Russia’s Richest Woman Seeks Aid, Drawing Double Takes

[babylonsister]

Russia’s Richest Woman Seeks Aid, Drawing Double Takes

By ELLEN BARRY
Published: March 13, 2009


MOSCOW — A year ago, Yelena Baturina unveiled the grandest plan yet in a building career that has remapped swaths of Moscow. It was called Project Orange, an avant-garde Norman Foster complex shaped like slices of fruit, with a tinted facade that would cast an orange glow over the Moscow River.

Last week, in a sign of the extraordinary times, Ms. Baturina applied for about $1.4 billion in government loan guarantees for her construction company, Inteko. The fortunes of Ms. Baturina, a onetime factory worker, had soared along with those of her powerful husband, Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov of Moscow. She is Russia’s richest woman, with a personal fortune that Forbes magazine estimated in 2008 at $4.2 billion.

Reports of oligarchs seeking financial aid have come to sound commonplace this year, and it is hard to detect much reaction, let alone outrage, among Muscovites. But Ms. Baturina’s request did capture some attention, particularly among those who took a dim view of the city’s recent building boom.

“It’s effrontery,” said Sergei S. Mitrokhin, an opposition lawmaker in Moscow’s city legislature. “She has no understanding of ordinary life, or ordinary people. She lives in her own golden world, from which she looks out at the reality that surrounds her, and of which she has no understanding.”

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/world/europe/14moscow.html?partner=rss&emc=rss