Less than Perfect: Petersburg’s Perfect Cup Chain Closes

20430158_1620086971395852_8533663628456563139_n — The marquee of an Ideal Cup coffee house in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Photo courtesy of The Village Petersburg

Petersburg’s Oldest Chain of Coffee Houses Closes
Olga Zarubina
RBC
July 25, 2017

The Perfect Cup, Petersburg’s oldest coffee house chain, has closed its last outlet, on Kamennoostrovsky Avenue. According to the sign on the door, the premises are undergoing repairs.

RBC Petersburg has learned that a coffee house in the Coffeeshop Company chain will open in its place once renovations have been completed. A Coffeeshop Company spokesman told us the opening was scheduled for September 2017.

We were unable to contact a spokesperson for The Perfect Cup. The company’s website is down. The chain’s page on the VK social network has not been updated since July 10, 2017.

The Perfect Cup (Idealnaya Chashka) coffee house chain was founded in Petersburg and modeled after the US chain Starbucks. In 2005, Scandinavian investment fund Trigon Capital bought 85% of the shares of Idealnaya Chashka, Ltd., from company founder Anna Matveyeva, but in 2011 the shares were returned to their original owner. In 2012, the chained numbered twelve outlets, but later it was reduced to three.

RBC Petersburg had previously written that The Ideal Cup changed owners in the spring of 2016. The new owners were three private investors, including Yevgeny Mikhiyenko, manager of Travelers Coffee LLC.

According to Novosibirsk news agency NGS.Novosti, the purchase cost the investors between three and four million rubles, since one of the terms of the deal was an obligation to pay off The Perfect Cup’s debts within two years. The debts exceeded the amount paid for the company by several times.

However, The Perfect Cup’s problems did not end there. In 2016, Idealnaya Chashka, Ltd. was a defendant in eleven lawsuits, totaling 6.7 million rubles. In February 2017, a bankruptcy suit against The Perfect Cup chain was filed in commercial court. The suit was never heard.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Dmitri Evmenov for the heads-up

Life on the Installment Plan

“Sovcombank. Are you a pensioner? Your loan is approved!”

Half of Russians in Arrears Take Out New Loans to Repay Old Loans
Takie Dela
April 18, 2017

In 2016, according to the statistics of the United Credit Bureau (UCB), 45 million Russians with current loans took new loans from banks. More than half of these people intended to use the money to pay off outstanding loans.

The bureau’s analysis showed that 53% of borrowers took a new cash loan that was used to fully or partly repay existing loans. 27% spent more than half of the new loans to pay their debts.

On average, Russians borrow between 101 and 126 thousand rubles [between 1,650 euros and 2,080 euros, approx.] to repay debts. According to statistics, around half of the borrowers (56%) take the money to repay debts of 50 thousand rubles or less or debts over 500 thousand rubles (47%).

33% of those who take new loans before repaying old loans have a debt of 100 thousand rubles. Nearly a fifth of all borrowers (18%) have three outstanding loans and a total debt of 278 thousand rubles, while every tenth borrower has five or more outstanding loans and a total debt of 575 thousand rubles.

71% of those who have five or more outstanding loans have taken a new loan to repay the interest on the existing debt. 65% of those with four outstanding loans and 60% of those with three outstanding loans have done the same thing. Those who have only one outstanding loan are the least likely (42%) to use a new loan to make interest payments.

“The trend may indicate the growing popularity of loan refinancing programs, which many Russian banks have vigorously brought on line in the past year,” commented UCB’s director general Daniel Zelensky. “Borrowers who took out loans at high interest rates in 2015 naturally have wanted to refinance them on more favorable terms.”

He added that many borrowers have realized that now it is “irrational to service several loans in different banks at the same time.”

In May of last year, the National Credit History Bureau analyzed 3,700,00 Russian creditors and reported that the most indebted Russians were schoolteachers and physicians. Employees of the social sector and education sector spend 33.39% and 33.3%, respectively, of their income paying back loans. The highest ratio of monthly loan payments to income (33.56%) was recorded amongst pharmaceutical and medical workers.

According to UCB’s report, no fewer than 600,000 Russians are currently bankrupt. That is, they owe more than half a million rubles and have not made payments on their debts for three months.

Translation and photograph by the Russian Reader. If you found this article interesting, you might want to read “Kotlas: Russia’s Bankruptcy Capital,” posted here in December 2016.

Russia Isn’t a Basket Case?

960x0 — Villanova University basketball team in action. Photo courtesy of Forbes.com

“Russia is neither the juggernaut nor basket case it is varyingly made out to be. A well-reasoned Russia policy begins by quelling one’s hysteria long enough to recognize this and then engaging it accordingly.”
—Mark Lawrence Schrad, “Vladimir Putin Isn’t a Supervillain,” Foreign Policy, March 2, 2017

Try telling a great many people in Russia that the country isn’t a basket case, or that Putin and his regime aren’t a total menace, especially to Russians themselves, as Mark Lawrence Schrad argues in the article I’ve quoted above. They would laugh in your smug face.

I wonder if this useful idiot and assistant professor in political science at Villanova has ever lived in the country long enough to figure this home truth out. Probably not.

Villanova has a great basketball team this year, however. Maybe I should focus on them.

Somehow, I have to stay positive in the midst of the dawning awareness that lots of Anglo-American Slavists would, seemingly, like to work for the KGB if they could. Or are simply too clueless to do their jobs.

At very least, Professor Schrad’s article would have been accepted for publication in Russian Insider as is. TRR

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17016781_10154597941078402_1412973065814591476_o — “For Rent.” Photo by TRR

Exhibit One: Downtown Petersburg’s Commercial Property Glut

This is what a “non-basket case” looks like in real life, not from one’s office in Philadelphia.

“Arenda” (“For Rent”) is definitely the most popular shop sign in the neighborhood around Voznesensky and Izmailovsky Prospect when I went there the other day to do a couple of errands, and it is complemented by lots of shops that aren’t flying the “Arenda” banner just yet, but which are definitely closed for business forever, like this Chinese restaurant, now known as “Khui” (if you read the fine print on the plasterboard that has replaced the broken glass in the door).

17038686_10154597949793402_944343543808199784_o — “Fuck.” Photo by TRR

Except for a few parts of central Petersburg where commercial spaces never stay empty for long, even in bad times, this is the visual-economic landscape you would see all over town. It is a landscape of “mixed and uneven development,” to put it charitably.

I don’t see how any self-respecting scholar wouldn’t start with this grassroots reality when analyzing Russia’s current state, rather than with a grab bag of rank speculations, half truths, and outright falsehoods he or she has read in English-language newspapers, magazines, and websites.

But that’s mostly how the new, actually quite fairly hysterical “anti-hysteria”/”anti-Russophobia” school of half-baked journalism and “Russia hands” scholarship operates. Its adepts sit far from Russia and tells Russians how good they’ve got it. TRR

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Exhibit Two: How the Russian Countryside Is Dying

How the Russian countryside is dying.

A sad name for a reportage. But first of all one feels for the people in the reportage, who have worked the land for many years.

I visited the hinterland just yesterday at the request of the workers at the Vegetable Integrated Agricultural Production Company in Tonshalovo, Cherepovets District, Vologda Region. The fact is that everything there has been frozen, and the company has been put on the road to bankruptcy. The prosecutor’s office is looking for the guilty parties, but instead of reading thousands of words, I suggest you watch the video. The inhabitants of our country utter many wonderful, sincere words in the video. What is happening with agriculture nowadays all over Russia is quite sad.

#VO35 #VologdaRegion #Tonshalovo #Vegetable #Prosecutor #Authorities #Bankruptcy #Unemployment #Agriculture

Source: vk.com/vologda_net

Nettle Info, How the Russian Countryside Is Dying. YouTube video, in Russian. Posted January 23, 2017, by Nettle Info

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up

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Exhibit Three: Russia’s Wildly Corrupt Prime Minister

Russian opposition politician Navalny links PM Medvedev to billion euro property empire
Deutsche Welle
March 2, 2017

Navalny alleges Medvedev took bribes from key Russian oligarchs under the guise of donations to charities. In a 49-minute exposé, Navalny even flies drones over lavish properties he alleges were bought with corrupt money.

Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny accused Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of massive corruption in a report accompanied by a Youtube video he posted on Thursday.

The anti-corruption activist alleged Medvedev controls a property empire including mansions, yachts and vineyards financed by bribes from oligarchs to a network of non-profit organisations.

“Based on the documentation disclosed, we can confirm that at least 70 billion rubles (1.3 billion euros or US$1.19 billion) have been transferred in cash and assets to Medvedev’s foundations,” said Navalny, who heads the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Medvedev “practically openly created a corrupt network of charitable foundations through which he receives bribes from oligarchs and frantically builds himself palaces and vacation homes across the whole country,” the report alleged.

The report was welcomed by Transparency International Russia, a non-profit organization that targets corruption, though it questioned some of its conclusions.

Findings met with skepticism

Navalny has sworn that he will be a candidate in upcoming elections despite being dogged by legal problems

“There are certain doubts in the story of Ilia Yeliseyev, the deputy chairman of the Gazprombank. It is doubtful that Yeliseyev is just a scarecrow. Despite the fact he was a classmate of Medvedev, he is an important figure. He could have earned that fortune himself,” spokesman Gleb Gawrisch told DW.

Gawrisch also said although it looked suspicious it wasn’t actually illegal for Medvedev to use real estate owned by non-profit organizations

“Corrupt officials often use non-profit organizations to hide financial flows and property,” he conceded in a statement to Deutsche Welle.

“The problem is finding out who the ultimate beneficiary is, and we are delighted that the Anti-Corruption Foundation has succeeded in presenting such an extraordinary investigation.”

Medvedev, a lawyer from Saint Petersburg, was president from 2008 to 2012 while Vladimir Putin served as premier between presidential terms. Medvedev intended to run in the 2018 presidential election.

Navalny, also a lawyer, garnered notoriety for his denunciations against corruption and was sentenced to five years in prison with a suspended sentence for embezzlement, which forbid him from being a candidate in the elections.

His [49]-minute video amassed several hundred thousand views in a few hours on YouTube.

Anti-Corruption Foundation, Don’t Call Him Dimon: Palaces, Yachts, and Vineyards—Dmitry Medvedev’s Secret Empire. YouTube video, with subtitles in English. Posted March 2, 2017, by Alexei Navalny

Navalny said that the foundations receive “donations” from oligarchs and companies, which are then used to purchase lavish properties for Medvedev, who is never registered as the owner.

“The prime minister and his trusted friends have created a criminal scheme, not with companies registered in tax havens as usual, but with non-profit foundations, which makes it virtually impossible to determine the owner of the assets,” he said.

“Medvedev can steal so much and so openly because Putin does the same, only on a bigger scale,” he wrote, presenting his team’s online report.

Navalny said he was able to establish the links to Medvedev by tracing the purchases online.

Medvedev’s spokeswoman dismissed the allegations as promotion for Navalny’s presidential bid.

“Navalny’s material is clearly electioneering in nature,” Natalya Timakova told RIA Novosti state news agency. “It’s pointless to comment on the propagandistic attacks of an oppositional convict,” she added.

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P.S. An acquaintance just told me the average monthly salary at the world-renowned St. Petersburg Conservatory is 11,000 rubles a month (approx. 178 euros), but employees there have not been paid since the end of last year.

And you would still say Russia is not a “basket case,” Mark Lawrence Schrad, assistant professor in political science at Villanova? Could you live on 178 euros a month while also not being sure you would actually be paid that measly sum on time every month?

I imagine that Professor Schrad was paid more than a paltry 178 euros for his wildly misleading article in Foreign Policy.

1280px-saint_petersburg_conservatory — St. Petersburg Conservatory. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Kotlas: Russia’s Bankruptcy Capital

A City of Bankrupts
Vladimir Ruvinsky
Kommersant Dengi
November 28, 2016

Kotlas, a district center in Arkhangelsk Region, will be one hundred years old in 2017. During the first half of the twentieth century, it was one of the main transit centers for political prisoners, but nowadays it is the capital of individual bankruptcies. There is no work in the city, which over the past ten years has become a local consumer’s paradise, and every fourth resident is up to their ears in debt.

In 2012, Kotlas resident Tatyana and her entire family, including her husband, daughter, and brother, took out a total of five million rubles in loans from banks. She asked we not reveal her surname, since her husband is unaware their daughter also took out a loan. As Tatyana says, they took out the loans not for themselves, but for a friend.

“I worked for two female entrepreneurs who sold clothing. We had known each other for something like twenty years. We would visit each other’s homes, go to each other’s birthday parties, and attend the weddings of each other’s children,” Tatyana recalls. “One of them, in fact, asked me to take out the loans because otherwise, she said, they would have to borrow at an interest rate of eight percent on the black market.”

Tatyana borrowed 1.7 million rubles at Trust, Tinkoff Bank, Home Credit, and OTP Bank.

“I worked for my friends selling luxury clothing. The turnover was good so I was not particularly afraid,” she explains.

Soon afterwards, her friends persuaded to take out additional loans for them. Her husband, daughter, and brother agreed to do this, borrowing 900,000 rubles, 1.8 million rubles, and 700,000 rubles, respectively. The deal was based on trust. Tatyana’s family handed the loan agreements over to the female entrepreneurs, and they paid back the loans themselves. This went on for two years.

“In 2014, the police came and searched our workplace. It turned out the women had been running something like a pyramid. They had been borrowing money on paper to purchase goods. They had not been buying anything, however, but had been cashing out the loans,” say Tatyana. “That is how we got in trouble, although we had not taken out the loans for ourselves.”

The banks demanded repayment of the loans. At first, Tatyana admits, she felt like hanging herself.

“But that is no solution. A woman I know hung herself over a loan. Someone shot himself. Well, if I hung myself, the debt would have been passed on to my relatives. So I got up and went to work.” Continue reading “Kotlas: Russia’s Bankruptcy Capital” →