The Forbes has published an interesting article concerning the Russian billionaires. This time the Forbes did not inform the number of the Russian billionaires only, but also found out how many of them are represented in the Russian legislative body.
The information they published is very impressing. Thus, there are 12 billionaires in the Russian legislative body and their total wealth exceeds $41 billion. Russia occupies the first place in the world with this big number of involvement. Accordingly, the Russians can praise themselves and say that their parliament is the richest parliament of the world. However, there are more reasons to be concerned than to be proud. Such surveys are not conducted by chance and usually their purpose is to show the level of involvement of the business and capital in politics and how the capital controls the politics. Such big number of rich politicians means that something is wrong. Even once Putin said that due to being involved in business activities people cannot be objective in the parliament. Both in Russia and Armenia the law writes that parliamentarians cannot be involved in business activities, but they can find ways and register their property under the names of their relatives or family members. The Forbes has brought an example how business can be combined with politics to develop its interests. It writes that senator Gleb Fetisov, who is also the owner of the Alfa-Group ($3,9 billion) company, has been lobbying for the purpose of weakening the state control over the biggest companies. The Forbes writes that the connection between the richness and the power is so old as the state power institution, however the number of rich people involved in the Russian politics is the biggest number in the world. The Forbes has been mistaken because they have forgotten about Armenia. Certainly you can’t compare our parliament with the Russian one with the total capacity of money. You can’t even compare the wealth of our MPs with, for instance, the property of Suleyman Kerimov (aged 42), who has $17.5 billion. Generally it is more difficult in Armenia to publish such numbers than in Russia. In Russia the stock market system is developed and it is possible to calculate the cost of the stocks and see how much money the owners have. As for Armenia, we can make an imagination about their wealth only by going through the list of the biggest taxpayers and trying to estimate how much their houses and cars would cost. However, it is not so important and if we try to compare these two situations, we will see that the situation in Armenia is more complicated.
If we go through the list of MPs, especially the RPA MPs, we can find only a couple of MPs who are not involved in business activities. In order to make the picture clear, let’s make a comparison. The Russian GDP made $1,2 trillion in 2007. Twelve richest parliamentarians of Russia are controlling 3.5% of this sum. The foreigners have considered it as a great influence by business on politics. Now let’s see what we have in Armenia. In 2007 our GDP made $10 billion. 3.5% of this sum makes $35 million. This means that if the total wealth of our parliamentarians exceeds 3,5% of the annual GDP, we can say that the influence of the business sector on politics is bigger in Armenia. As the Russian legislative body is bigger than that of our country, let’s take the capital proportion of four MPs from our parliament to compare with the capital proportion of the capital of twelve MPs from the Russian Duma. Let the readers decide who the four richest MPs of our parliament are. After combining the money they have let’s find out for how many times this number exceeds 35 million. It means that the level of influence of the businesses on politics in our country is more for that much time in Armenia than in Russia.
We can agree that this is not a professional and correct approach. However, the difference is so big that we believe the Forbes has ignored our country. For example if we combine the value of the houses, cars and current expenses of these four MPs we will see that 35 million is not such big money for us. For comparison, let’s mention that despite Russia, where the richest 10 families are controlling 9,1% of the Russian GDP, in Armenia this level of control makes 4,7% (as of 2006).
Even though most of our MPs are actively involved in businesses, it is difficult to say whether they are trying to use their legislative work and status for the purposes of their own businesses or no. Definitely they don’t. The reason is not the fact that they are very honest and prefer the state interests from their own interests. The reason is very simple, which is that being parliamentarians most of them generally don’t take part in the legislative work of the parliament. They are just visiting the parliament and pressing the buttons if there is a need. Even it is very hard to imagine that some of them may read laws or drafts. For example, if the government develops a bill, which may affect the interests of a certain candidate, he will vote for that bill without reading it because he has been told to do so.
It is a paradox: the parliament mostly consists of MPs, who are there to protect their interests, but they can’t go against the government and vote for the drafts they are advocating for in order to protect their interests. However, if we analyze the situation it will not seem so strange because even the high ranking authorities often prefer not the interests of the state, but their own financial interests and sometimes they use the state interests for their own material interests.