Miller Magazine Issue: 136 April 2021

85 MILLER / aprıl 2021 INTERVIEW among the first 100 Russian capital markets specialists. After graduating from Chicago Booth School of Business in 2007, I took up private equity and turnaround projects. Agribusiness was one of our areas of in- terest. We have made several deals in this sector. As a result, BIO-TON Agri Corp. was born, one of the largest crop production companies in Russia with its own land bank of over 450 KHA, a leader in wheat and sun- flower production. I gave up my turnaround advisory practice and focused entirely on my company. I am its sole shareholder at the moment. As a public duty, I accepted the in- vitation from the largest Russian grain exporters and in 2019 created and headed RUSGRAIN UNION, the Rus- sian Union of Grain Exporters. Your association is a newly founded union. What did lead up to the Russian Union of Grain Exporters’ founding? Indeed, RUSGRAIN UNION is a new organization cre- ated in 2019 by the four largest grain exporters - private TD RIF and Aston, multinational Glencore Agriculture (now Viterra) and state-owned United Grain Company (UGC or OZK). The composition of the founders quite accurately reflects the balance of power in the Russian market, where companies of different forms of owner- ship compete with each other. I was just finishing my last turnaround project at UGC. I knew my colleagues and their plans well, but did not think to participate in the new project. However, a se- ries of interviews with candidates for the leadership role, most of which are well known to the market, ended in failure. And then the offer was made to me. I accepted it after some thought. The fact is that by this time I had already firmly decided to focus on developing my own business. Any new project brings new professional con- tacts and connections but takes up a significant portion of the time, the most valuable resource. In addition, at that time I believed that any of the interviewed candi- dates were stronger than me. Now I understand that I was wrong. Vanity and excessive personal ambition did not allow them to earn the trust of the founders and take the place of the leader of RUSGRAIN UNION. I will not disclose their names for ethical reasons. To understand the reasons for the emergence of RUS- GRAIN UNION, one must understand the mentality of Russian business. Almost any branch of agribusiness to- day is represented by several professional unions and associations, most of which are phantom entities. These organizations have long ceased to represent the inter- ests of their industries, but claim rent from them. This phenomenon can be explained by the absence of the practice of succession and turnover of business leaders, which we inherited from Soviet times. Many professional organizations are associated with their leaders. Together with them, they grow old and decrepit, losing touch with the real world and turning into their lifelong retirement plan. It seems that the Western busi- ness world does not understand this phenomenon. Many foreign compa- nies join such organizations, consid- ering their membership as a confir- mation of their professional status. But the truth is that these organiza- tions no longer exist for the Russian business community, they no longer represent anyone's interests except the private interests of their bosses. Grain trading in general and ex- port, in particular, is an extremely dy- namic business area. Russia has suc-