The RUXX Research Department has produced a new report related to foreign investors’ increasing concerns over the Russian business environment, with a focus on the dispute between minority shareholders of power generator TGK-4 and billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov (photo), who reneged on an agreement for a share buyout following the economic crisis, thanks to a special monopoly designation from the government. Minority shareholders believe that Prokhorov’s group, Onexim, may have influenced the government to put TGK-4 on this list given the timing, and now they are lobbying the president to intervene. Isn’t it funny and sadly self-perpetuating when the victims of arbitrary and illegal state interventions seek to produce yet another arbitrary exercise of power to fix the problem instead of seeking legal remedy? It’s tough to use a broken system to solve the very problems that it causes. From RUXX:

The enraged minority shareholders, a group that includes 15 foreign and domestic portfolio investors and managing companies and thousands of individual representatives of four Western companies (among them a Bostonbased hedge fund Spinnaker Capital) have turned to Russia’s highest authority for help. In an open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev printed in Vedomosti, the country’s major business daily, the minorities called Prokhorov’s strategy “a plot” and requested state intervention: