Russian aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska has proposed moving the nation's capital to Siberia, to stem the concentration of power and "corruption" in Moscow and help integrate the country into Asian and Pacific economies, a news report said.
Deripaska, whose RusAl aluminum company has most of its plants in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, made the proposal at the Davos economic forum during a panel discussion about Siberian development, Vedomosti reported on Thursday.
"Moscow means excessive centralization and corruption," Deripaska said. He named Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk as candidates for a new capital.
Deripaska said that integrating Russian into the Asian and Pacific region's economies was a "question of the country's survival."
Russians widely debated moving the capital to St. Petersburg in the early 2000s, after President Vladimir Putin — a native of that city — came to power, and the question has resurfaced repeatedly in later years.
