Finance Minister of the Year: Chubais forces the pace
Central Banker of the Year: Yam: Hong Kong's sharp-shooter
Finance Minister and Central Banker of the Year: The regional winners
The financial community regards the Svyazinvest auction and the settling of Gazprom's tax arrears as your biggest accomplishments. What other success do you think you have had?
Getting the old budget sequestered, revised and then re-implemented in the spring was an extremely important step. In its original form, this budget for 1997 was completely unsustainable and unrealistic. It would have produced further government arrears and have created a variety of other problems.
Before the presidential elections in June 1996, the Communists stated that they did not support the nationalization of property.
I consider that forcing them to make this statement is my greatest success. In Russia now, it is absolutely impossible to support the idea of nationalization. For a politician, there is no way you can legally, legitimately obtain power if you publicly support nationalization.
That is why I can say that we have achieved an irreversibility of privatization.
What has been your biggest setback?
We had wanted to eliminate the offsetting system of reconciling payments but were unable to do so.