Oleg Shvartsman is starting to get quoted more than even Chris Weafer these days. The shadowy government financier, who infamously coined the term “velvet reprivatization” in a tell-all interview with Kommersant before the parliamentary elections, finds himself in a tough spot, and seems to have adopted a “regret nothing” attitude and has even manufactured a sense of self-righteousness to explain his role in helping to turn former spies into CEOs and industrialists. His claims that Kommersant misrepresented him seem to be going nowhere, and his subsequent retractions (first on Echo Moskvy) and clarification interviews appear to have been ordered by higher powers in the Kremlin. Today in the Financial Times: “It is difficult to tell whether – as some Russian observers have claimed – Mr Shvartsman is just a pawn in a complex political chess game between Russia’s warring elite. He says Kommersant portrayed him as a victim of the political infighting that broke out as Russia prepares for a transfer of power next year. … He is representative of a growing political class of mid-level managers working for the state, with ties to the security services, who believe it is time for Russia’s nascent class of business owners to hand their property back to the state, former government officials said. “This was a manifesto for state raiding,” said Alexander Temerko, a former vice-president of Yukos, the defunct oil group once run by jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. “There are a lot of companies like his, and now there are so many of them they are a force.””