Alan Thompson was appointed RBCC Russia Director in April 2012. In this role he has responsibility for the Moscow and St Petersburg offices of the Chamber. He is based in Moscow.

Alan moved to Russia in 1999 in the search of a challenge. His career has lead him through a broad spectrum of businesses, from agricultural projects, to insurance, advertising sales, and latterly providing hygiene and disinfectant products to hotels in Russian and Eastern European markets. Over the last 8 years Alan took his start up experience as Deputy Director in the Yellow Pages and market exposure into the Marketing Director's role in a large multi-national company.

Alan is a very strong networker and, driven by the exciting Russian business environment to find synergies. He enjoys combining networking with certain elements of his native Scottish cultural background. As the Chieftain of the St Andrews Society Moscow he has been the main coordinator of the Scottish Expatriate community events in Moscow over the last 5 years, and is a regular participant in a Whisky tasting club.

Troika Dialog, one of the leading investment companies in Russia and the CIS region, today announces the upcoming appointments of Igor Krol, Maxim Glushkov and Alexei Litvintsev in its Investment Banking division. All three senior hires will start their new roles in early April 2012. Each of the appointments brings invaluable experience from the leading global financial institutions and considerable sector expertise as Troika Dialog continues on a concerted drive to strengthen and expand its investment banking capabilities within Sberbank.

61% of top and middle level managers are happy with the size of their bonus for 2011. These are the results obtained during a survey held by Antal Russia amongst 3,200 managers of Russian and international companies. More than half (54%) of the respondents has received the bonus for 2011. At the same time about a third of managers didn’t received any annual bonus and 18% have mentioned that their contract doesn’t actually include a bonus scheme.

Building justice: A social policy for Russia

By Vladimir Putin
Translation provided by the Prime Minister's web site

Russia is a social welfare state. We have a much higher level of social guarantees than countries with a comparable level of labour productivity and per capita incomes. In the past few years, spending on the social sphere has accounted for over 50% of overall budgetary spending. In the past four years alone, it has gone up by 50% in absolute terms. Its percentage share of GDP has increased from 21% to 27%. The 2008-2009 downturn failed to undermine any of these social guarantees. Moreover, during this period the wages of public sector employees actually went up, as did pensions and other social payments. But Russian citizens are by no means satisfied with the current situation, and their dissatisfaction is perfectly justified.