In the 2000s Western banks eagerly helped Putin’s regime build its economic empire

I know — I had a tiny role in that effort, working for Morgan Stanley.

I’m not talking about these banks’ work with Russia’s oligarchs. The oligarchs’ companies were private, after all. Once enough years had passed since the murky privatizations of the 1990s and these companies cleaned themselves up, their integration into the world of global business was only natural. Investment banks were there to do their usual work of brokering deals.

But let’s look at some specific deals. I saw them from the inside.

I first worked for Morgan Stanley’s London office and then accepted the opportunity to work in Moscow, where the bank’s Russian business had started to pick up.

In 2003 Putin went after Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of the biggest oil company. I recently wrote a story about the oligarchs and how their role evolved under Putin. In short, Khodorkovsky breached the “pact” not to interfere in political matters.

Khodorkovsky was accused of tax evasion, arrested and Putin went all in to destroy him — Khodorkovsky would spend many years in jail.

I remember seeing, for the first time, the headline “Russia Freezes Yukos’s Assets”. Khodorkovsky was no angel, Russia’s privatizations in the 1990s were extremely shady, but, still, it was a shock seeing the news, especially from the office of an American investment bank. It was a direct ruthless politically…