[1.5 Человека] О Ладе, Путине, Березовском И Британии

Спонсор месяца - ВотИменно.Ру, первый в России безрисковый нейминг-сервис.



...But in reality the very opposite was true. The absurdities of the plan were actually beginning to allow the managers to become much more powerful.

They were using the chaos and incompetence of central control to construct their own alternative economic systems. Which they controlled for their own benefit.

In the case of Togliatti, senior managers were running an ever-growing shadow economy selling spare parts and even cars on the black market. It was supplying the needs that the Plan couldn't. And the "Red Directors" as they were called, were beginning to make a lot of money.

And around the time the film was being shot the Togliatti managers met a young academic from Moscow who had come to help on the computerisation of the car production.

He was called Boris Berezovsky.

Twelve years later - as the Soviet Union began to collapse - the Togliatti plant was brought to its knees and almost destroyed.

A number of journalists and historians have investigated what happened.

In 1989 Boris Berezovsky set up a company with the head managers of Togliatti. It was called LogoVaz. Initially it designed management software. But then it started to sell Lada cars.

What then happened is murky, but it is alleged that the managers in effect looted their own factory.

LogoVaz wanted Lada cars to sell. The managers of the Togliatti plant agreed to give tens of thousands of new cars to LogoVaz at a very low price. What's more, LogoVaz wouldn't have to pay for them for two and a half years. And, because of massive inflation, that payment would be a pittance.

It meant that Berezovsky would make millions. And so would other members of LogoVaz - who just happened also to be the directors of the Togliatti plant

But it also meant that there was no money left to pay the workers at the plant. They kept producing the cars - but for no money. And LogoVaz kept on selling the cars. And the old Red Directors became very rich.

And Boris Berezovsky began his rise to power.



At the time we in the west looked on in superiority. What was referred to as “gangster capitalism” could never happen here. But ten years later something rather similar did happen here – in the Midlands.

Starting in 2000, one of the few remaining bits of British Leyland - the giant Longbridge plant - was brought to its knees in very much the same way by its own senior managers.

They siphoned off money that was supposed to help rescue the plant, and instead used it to enrich themselves. They would be helped in this by a car salesman from Stratford on Avon.

In 1999 BMW had given up on what was now called the Rover Group. A Rover manager called John Towers dramatically announced he had created the "Phoenix Consortium" with a Rover car dealer called John Edwards and two other directors. Their aim was to rescue the company.

Here is Mr Towers being given a hero's welcome by ...читать дальше

Спонсор месяца - ВотИменно.Ру, первый в России безрисковый нейминг-сервис.