MOSCOW, January 20. /TASS/. Russia’s State Duma urges captains of national business to transfer their assets from abroad to Russia, Duma deputies told TASS on Thursday.
“I’m calling on everyone to disburse overseas assets and to invest monies in our own country,” Alexander Ageyev, first deputy chairman of the committee for constitutional legislation and state construction told TASS.
As an instance, he cited the situation around the Brooklyn Nets basketball club of the Russian billionaire businessman Mikhail Prokhorov, which the Forbes magazine ranked as the sixth most expensive sports club in the world, costing its owner more than $1 billion.
“There’s no doubt Prokhorov has an acute sense for business because he purchased the club for $300 million and now it costs five times as more — in no small a measure thanks to the monies that Prokhorov earned at a Russian enterprise in the Krasnoyarsk territory,” Ageyev said.
“However, business people of Prokhorov’s category can’t remain socially irresponsible now that the economic situation has deteriorated,” he said. “It is important to assure that all these means should be remitted back home, to our country, for the projects like support for the very same sports which have been hard hit after the downhill slide of the exchange rates here.”
“I’d like to make a reminder to Mikhail Prokhorov that if he thinks himself to be Russian and a person caring for the destiny of his homeland, then it’s important for him, too, to transfer all such assets to Russia,” Ageyev said.
Reports on Prokhorov’s holding talks to sell his shares in the club appeared at the beginning of last October.
The billionaire businessman purchased the Nets in 2009 when the club was still based in New Jersey. In 2012, it moved to Brooklyn to the Barclays Center stadium built by Prokhorov.