Yesterday, the Customs Committee (in a joint operation with the MVD) arrested a group of people from a yacht importer, including the head of the group that imports Aston Martins into Russia(Moscow Times link). What's surprising is the ferocity of the arrest, breaking windows, and the fact that it was done in public. Even in Russia, these things are normally more civilised, and it doesn't look like the suspects were a flight risk, given that they were just about to take part in a press conference relating to the start of a yacht exhibition in Moscow. So clearly there was a desire to send a signal. The Moscow Times article suggests that it's because there has been criticism of the Customs Committee, which is now trying to show, as publicly as possible, what a good job it's doing. There has also been a suggestion that it's for internal Russian PR, to show that they are squeezing the rich for taxes.
The Customs Committee has been a huge battleground since the fall of Communism. It generates huge cash flows, so it's important for the state, but more importantly, it's a place where people can attach themselves to cash flows and get rich. One of the ways that the Onexim people (Potanin and Prokhorov) made their money was to purchase privatised state assets using funds placed on deposit with them by the Customs Committee. There is a whole industry of expeditors that make money by helping importers and exporters get past the Customs Committee (I've been told unofficially by World Bank officials that each separate export license costs $250,000, which formed the basis of the initial capital for a different oligarch group). One of the most bitter fights of the early Putin era was the "Tri Kita" episode, which was ostensibly over the investigation of a furniture importer, but in reality was between two branches of the security services for control of the Customs Committee.
Once you are in place in the Customs Committee, then you have to pay a fair amount of money upwards in order to keep your place. This is fine as long as the sector is awash in cash, but these cash flows have been severely restricted by the fall in the price of oil - the Customs Committee collects all of the difference between the export price received and about $32. So the fall in the price of oil from $150 to $75 will have hurt. And of course the general decline in exports will have caused problems. But I doubt that the cost of maintaining your position has fallen. So the guys in charge need to seek more revenue opportunities. This is why they have gone after the Cherkizovo market, which sold cheap Chinese imports, which were cheap because someone was paying off the appropriate customs inspector.
The rake-off from yachts and Aston Martins is probably not that big. But presumably the arrested suspects have already paid off one customs inspector, and this is a way for a different customs inspector to make his way on to their turf. The Russian word is razborka which translates as a sort of "working out of differences". The guys in charge are letting their subordinates fight it out amongst themselves, using whatever allies they can muster (hence the presence of heavies from the MVD), and will happily collect their baksheesh from the victor. In the meantime, some poor businessman who thought he had sorted his problems by paying a large amount of money to a senior official, suddenly finds that he's in jail, for having backed the wrong horse, when he wasn't even aware that there was a race going on.
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