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PRESS POLLS RUSSIAN BIZ ON YUKOS AFFAIR

MOSCOW, August 30 (RIA Novosti) - The Yukos controversy is badly hampering Russia's medium-scale companies, shows an opinion probe the Moscow-based Compania business weekly made among proprietors and top managers of such companies. A majority of respondents say the petroleum mammoth's plight has hit their business.

There were three items in the questionnaire the periodical was offering. Answers to the opening question demonstrated a spectacular and alarming change in the mentality of the Russian business community. That was, "Do you think the police/security attack on Big Biz threatens Russia's entire private property arrangements?"

Government action against the Yukos certainly endangers Russian private property holding, said close on 60 per cent of respondents. Many have changed their opinion to "rather dangerous" from the "hardly dangerous" of similar preceding probes. The Yukos is not alone in danger, said respondents who chose not to conceal their identity and supplemented their replies with detailed comments.

Official coercion of Big Biz will surely spread to small and medium-scale businesses, which has far scantier chances to protect themselves, says Dmitri Gulin of the Avtomir directors' board. The Avtomir is Moscow's biggest car shop chain.

Medium-scale private entrepreneurs are far from panic as they evaluate authorities' confrontation with Big Biz. The number of companies the Yukos affair has hit real bad has even shrunken since quite recently. However, the number of companies hit by "stray bullets" has almost doubled. According to 61 per cent of respondents-against 34 and 37 per cent of the two previous probes-said the last few months' Yukos-related developments had been hampering corporate activities and forced them to change plans. Thus, the business community now has far smaller confidence in the legal instruments of settling fiscal and economic disputes. Private entrepreneurs are anxious to get their money as far away as possible from wherever the government can lay hands on it. Overseas companies' confidence in Russia is also dampened. Transnational mammoths alone now can afford capital investment in Russia, and such mammoths are extremely few, say the pessimistic pollees.

The most alarming answers came to the third, and last question: "What has changed in private entrepreneurs' relations with government inspections and control agencies?" The preceding year badly spoilt those contacts, say more than 20 per cent of the respondents. They track the change down to the public mood round the Yukos affair. The number of alarmed businessmen has doubled since the latest probe, of a year ago, so the weekly discerns an established trend here.