The Soviet Union is only gone in name, not in spirit

The New York Times has an article by Andrew Kramer about the latest move by the Russians:

Already jittery investors were alarmed on Thursday when a Norwegian cellphone company announced that a Siberian court had seized its multibillion-dollar investment in a Russian joint venture and would turn it over to a company thought to be allied with a Russian oligarch. The decision signaled an escalation in a long-running dispute between the Norwegian company, Telenor, and the Alfa Group, an alliance of Russian businessmen that was also at the center of a separate fight with the British oil giant BP last summer. That dispute also shook faith in the Russian market. Russia’s stock market fell on the news of the asset seizure.
Telenor has accused the Alfa Group, whose principal partner is Mikhail Fridman, of filing groundless lawsuits to gain control of Vimpelcom, the cellphone company that they own jointly. One such lawsuit prompted the ruling Wednesday. A judge in the Siberian city of Omsk ordered court bailiffs to seize Telenor’s 29.9 percent share in Vimpelcom. The judge had earlier ordered Telenor to pay a fine of $1.7 billion after Alfa accused Telenor of obstructing the expansion of Vimpelcom into the Ukraine to protect other Telenor businesses in that country. Telenor denied the accusation and refused to pay the fine. The shares were seized in lieu of the payment.
Telenor has called the original ruling and the decision to allow seizure of its shares groundless, and is appealing to a higher court in the Siberian city of Tyumen. Lawyers for the Norwegians, however, were not hopeful about the outcome of that appeal. “It’s like going from the frying pan into the fire,” said a lawyer for Telenor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of angering the Russian courts. The beneficiary of the Omsk lawsuit was a little-known company, Farimex Product, which Telenor contends is affiliated with Mr. Fridman’s Alfa Group; Alfa, which already controls 44 percent of Vimpelcom, has denied it is linked to Farimex. “This is a yet another escalation of the attempts to steal our Vimpelcom shares with the aid of Russian courts,” Telenor’s director for Central and Eastern Europe, Jan Edvard Thygesen, said in a statement.
The business dispute has spread to other jurisdictions. The Norwegians and Russians are also in court in the Ukraine and in the Southern District of New York. The Siberian court ruling came the same day Telenor won a judgment against Alfa Group in New York, in a case related to a Ukrainian cellphone company also jointly owned by Alfa and Telenor. Alfa Group issued a statement saying its assets were at risk of being seized in the New York case.

Rico says he wouldn't be doing business in Russia just yet...