It's not good. The corpus of law is generally good and workable. The corpus of law, legislation itself, is actually good. The country has been putting in place good legislation. It has tidied up the crazy period of 1995 to 1996, when decrees were being issued that had force of law. Yeltsin issued, I think in 1994, 372 decrees, each of which had force of law and overrode existing legislation. All of that has gone away and there is now a body of law that is good.
The judiciary is very patchy and is subject to local and regional influence. You can go through the process. I took a case from Vladivostok right through to the Supreme Court in Moscow, and won it in the Supreme Court, only for the judge to say to me, “Now good luck enforcing it back in Vladivostok.” So that is an issue. At the same time, I won a shareholders rights case in St. Petersburg over a period of two years, which went through the courts very transparently.
So it is patchy. It is something that I believe the Kremlin is actually trying to tidy up. The Kremlin has a strong desire to have control, and this patchiness undermines the control—by control, the stability across the country—the Kremlin has. There's more to do there, but for business people, it is possible to continue to operate. To a great extent, in Russia, as in many Asian countries, you do better to focus on the relationship you establish with your partners and maintain with your partners, rather than to rely purely on legal documentation.