It’s not just rich Russian that will share Cyprus’ pain

In their second attempt to clean the Augean stables of Cyprus’s banking system without jeopardising the integrity of the euro, bailout negotiators seem to have heeded most of my advice from last week. After the 36-0 rejection by the Cypriot parliament of a first set of terms that included a levy on all bank deposits, large and small, the new €10 billion deal reached in the early hours of Monday protected depositors with holdings of less than €100,000 while letting the weakest of the island’s big banks, Laiki, go under in an orderly way.

Laiki’s unprotected larger depositors will lose most, while those of Bank of Cyprus (which will absorb what’s left of Laiki) take a haircut of up to 35 per cent. And a large proportion of the money thus creamed off for Cyprus’s contribution to its own -bailout, alongside loans from the EU and the IMF, will come from Russian depositors — who had placed money on the island either to avoid Russian tax or to gain the advantages of channelling money back into Russia as though it were genuine foreign investment. And if what we’re so often told about Russian capitalism is true, some of those depositors might not have been the legitimate owners of the money in the first place.

The people of Cyprus will find themselves with shrivelled banks and a collapsed property market, but without the longer-term benefits to tourism and exports (‘citrus, potatoes, pharmaceuticals, cement, clothing’, according to the ever-helpful CIA World Factbook) that would have been delivered by a devalued local currency, after the initial shock. And they will share their pain not only with internationally mobile Russians who are a little less rich as a result of the levy, but at one remove with the mass of Russians who are poorer than they might otherwise have been as a result of the chicanery of oligarchs and wheeler-dealers whose loot ended up in places like Cyprus.

Prime minister Dmitri Medvedev was reported to have called the bailout terms ‘theft’, but a fuller translation — apparently paraphrasing an old revolutionary slogan — was ‘stealing from the thieves’. You can see exactly what he means.

Far-fetched

Speaking of Russian villains, I was tempted to shout ‘You look surprisingly cheerful’ when a smiling, loquacious, fit-looking Boris Berezhovsky strode past me in Berkeley Square the other day. The irrepressibly bumptious Russian car dealer turned oligarch in exile must be bouncing back — I thought — after the humiliation of his failed £3 billion claim against Roman Abramovich last year, followed by a battle with his ex-mistress Elena Gorbunova over the remains of his fortune. But that fleetingly upbeat impression does not accord with accounts of Berezhovksy as a man in a terminal state of depression and heart trouble before his apparent suicide aged 67, last weekend.

In the High Court, Mrs Justice Gloster labelled Berezhovsky an ‘inherently unreliable’ witness, so we’ll never know for sure how many assassination attempts he survived before the Grim Reaper finally called at his Ascot mansion. There was a real one — a Moscow car-bomb in 1994 — and he claimed at least three more after he moved to Britain, including one in which a Kremlin agent was sent to stab him with a poisoned fountain pen during a Bow Street magistrates’ hearing. That sounded far-fetched at the time, but less so after the subsequent polonium poisoning in London of his fellow Putin-baiter Alexander Litvinenko. Whatever the whole truth of Berezhovsky’s larger-than-life story, death by his own hand in the privacy of his own bathroom was surely a most unlikely denouement.

Lean pickings

This column has long promoted the idea that women are more sensible than men, and that instability in banking and public finance would be less endemic if there were more female minds at the top — see last week’s item on who should run Cyprus, and one from last October on the need for ‘a cohort of no-nonsense mothers-of-three’ to run retail banks. So I think that frees me not to like Lean In by Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg — a manifesto for ambitious women in the workplace which has attracted publicity out of all proportion to its weight, but very much in proportion to its author’s standing as one of the world’s most powerful media executives.

There’s nothing wrong with Sandberg’s thesis that women should believe in themselves, bag a seat at the table rather than at the back of the room, and make their partners share the childcare. I’m sure she’s right that in a corporate milieu where women hold only 7 per cent of executive directorships and 15 per cent of all boardroom places in FTSE 100 companies, the dice are still loaded, career-wise. She cites a 2011 -McKinsey report that found ‘men are promoted based on career potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments’ — but misses the point, made to me by an ex-City mother-of-several, that if your past accomplishments do put you in the frame for non-executive directorships, you can take your pick of plum part-time jobs, because public companies are so eager to tick the women-on-the-board box.

The real problem with Lean In is that the author can’t hide how pleased she is with her own career — her Facebook shareholding is worth $400 million, after all — but has distilled that experience into a preachy little assertiveness training manual for lesser mortals, designed to be a bestseller on Amazon and airport bookstalls. In doing so, I fear she provides evidence for one of the survey findings she attacks: that the more successful a woman becomes, the less she tends to be liked, whereas for men it’s often the opposite. Sandberg gives a more attractive account of herself, and says everything useful in the book far more succinctly, in a 15-minute ‘TED talk’. My own advice — if you’d like it, ladies — is to save your £16.99 and watch her on YouTube.