Relevant: How Oligarchs use english football teams to launder money
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/9/investigation-reveals...
Statement from Roman Abramovich
141–150 of 151 posts
Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#142The guy is giving away £3 billion+ to charity and writing off a £1.5 billion loan, and yet the whole thread is looking for holes in the short statement. Nice gesture I say as he didn’t start the war.
> The guy is giving away £3 billion+ to charity and writing off a £1.5 billion loan
Don't forget that all his wealth he obtained through stealing and corruption in the early days of russian robber capitalism (for a while he was a close associate of notorious Boris Berezovsky). Abramovitch is also rumored to be one of the putin's "purses" [0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/21/is-abramovich-...
Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#143It's quite remarkable that he is being allowed to sell Chelsea and his extensive property assets in Londongrad without the proceeds being frozen. Perhaps sanctions will be levied on him after he has finished leisurely sheltering his assets offshore.
The British government and establishment is truly rotten to the core.
Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not good to support decades of growing autocracy, benefit from it. It is almost as if the Western democracies and companies didn't enrich the Russian government by purchasing energy from them...
Oh, they absolutely did. And the list of faults is unfortunately growing. However we're not in a position of choosing how exactly this particular set of problems will be solved; we have to get what we can sometimes.
Witch hunts. A concept as old as cave men.
Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, they absolutely did. And the list of faults is unfortunately growing. However we're not in a position of choosing how exactly this particular set of problems will be solved; we have to get what we can sometimes.
Witch hunts. A concept as old as cave men.
Or something else, which just happens to be - for some people - similar to witch hunt. If, for example, an action needed to be done for quite some time, and then suddenly is done, somebody can ask why it's done, since it wasn't done before. And the reason is - some other events triggered the action, not that the action suddenly became necessary while it wasn't before. It's just similar to witch hunt, but not the witch hunt by itself.
How would you distinguish witch hunt from a legitimate action?
Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#146The positive: he calls it a war - which is a very clear distancing from Moscow. The more questionable: “all victims”. The correct call would be to clarify that all victims are on the Ukrainian side. That would have made an even clearer message against Putin too.
> all victims are on the Ukrainian side. So, a Russian conscript, beaten into submission and then sent off to fight a war against people who might as well be his cousins. If this conscript is killed in action, is he not a victim?
Could be, but he shouldn't be helped in Russia in that case. They should be given incentives to surrender (as is already the case - but it needs to be extended).
Providing those who return from the war in russia, no matter how poorly informed or treated they were with any support sends the completely wrong signal.
Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#147The positive: he calls it a war - which is a very clear distancing from Moscow. The more questionable: “all victims”. The correct call would be to clarify that all victims are on the Ukrainian side. That would have made an even clearer message against Putin too.
I don't get why we are so concerned with the purity of his heart. As I see it it pales near to his gesture and the simple fact that he (a Russian man, a friend of Putin, a person with a lot of personal and business connections to Russia) is doing it. I feel he is already beyond all expectations.
I'm not that concerned about the purity of his actions but I'm concerned that e.g. something is claimed to be a charity and ends up actually being pouring every penny into the russian war machine as e.g. "help to russian veterans".
I'm not saying that's the case, but I'm not exactly going to give an oligarch the benefit of the doubt.
Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Witch hunts. A concept as old as cave men.
Or something else, which just happens to be - for some people - similar to witch hunt. If, for example, an action needed to be done for quite some time, and then suddenly is done, somebody can ask why it's done, since it wasn't done before. And the reason is - some other events triggered the action, not that the action suddenly became necessary while it wasn't before. It's just similar to witch hunt, but not the witc…
At this point, I believe a lot of "economic warfare" the West is engaging in is just optics, populist measures, just for the memes, and very hypocritical and shallow, especially given that in a post globalised World, almost every other major business is connected to other major businesses.
Diplomacy is the need of the hour. The US/NATO really botched this, or purposefully enraged Russia, for avoidable reasons. Ukraine is facing the brunt, just like Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen continue to. The warfare (both on-ground and the economic one) is so destructive that I fail to understand people who prefer it, at all, over any number of available compromises.
I have lived through war, sanctions, and rioting all under the pretense of freedom, nationalism, pride, religion, democracy, righteousness and what not, and I don't prefer it one bit.
Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#149Re: Statement from Roman Abramovich
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, then why are there so many anonymous huge donations?
“So many” feels like a misdirect using absolute numbers instead of percentages. Of the money and assets donated by billionaires, do you believe more than 10% of it is done so anonymously that no one ever finds out who donated?
exactly lol