Russia's Raiders

It seemed like any other workday at Togliatti Azot, a giant chemical factory in Russia's Samara region, on the Volga River 600 miles east of Moscow. Engineers were on their morning rounds, and union representatives had just finished a talk about financial support for newlyweds. Then around 11 a.m., dozens of men dressed in camouflage and toting automatic weapons charged into the administration building. "We thought it was a terrorist attack," Sergei Korushev, the plant's deputy director, says of the September, 2005, raid.

In fact, the uninvited visitors were members of the local OMON, Russia's crack paramilitary police, and detectives from Moscow. They seized thousands of financial documents—evidence, they said, of crimes by management. The police later brought charges of tax evasion and fraud against General Director Vladimir Makhlai and CEO Alexander Makarov, both of whom have since left the country. (Neither could be reached for comment.) While the company has been hit with $150 million in back tax claims, many at Togliatti Azot have their own explanation for the events. "Someone wanted to eat up a very good and very lucrative morsel for their selfish goals," says Korushev. The plant's current boss, Yuri Budanov, calls the police probes a "shakedown," which a local politician links to a rival company.

Budanov and Korushev, like many Russians, believe the police and courts have become weapons in the capitalist arsenal. Some 8,000 companies a year are targets of lawsuits or investigations at the behest of rivals seeking to put them out of business or take them over, the Russian Chamber of Commerce & Industry says. Russians call this process reiderstvo, or raiding. In some of these cases, companies pay off police and courts with a goal of harassing competitors. Often raiders rely on corrupt courts to rule that they are legal owners of a company. In other cases, raiding companies or their agents use legal pressure as a tool to force controlling shareholders to sell their stakes. While targeted companies sometimes don't know who is behind the legal attacks, the practice is common enough for the Russian press to name the prices corrupt officials allegedly charge for various "services": Getting police to open a criminal investigation costs $20,000 to $50,000, an office raid is as much as $30,000, and a favorable court ruling runs anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000, according to press reports.

Rampant lawlessness is the No. 1 barrier to Russia's economic development, says President Dmitry Medvedev. The former law professor, who promised to make law and order a top priority, has coined his first catchphrase, "legal nihilism," to describe widespread disrespect for the law at all levels of society. Medvedev, who took over the Presidency from Vladimir Putin on May 7, has called for legislation to rein in reiderstvo, and Parliament is debating a 20-year jail sentence for raiders who illegally acquire companies.

VENALITY ON THE VOLGA

Sometimes Russia's legal shenanigans make global headlines. Oil giant Yukos was broken up and renationalized by the Russian government between 2003 and 2007. Police on Mar. 20 raided the Moscow offices of BP (BP) and its Russian joint venture, TNK-BP. And on Apr. 6, Hermitage Capital Management, a British investment fund, said Russian police, under cover of an investigation for alleged tax evasion, stole documents that were then used in an attempt to defraud the fund. (The police did not comment.)

While such cases capture worldwide attention, reiderstvo more typically targets small and midsize companies in places like Samara. Located on the historic trade route with Asia, Samara has long had a wild streak. In the 17th century, the city—the capital of Samara province—was the base for Russia's most notorious outlaw, a Cossack named Stepan Razin who held up riverboats. In the 1990s criminality in the region centered on the giant AvtoVAZ car factory in Togliatti, Samara's second city, where mobsters stole cars and gunned down managers.

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