A week ago during the VTB investment conference titled “Russia Calling!” our colleague Alexander Branis questioned Prime Minister Vladimir Putin about a corporate governance dispute that is arguably the most serious since the Yukos affair.

The government just approved the sell-off of an estimated $29 billion in state assets. But investors beware, a major investment company warns. Russia’s legal system has made little progress, as illustrated by a case unfolding at Prosperity Capital Management.

So, it happened, He won. The political doubt has vanished, or a chunk of it, anyway. So where's the stock-market boom? Where's the wall of money? Where are the scores of institutional investors who said they would pile into Russia the moment President Boris Yeltsin was re-elected? On Thursday, the day after Yeltsin beat Gennady Zyuganov, Russian equity investors were given a lesson in how to play a volatile stock market. Bleary-eyed after a late-night TV vigil, Muscovite traders were met at work with a barrage of calls from Russian clients to buy anything even remotely resembling a domestic stock. The word was that once Western Europe arrived at work two or three hours later, serious money would move into Russia's tiny equity market, pushing prices ""to the moon,"" in the words of one trader. As London and Paris were commuting, Moscow's midmorning buying frenzy hiked the most liquid corporate and second-tier securities 15 percent. But the Western money was unimpressed.