The investment calculus shifted yet again in Russia as Bloomberg News reports that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling party failed to gain a majority of the vote in several regional polls, less than a year before parliamentary and presidential elections. This comes on the heels of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden warning the regime that only genuine change will bring “wronged or nervous” investors back in to Russia:
Americans, Europeans, and Russians themselves, are less likely to invest confidently in a country where property rights are frequently violated, where fortunes can be lost because of legal abuses, where companies can be seized on a politician’s whim, and where a lawyer like Sergei Magnitsky can be arrested after accusing the police of fraud — and then die in detention before ever being tried.
