist otherwise. This is disingenuous. Ponzi and pyramid schemes have been a fixture of Western civilization at least since the middle Renaissance.

a.s.sets tend to acc.u.mulate in "a.s.set stocks". Residences built in the 19th century still serve their purpose today. The quant.i.ty of new a.s.sets created at any given period is, inevitably, negligible compared to the stock of the same cla.s.s of a.s.sets acc.u.mulated over decades and, sometimes, centuries. This is why the prices of a.s.sets are not anch.o.r.ed - they are only loosely connected to their production costs or even to their replacement value.

a.s.set bubbles are not the exclusive domain of stock exchanges and shares. "Real" a.s.sets include land and the property built on it, machinery, and other tangibles. "Financial" a.s.sets include anything that stores value and can serve as means of exchange - from cash to securities. Even tulip bulbs will do.

In 1634, in what later came o be known as "tulipmania", tulip bulbs were traded in a special marketplace in Amsterdam, the scene of a rabid speculative frenzy. Some rare black tulip bulbs changed hands for the price of a big mansion house. For four feverish years it seemed like the craze would last forever. But the bubble burst in 1637. In a matter of a few days, the price of tulip bulbs was slashed by 96%!

Uniquely, tulipmania was not an organized scam with an identifiable group of movers and shakers, which controlled and directed it. Nor has anyone made explicit promises to investors regarding guaranteed future profits. The hysteria was evenly distributed and fed on itself. Subsequent investment fiddles were different, though.

Modern dodges entangle a large number of victims. Their size and all-pervasiveness sometimes threaten the national economy and the very fabric of society and incur grave political and social costs.

There are two types of bubbles.

a.s.set bubbles of the first type are run or fanned by financial intermediaries such as banks or brokerage houses. They consist of "pumping" the price of an a.s.set or an a.s.set cla.s.s.

The a.s.sets concerned can be shares, currencies, other securities and financial instruments - or even savings accounts. To promise unearthly yields on one's savings is to artificially inflate the "price", or the "value" of one's savings account.

More than one fifth of the population of 1983 Israel were involved in a banking scandal of Albanian proportions. It was a cla.s.sic pyramid scheme. All the banks, bar one, promised to gullible investors ever increasing returns on the banks' own publicly-traded shares.

These explicit and incredible promises were included in prospectuses of the banks' public offerings and won the implicit acquiescence and collaboration of successive Israeli governments. The banks used deposits, their capital, retained earnings and funds illegally borrowed through shady offsh.o.r.e subsidiaries to try to keep their impossible and unhealthy promises. Everyone knew what was going on and everyone was involved. It lasted 7 years. The prices of some shares increased by 1-2 percent daily.

On October 6, 1983, the entire banking sector of Israel crumbled.

Faced with ominously mounting civil unrest, the government was forced to compensate shareholders. It offered them an elaborate share buyback plan over 9 years. The cost of this plan was pegged at $6 billion - almost 15 percent of Israel's annual GDP. The indirect damage remains unknown.

Avaricious and susceptible investors are lured into investment swindles by the promise of impossibly high profits or interest payments.

The organizers use the money entrusted to them by new investors to pay off the old ones and thus establish a credible reputation.

Charles Ponzi perpetrated many such schemes in 1919-1925 in Boston and later the Florida real estate market in the USA. Hence a "Ponzi scheme".

In Macedonia, a savings bank named TAT collapsed in 1997, erasing the economy of an entire major city, Bitola. After much wrangling and recriminations - many politicians seem to have benefited from the scam - the government, faced with elections in September, has recently decided, in defiance of IMF diktats, to offer meager compensation to the afflicted savers. TAT was only one of a few similar cases. Similar scandals took place in Russia and Bulgaria in the 1990's .

One third of the impoverished population of Albania was cast into dest.i.tution by the collapse of a series of nation-wide leveraged investment plans in 1997. Inept political and financial crisis management led Albania to the verge of disintegration and a civil war. Rioters invaded police stations and army barracks and expropriated hundreds of thousands of weapons.

Islam forbids its adherents to charge interest on money lent - as does Judaism. To circ.u.mvent this onerous decree, entrepreneurs and religious figures in Egypt and in Pakistan established "Islamic banks". These inst.i.tutions pay no interest on deposits, nor do they demand interest from borrowers. Instead, depositors are made partners in the banks' - largely fict.i.tious - profits. Clients are charged for - no less fict.i.tious - losses. A few Islamic banks were in the habit of offering vertiginously high "profits". They went the way of other, less pious, pyramid schemes.

They melted down and dragged economies and political establishments with them.

By definition, pyramid schemes are doomed to failure. The number of new "investors" - and the new money they make available to the pyramid's organizers - is limited. When the funds run out and the old investors can no longer be paid, panic ensues. In a cla.s.sic "run on the bank", everyone attempts to draw his money simultaneously.

Even healthy banks - a distant relative of pyramid schemes - cannot cope with such stampedes. Some of the money is invested long-term, or lent. Few financial inst.i.tutions keep more than 10 percent of their deposits in liquid on-call reserves.

Studies repeatedly demonstrated that investors in pyramid schemes realize their dubious nature and stand forewarned by the collapse of other contemporaneous scams. But they are swayed by recurrent promises that they could draw their money at will ("liquidity") and, in the meantime, receive alluring returns on it ("capital gains", "interest payments", "profits").

People know that they are likelier to lose all or part of their money as time pa.s.ses. But they convince themselves that they can outwit the organizers of the pyramid, that their withdrawals of profits or interest payments prior to the inevitable collapse will more than amply compensate them for the loss of their money. Many believe that they will succeed to accurately time the extraction of their original investment based on - mostly useless and superst.i.tious - "warning signs".