Russia will save $1.5 billion by slashing its army of bureaucrats by more than 100,000 over the next three years, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has announced. Yana Yakovleva, founder of Business Solidarity, provides some concrete examples of how bureaucratic hurdles are stifling young businesses in a Moscow Times op-ed. On the back of a rejuvenated economy keeping borrowing costs down, Russian banks are selling the most bonds on international markets since the government defaulted in 1998, Bloomberg reports. If the battle for the leadership of national building regulatory group Nostroi is won by housing developer Alexander Vakhmistrov, it is apparently likely that standards in Russia’s construction industry could approach those applied across the globe. It appears that Luzhkov-sparring tycoon Telman Ismailov is planning a large-scale return to the hotel industry, with a $1 billion project to build Sochi’s largest complex in time for the Olympic Games.