| Chubais: facing stiff competition from Boris Berezovsky to be the most hated man in Russia |
Anatoly Chubais, CEO of energy company RAO UES, is planning a return to politics in the forthcoming Duma elections in Russia. As Boris Yeltsin's deputy prime minister in the 1990s, Chubais was responsible for many of the government's most controversial policies.
These included the loan-for-shares privatization programme, which enriched a handful of oligarchs such as Yukos CEO Mikhail Khordorkovsky and exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky. Chubais also persuaded Yeltsin not to dissolve the Duma and halt democracy in 1996. As he put it modestly at a recent political rally: "In all those years, there was no reform except ours. There were no ideas except ours."
Chubais is standing for the SPS party, or Union of Right Forces, which is led by Irina Khakamada and Boris Nemtsoy. He will not stand down from his UES job if he is elected. He told an SPS rally last month: "Now we have in front of us a political fight, or a good scrap... I could not miss such an event.