Medvedev Urges Russia's Richest To Return "Moral Debts"

Medvedev Urges Russia's Richest To Return "Moral Debts"
Mar 15, 2009 11:13

MOSCOW (AFP)--President Dmitry Medvedev Sunday urged Russia's largest businesses to return "moral debts" during an economic crisis which he called " cleanup time."

"Nowhere in the world perhaps has the development of entrepreneurship in recent times happened as quickly as in our country.

"People simply have been getting very rich in a very short time," Medvedev said in an interview to be broadcast on national television later Sunday..

"Now it is time pay off debts, moral debts because the crisis is a test of maturity," he said.
Medvedev said the current crisis, Russia's worst economic collapse in a decade, was the time for the richest businessmen to embrace social responsibility and put interests of their employees before their own.

"If a person has really become a genuine businessman he can appreciate his employees," he said in comments released by the presidential administration.

"He will perhaps try to put off part of his proposals, part of his ideas or personal consumption, save his staff, pay them salaries, save what he's been doing in recent years."

Many of Russia's richest people earned fortunes through controversial loans- for-shares privatization in the 1990s and an economic bonanza fueled by high oil and gas prices gave birth to yet more tycoons.

Today Russia's richest are struggling to pay off billions of dollars in debts built up in better times, while the government has said businesses shouldn' assume there would be a blanket bailout of all.

"In this sense, this is probably cleanup time: he who survives the crisis conditions will be an effective entrepreneur, an effective manager in a good sense of the word," Medvedev said.

(END)