The issue of the legitimacy of privatization in the 1990s in Russia should be closed, and a mechanism for doing that should be devised, Prime Minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin said on Thursday at a business lobby group congress.
“We need to turn this page,” Putin said at the 19th congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. “We need closure on this period – different methods are possible, and of course we need to discuss this with the public, with expert society. But in such a way that society really accepts this variant of closure of the problems of the 1990s, and these, frankly, dishonest privatizations,” he said.