Russia's top business lobby group said the country should host the headquarters of an OPEC-like gas group and sell oil in robles to help achieve the Kremlin's desire to make Moscow a global financial centre. Russia, which is flush with oil revenues and holds the world's third largest gold and foreign exchange reserves, aims to boost its influence in global political and financial affairs and wants to lure international investors to its capital. The Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, often dubbed “the oligarchs' trade union” because it has some of Russia's richest men on its board, drafted proposals in response to President Dmitry Medvedev's call to make Moscow a world financial center. The proposals on Thursday also include a merger of Russian bourses to create a giant operator, which should take over bourses in Germany, Sweden, Kazakhstan and Vietnam, described in the draft as “regions outside London and New York's zone of influence”. Some gas exporting countries are exploring the idea of turning an informal club, known as the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, into a more formal group with a charter similar to that of the OPEC. The US and the European Union have repeatedly said the creation of an OPEC-style gas group would pose a serious danger to global energy security and create room for price manipulation. Russian gas monopoly Gazprom's CEO Alexei Miller, who also publicly opposed the idea of creating a gas group similar to OPEC, sits on the board of the lobby. The official strategy of turning Moscow into a global financial centre, drafted by Russia's financial markets watchdog (FSFR) last year, calls for the abolition of taxes on income from investment in domestic securities. Russia's stock market is the world's 12th largest by total capitalization, currently at $1,350 billion, but the number of freely floated stocks is small. The FSFR strategy says Russia should become the fifth-largest stock market in the world by 2020. Investors see poor financial market infrastructure, massive traffic jams in the city center and Soviet-era airports as the main obstacles to doing business in Moscow.
