Posts Tagged ‘der spiegel’
Europe’s Mounting Reluctance to Bail Out Cyprus
There is growing resistance in Europe to the planned aid program for Cyprus, because it would also benefit illegal Russian money parked in bank accounts in Cyprus. The government in Nicosia is willing to make concessions, but Brussels is demanding more reforms.
It was a long way to go to deliver a short message. German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew almost four hours last Friday to Cyprus, where she spent a few minutes campaigning for the conservative presidential candidate in the February 17 election, Nikos Anastasiades. Speaking in the city of Limassol, Merkel praised Anastasiades, saying that she had known him for a long time and valued his openness to change, and that the country urgently needed “structural reforms.”
After smiling for the cameras, Merkel returned to wintry Berlin.
Her destination in the eastern Mediterranean has a smaller population than the little German state of Saarland, but that hasn’t stopped it becoming one of the biggest trouble spots in global politics at the moment. The question of whether the government in Nicosia should be allowed to bolster its ailing banks with more than €17 billion ($22.7 billion) from Europe’s bailout funds is dividing the euro zone, causing uncertainty in international markets and adding to the woes of the coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, made up of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP). Now that the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party have announced their opposition to the plan, Merkel’s coalition could for the first time fail to muster a parliamentary majority on an important decision relating to the euro crisis.
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A Hedge Fund Manager’s Crusade against Putin
Financial investor Bill Browder was once a fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But after his lawyer died in prison under suspicious circumstances, he launched a crusade against the Kremlin. The case has gained the attention of the OSCE and the US Senate.
The text message Bill Browder, a London-based hedge fund manager, received on his phone was lifted directly from a mafia thriller. “If history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone,” Michael Corleone says in “The Godfather: Part II.” Browder doesn’t know who sent him the quote.
It wasn’t, however, the only one. The 48-year-old has several such text messages, which he believes to be from Russian intelligence agents. He explains all this in a matter-of-fact, business-like tone, as if this were all still just a question of money and business rather than life and death.
Two and a half years ago, Browder’s tax attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten in Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina detention center. Shortly afterward, Magnitsky was dead. “Sergei was tortured to death,” Browder believes.
The case has turned a spotlight on the Russian government’s harassment of businesses and foreign investors within its borders. The Kremlin’s legal system has thrown over 100,000 businesspeople in jail, with oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky being the most prominent one among them.
But Browder isn’t the type to be easily intimidated. His story reads like a modern-day Damascene conversion, becoming a human rights crusader in addition to a hedge fund manager. It’s also a story of battling Russia’s strongman, Vladimir Putin, who was reinstalled as his country’s president this May and wants to consolidate Russia as an international economic power.
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