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RUSSIA’S GOVERNMENT SEEMS intent on cleaning up the country’s notoriously investor-unfriendly financial system. Global investors hope that the country is ready to usher in a cleaner and more transparent era as the worst effects of the global financial crisis fade. Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, a pragmatic technocrat who is devoid of the worst of premier Vladimir Putin’s sabre-rattling paranoia, is starting to impose his own authority over power brokers in the Kremlin, the army and the government.
Legislation is wending its way through parliament designed to draw a line under the worst excesses of insider trading. On April 17 two-thirds of the state duma adopted a draft bill called On counteracting the abuse of insider information and market manipulation. The bill, in preparation for nearly a decade, would be the first legislation directly to address rampant insider trading in Russia. A second bill, introduced in May 2009, amends the criminal code, making it possible to sentence those abusing inside information to up to seven years’ imprisonment.
Medvedev’s anti-corruption push is seen as a further sign of his new-found power and assertiveness.
