"Oligarchs" refer to underground Russian businessmen that cheaply bought up state assets after the USSR collapsed and sold it for exceedingly higher sums later.
It's a blasphemy to capitalism to conflate those bandits with Western entrepreneurs that founded and built their own companies from scratch, even though they have their own set of issues.
In the west, we call that "privatization", and it happens pretty frequently, and it's common for the process to be technically open, but practically exclude all but a handful of buyers.
It's also common for those buyers to make a lot of money from the assets before returning them to the state 20 years later, unmaintained and debt laden.
If they were 'proper investors' they would cheaply buy up UK water companies, load them with debt, pay out 40 billion of dividends, and then enter talks with the government about insolvency.
Can someone explain this to me? America won the Cold War and had an influence on Russia's (the successor state) transition to a market-based economy. Then how can “we“ at the same time be mad about how the transition was handled?
Luxe Lifestyle was a recently-formed company with no staff. It was awarded £25 to buy protective equipment for Covid.
The very next day, on April 29, DHSC bought another 200 million face masks, this time contracting to pay £252.5 million to Ayanda Capital, a Tory party-linked firm also bumped into the VIP lane despite having no previous PPE experience. It is an investment company specialising in currency trading, offshore property and private equity.
To this day, no-one has been charged with any crime.