【英语国际】普京称俄私有化获利者应缴费

The tycoons who reaped fortunes thanks to Russia's controversial 1990s privatizations should make a one-time windfall payment to legitimize their holdings, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday.

'We need to turn the page on this period,' Mr. Putin told a meeting of the country's biggest business union. 'We must establish the social legitimacy of private property and social confidence in business.'

Russia privatized huge swaths of its state assets in the 1990s in an effort to transform its crumbling Soviet-era planned economy. In the process, a handful of well-connected businessmen amassed assets valued at billions of dollars. To this day, the process is widely criticized as rigged and unfair.

Mr. Putin didn't specify how the process would work or how much the payment would be. His statement, seen as one of several attempts to gather popular support ahead of March 4 elections where he will stand for president, was met with skepticism by economists and former government officials.

Although Mr. Putin commands an extensive lead against his opponents in the presidential race, opinion polls show him straddling the threshold of a 50% majority needed to win elections in the first round.

In recent weeks, Mr. Putin has fired off a string of populist measures playing up to various segments of the electorate, promising coal miners $8 billion in development aid by 2030 and trying to make amends with the country's small investor class by buying them out of a disastrous 2007 initial public offering of state-owned lender VTB at the IPO price.

Many formerly socialist countries held privatizations that were later called unfair, but 'I'm not aware of a single case where this problem has been solved legitimately,' said Anatoly Chubais, who in the 1990s oversaw Russia's privatization program. 'I'm convinced that this would be impossible in Russia as well.'

Mr. Putin's statement 'showed to the whole world that ownership rights mean nothing in Russia. I'm sure many of the business people in the audience had a few unpleasant minutes,' former central banker Sergei Aleksashenko wrote in his blog.

俄罗斯总理普京(Vladimir Putin)周四说，因上世纪90年代俄罗斯富有争议的私有化而发财的巨头们应该为暴利所得一次性缴纳一笔费用，以便使自己的资产合法化。

普京在俄罗斯最大商业组织举行的会议上说，我们需要将这个时期的一页翻过去，我们必须建立私有财产的社会合法性并树立社会对商界的信心。

上世纪90年代，俄罗斯将大量国有资产私有化，以便让即将土崩瓦解的苏联计划经济实现转型。在这个过程中，一些人脉很广的商界人士积聚了价值上百亿美元的资产。至今，这一过程被广泛指责为非法的和不公平的。

Sergei Ilnitsky/European Pressphoto Agency图片：反普京和挺普京集会同日举行普京没有具体指明让俄罗斯巨富们为其当年的暴利所得付费的工作将如何展开，也未透露需缴纳费用的金额。他的声明受到了经济学家和前政府官员的质疑。普京此举被视为他要在3月4日的总统选举前争取公众支持的一项努力。

尽管普京在总统竞选中大幅度领先于其竞争对手，但民意调查却显示，他的支持率在50%这一水平上下波动。而候选人要想在第一轮选举中就成功当选，他必须赢得50%以上的选票。

近几周来，普京针对不同的选民群体推出了一系列投其所好的民粹主义措施，他承诺2030年前向煤矿企业提供80亿美元的发展援助，并试图赔偿俄罗斯小投资者阶层的损失，提出以首次公开募股(IPO)价收购他们手中的VTB股票。这家国有银行在2007年进行IPO后股价一路下跌，众多小投资者被套牢。

丘拜斯(Anatoly Chubais)说，很多曾经的社会主义国家都进行过私有化，这些私有化过程后来也被指不公平，但我不知道在哪个个案中这一问题以合法的方式得到了解决。上世纪90年代，丘拜斯负责俄罗斯的私有化工作。他说，我深信，俄罗斯也不可能做到这一点。

前俄罗斯央行官员阿列克萨森科(Sergei Aleksashenko)在其博客中写道，普京的声明向全世界表明，所有权在俄罗斯没有任何意义，我相信听众中的很多商界人士有一度感到不快。