Opinion: Russia not ready for large-scale foreign investment

'Russia is not ready for large-scale foreign investment,' Deputy General Director of Russian Aluminium Alexander Livshits believes. As a Rosbalt correspondent reports, he made this announcement at the press conference 'Results of the world forum in Davos and prospects for economic growth in Russia' yesterday.

In Mr Livshits' opinion, the inflow of foreign capital into the country 'will make the ruble unnecessarily strong and recent events have shown that nobody is able to cope with this at the moment.' However, he believes the strengthening of the ruble is not the main problem. In his opinion, the biggest problem is foreigners' unwillingness to invest money in those areas of the Russian economy 'which we want them to invest in.' He added that 'we do not let foreign companies invest in those areas they want to invest in. We would like foreigners to invest in the development of the national infrastructure, in science intensive industries but they are not interested: these areas of the Russian economy will only be profitable in the long-term. Foreigners want to get hold of our companies that deal in natural resources. Our economy has always been based on natural resources, even 100, 200 and 300 years ago.' Mr Livshits mentioned that 'there are offers to buy 'Russian Aluminium almost every month and nobody complains about the bad investment climate.' He also claimed that large Russian businesses are 'greatly underestimated as not all Russian companies are listed on the stock markets and many people are unaware of their market value.' However, the Russian government should try to preserve the current investment climate in the hope that foreign capital will be invested in other sectors of the economy,' he concluded.

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