Until the end of the last century, few people in Russia heard the word "raider" and had no idea about the very concept of raiding. The total state form of ownership completely excluded this phenomenon. With the development of market relations, which caused a redistribution of economic spheres, many ugly and criminal forms of new realities appeared. Raiding is one of them.
The meaning of the word "raider" (translated from English - raider) speaks for itself. Raiding involves takeover, seizure of property or operational management. For this, a certain conflict is initiated, most often in the field of business, as a result, the assets of the enterprise are withdrawn from the possession of the legal owners. Very often these actions are openly illegal. But today raiding has become so sophisticated that they can act as completely legal structures, for example, consulting companies, various law firms, security companies, etc.
Their morals
The paradigm of raiders' actions has been worked out - creating unbearable and critical conditions for the enterprise, financial exhaustion, persuading owners to sell assets at a bargain price, and then selling the enterprise itself and its property at a price a thousand times higher than the original one. For these purposes, fly-by-night companies or offshore zones are often created, where financial transactions are carried out without taxes.
Persons interested in raiding do not show themselves openly. Usually these are representatives of large commercial structures, financial market players. They also purchase property from raiders as owners of the enterprise at a price 50 percent cheaper than the market price. Among the clients of raiders there are also such structures that buy assets in reserve and then resell them at speculative prices. In this case, the sold enterprise falls into a long stagnation, it does not produce products, does not deduct taxes, labor collectives are scattered or even completely lost, unemployment and social tension are growing.
The very phenomenon of raiding in the world is hundreds of years old, in each country it manifested itself in its own way and was not always frankly criminal in nature, being, as it were, a forced component in the sphere of complex financial and industrial relations between corporations, firms, enterprises. The phenomenon of raiding was most clearly manifested in the period of the appearance of shares, which made it possible to alienate firms and enterprises without the consent of the management in favor of third parties with subsequent sale. These processes have actively taken root in the United States. Mass raiding has not become typical for European countries. For example, in Germany, over the past half century, only three attempts of corporate raider takeover have been recorded.
Three colors of privatization
Modern Russia has demonstrated a bright flourishing of raiding in the form of privatization of billions of dollars in assets of the former Soviet industry and economic facilities. Raiding in Russia is conventionally divided into white, gray and black. The first usually does not go beyond the scope of the law and uses corporate blackmail for its activities, that is, creates a minority stake and forces the company's management to buy it out at an inflated price, getting rid of the blackmailer. Gray and even more so black raiding does not shun various and often criminal methods of seizure and appropriation of property, violation of criminal law. For example, this is bribery of general managers, forgery and falsification of documents, bringing an enterprise to bankruptcy and even outright seizure of it.