Deripaska proposed lifting the ban on the work of businessmen in government

The rights of businessmen must be equalized at the legislative level with other social groups, Oleg Deripaska believes. The billionaire believes that these are the main subjects,

With the stabilization of the foreign policy situation, Russia needs to "find the strength" in an accelerated way to start moving towards a real open market economy based on private property and free entrepreneurs, businessman Oleg Deripaska writes in an article for RBC.

According to him, for this it is necessary to abandon all "chimeras of harmful state capitalism" and equalize entrepreneurs in rights with other social groups - artists, patriotic journalists, athletes, security officials, law enforcement officials, veterans. Until that happens, they "will remain 'weak people' along with the retired intelligentsia," the businessman warns.

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Deripaska considers entrepreneurs to be the main subjects that bring progress and development in all sectors of the economy and life in Russia, and, in his opinion, it depends on them how quickly "positive changes will come."

Under the equation in rights, he means, first of all, “total decriminalization of business”, the abolition of “already set on edge” 159 and 160 (fraud and misappropriation or embezzlement) and a number of other articles of the Criminal Code, according to which business is “treated, milked, according to which they break the fate of entrepreneurs, keeping them in prison for years, depriving them of their property, and so on.

On December 1, 2022, the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow sentenced the founder of the Summa group, Ziyavudin Magomedov, to 19 years in prison, his older brother, former senator Magomed Magomedov, also received 18 years in a strict regime colony. The Magomedov brothers, whose fortune Forbes estimated in 2017 at almost $ 2 billion and included them in the top five richest families in Russia, were found guilty of creating an organized criminal community (part 1 of article 210 of the Criminal Code), in nine episodes of especially large-scale fraud (part 4 article 159 of the Criminal Code) and in one episode of embezzlement (part 4 of article 160 of the Criminal Code).

But Deripaska proposes not to be limited to the decriminalization of business and go further - to remove the overt and covert bans on entrepreneurs from holding state and municipal positions, to give them the right to be elected to municipal and regional authorities, to the Federation Council and the State Duma. “This is a major issue that will not be easy to address in the next five years,” he concludes.

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Deripaska is the founder and co-owner of the En+ holding, which owns UC Rusal, one of the world's largest aluminum producers. In April 2018, he fell under US sanctions and was forced to reduce his stake in the holding below control. Prior to the imposition of sanctions, he also owned the GAZ group, a stake in the Ingosstrakh insurance company, the Austrian construction company Strabag, the Basel Aero group (operates airports in the Krasnodar Territory, renamed Aerodinamika) and the Kuban agricultural holding. In the spring of 2022, Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at $1.7 billion.