Asset Appreciation and Predatory Raiding in Russia: Changing Value, Changing Hands

This book presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of predatory raiding in Russia. Predatory raiding in Russia is the process of depriving lawful owners of their businesses and property with the help of criminal methods, including corruption, fraud, and violence, wrapped in the clothes of legality. The book argues that significant changes in value of corporations, property, and land in Russia incentivize predatory raiders. The appreciation of economic assets influences predatory raiders’ decision-making regarding the selection of potential targets for hostile takeovers. Unlike Western corporate raiders, who target weak companies in financial distress, Russian predatory raiders target primarily the most profitable, lucrative or economically promising companies, as well as private and public property, and land. Russian predatory raiders give clear preference to non-economic instruments for staging hostile takeovers. These comprise legal battles, corruption, fraud, intimidation and violence. Russian predatory raiders are distinctive for their frequent use of force, threat of force, or violence, as applied to businesses and property owners. This research relies on extensive video footage of violent hostile takeovers to draw inferences about the phenomenon of predatory raiding in Russia. In defining the perspective directions for the corporate predatory raiding movement and the anti-raiding campaign, the process of re-valuation of assets may be more important than the mass privatization of the 1990s.

Ararat L. Osipian is a Fellow at the New Europe College-Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest, and a Founding Fellow of the New University in Exile Consortium at the New School in New York. He previously served as a Fellow of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, The Alexander Mirtchev visiting professor and scholar, Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TRACCC), Schar School of Policy and Government at the George Mason University, Washington, DC, associate researcher, Department of Political Science and the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and fellow of the Institute of International Education (IIE), United Nations Plaza, New York. Dr Osipian holds a PhD in Economics of Education and Human Development from Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt and an MA in Economics from Vanderbilt University, where was a fellow of the US Department of State. Dr Osipian is the author of Sustainable Economic Growth in Russia: A Structuralist Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), The Economics of Growth in Russia: Overcoming the Poverty Trap (Routledge, 2023), Political and Economic Transition in Russia: Predatory Raiding, Privatization Reforms and Property Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), The Political Economy of Corporate Raiding in Russia (Routledge, 2018), and The Impact of Human Capital on Economic Growth: A Case Study in Post-Soviet Ukraine, 1989-2009 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). His research interests include corruption in higher education and inequalities in access to higher education in international perspective, corporate, property and land raiding, nexus of education and economic growth, modern welfare states and political economy of transition.