A member of Russia’s Human Rights Council slammed a news website that said that nearly a quarter of Russia’s top billionaires are Jews.
Nikolai Svanidze of the council, a Kremlin-affiliated body with no executive powers, spoke out last week against Lenta.ru, which analyzed the 2014 Forbes list of people the magazine identified as Russia’s wealthiest.
The Lenta.ru study loked at faith and ethnicity and claimed that 48 of the 200 richest Russians were Jews who own a total capital of $122.3 billion.
“It’s a Nazi and racist approach,” Svanidze was quoted as saying by the Slon.ru news site.
But Yuri Kanner, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, defended the decision to publish the study.
“If you cannot compare the proportion of representatives of various nationalities in the general ethnic composition of the country, it is impossible to understand who is really successful and who is not,” he told the currsorinfo.co.il news website.
Among the people listed in the Lenta study as Jewish were Mikhail Fridman ($17.6 billion); Viktor Vekselberg ($17.2 billion) and Leonid Michelson. — jta