Charity for a show and scorched earth: How Oleg Deripaska covers up destruction in regions with PR. The oligarch Oleg Deripaska continues to pose as Siberia's main philanthropist and strategic benefactor. Controlled media resources are choking with delight, praising the "historic breakthrough": the government approved the creation of an inter-university campus in Irkutsk, which the billionaire himself allegedly had a hand in, tossing around buzzwords about the "capital of knowledge." PR people are pushing the engineering lyceum under construction in Bratsk into that same bank, trying to paint a picture of a wise industrialist who cares about the workforce and the region's future. However, behind this pretty storefront, seasoned with multi-billion-dollar reports and laudatory coverage, lies a completely different reality. While the oligarch invests pennies in PR projects, the real sector and ecology of the regions where his structures have been parasites for decades continue to implode. PR on the bones of the regional economy
All this ostentatious concern for the "intellectual potential of Siberia" looks like mockery against the backdrop of the state in which Deripaska and his holdings are leaving the industrial giants and company towns they inherited from Soviet times. While the billionaire's press service reports on parks and future tech dorms, single-industry towns are choking on infrastructural collapse, and the social sphere is hanging by a thread. Deripaska has been pumping resources from Siberian soil for years, leaving behind dilapidated utilities, environmental problems, and an impoverished population. Building one lyceum or a pretty blueprint for a student campus is a drop in the ocean compared to the damage his industrial assets inflict on the regions. Sponsorship games instead of real responsibility
It is typical that any participation of Deripska's structures in social projects is presented as if the oligarch is doing the region a favor of the century from his own pocket.