When Vladimir Ryskin joined the fledgling Unexim Bank as head of treasury a few years ago it was like going back to college. He knew almost everyone. They were either former classmates at the prestigous Moscow Institute of Finance, or former workmates at the International Bank for Economic Cooperation (IBEC), or friends among Moscow's tight-knit social and professional elite.
Unexim is Russia's nearest equivalent to a blue-blooded bank - like JP Morgan in the US or Deutsche Bank in Europe. It is powered by the same people who would have aspired to the administrative elite that ran the Soviet Union. Many, such as founder and chairman Vladimir Potanin, were members of Komsomol, the Young Communist League. Later they gained executive positions in government or - like the bank's co-founder, Michail Prokhorov - the state-owned banks. In capitalist Russia these thirty-something communists-turned-bankers have in four years made Unexim the largest privately owned bank.
Now they're preparing to create Russia's leading investment bank. In July they announced that Unexim's associate bank, International Company for Finance and Investment (ICFI), will merge with Renaissance Capital Group, the bank set up by a group of former CSFB excutives led by Boris Jordan.