In Chapter 5 of "Making Globalization Work", Stiglitz briefly mentions the case of (former) Russian Oil Tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, citing him as an example of one of Russia's oligarchs that was righteously toppled by the Russian government in an attempt to reassert state control of former publicly owned assets. Stiglitz takes that stance that Khodorkovsky was a member of the group of oligarchs who were "stealing money from their own country".
I don't know if this assessment is entirely fair. If I were a rich business man, and the government declared it would be selling the rights to the country's natural resources, I'd probably recognize the opportunity for major profit. No matter how cheap the prices for the resources were, they were BOUGHT, not stolen. Whats more, there is a lot of evidence that suggests that Khordorkovsky was arrested more for the growing traction of his political aspirations, than for the legality of his actions. When Khordorkovsky was arrested for not showing up as a witness in a court hearing, he was immediately presented with an enormous list of wrongdoings, suggesting that the government had been concocting an accuse for his arrest for sometime. In 2011 the European court ruled in favor of Khordovsky in a human rights violations case against the Russian Government. Just days before Amnesty International declared Khodorkovsky a prisoner of conscience in response to the Russian governments extension of Khordorkovsky's jail sentence through 2017.
Stiglitz seems to support Putin's actions against Khodorkovsky, because he protected that states resources (or as Stiglitz would say, assets) from being stripped. But evidence suggests that Khordorkovsky was actually arrested because he posed a legitimate political threat to Putin's regime. Does this mean that Stiglitz prioritizes political stability and the protection of state resources more than he values the integrity of the political system that operates in a country?
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