5 ms·

Help the Moldovan company RITLabs to survive

150 points by rhabarba 11y ago

rdtsc 11y ago
That is sad to hear. As a rule, when Moldova is in the news, it is rarely good news. > We think it is a deliberate attempt to destroy our company. That would probably be true. Knowing how things work there. This is the country which had $1B stolen from it. Not from a company, but from the country! Sounds too crazy to be true? Nope, it is true in Moldova. http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/news/economy/moldova-stolen-billion/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/news/economy/moldova-stolen-... That is a whooping 12% of its GDP. Imagine someone walking away with $2T away from US. On the other hand, if you are a corrupt criminal, Moldova is a nice place to hang out. You can make your own laws, pay your way out of anything. Corruption attracts corruption. EDIT: This is also a country were when I lived there, someone put a bomb under the door of someone they don't like in a 5 story apartment building. I was in the evening on the phone with someone and the whole building shook, thought it was an earthquake. Nope, apartment building next door was bombed. The part of the roof and the part of the wall was missing. Could see people's furniture inside and all after the dust settled. It was miracle nobody died.
- mtgx 11y ago
  > Imagine someone walking away with $2T away from US. Not so hard to imagine: https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/want-cut-government-waste-8-5-trillion-pentagon-142321339.html https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/want-cut-govern... Moldova's $1 billion probably got "lost" in a similar way - corruption that doesn't appear in the books.
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    At least criminality in Moldova can be agile ;-) you don't need a whole military contractor company to steal billions from taxpayers to say build "infrastructure" in Iraq or Afghanistan. Alone or with a few accomplices can efficiently take the money and cut out all the fakery in between.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      So it seems Moldova offers a lesson for startups on how to disrupt corruption industry. It's time for the dinosaurs of military-industrial complex to shake in fear as the agile lean Bribe-as-a-Service companies take their marketshare. ;).
  - paul_milovanov 11y ago
    Provincial amateurs. Don't have to look as far as US: every municipality, region and the federal gov't in Russia is doing the same but with more skill and elegance. Speaking of which, any official GDP statistic is probably a number with zero significant digits. Figuring out what the off-the-grid money flows are is a difficult and personally reckless task, and there's a million reasons to suspect a great deal of artistic licence in any above-ground records.
  - rtpg 11y ago
    This "$8.5 trillion stolen by the pentagon" meme keeps on getting touted about, but that story is about the pentagon not submitting properly audited spending trails for this money. It's not like $8.5 trillion went into private citizen's pockets (though I wouldn't be surprised if, say, 1% did).
- paul_milovanov 11y ago
  > As a rule, when Moldova is in the news, it is rarely good news. That, unfortunately, is exactly true. I was lucky to emigrate as a child, and my sad, cynical reaction to whenever I see "Moldova" on a page out of a corner of my eye is "oh boy, this is going to be a good one" -- not because I wish them ill, but because the only real hope there is for individuals who can emigrate, not for the country. Fortunately, Romania is handing out citizenships to any Moldovan that cares to ask (in Romanian), and throughout the nineties and the naughts hundreds of thousands of Moldovans have been working throughout Russia, Ukraine and the EU. The remittances from emigres to their relatives left behind are a significant part of all money flows into the country. I can't see any path forward for them until they become part of either Romania or Russia, whole or in pieces. That, in turn, won't happen, partly for geopolitical reasons, and partly because small new nations are fucked in the head and will rather cut their own balls off than let go of any territory. Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia are excellent post-soviet examples: to continue the unfortunate metaphor, the respective sets of balls (which Russia's got a firm grasp on through military presence and financial assistance) are the separatist Transnistria, Eastern Ukraine, Abkhasia and Ossetia. This is a clever technique, and the fact that it's by now simultaneously well-understood and consistently successful unfortunately suggests that these countries' geopolitical limbo is partly of their own making. The kind of news that pop up are: - Moldovan police arrest a guy looking for a buyer for 2 kg of plutonium in his car - Moscow road police arrest a Moldovan for naked drunk-driving - A sad, sad, hopeless BBC documentary about an orphanage 30km away from the capital that the foreign volunteers come to renovate and donate mattresses and toys to, only to find the toys gone and building materials stolen when they come back for a visit six months later. - Moldova becomes one of the desperately poor countries chosen for Michelle Obama's program that supports the education of girls. I remember being surprised when I saw Moldova declared the poorest country in Europe -- we were far from rich, but we lived in the capital and my parents shielded us well. Unfortunately, Moldova shows up at the top of that ranking year after year, except for apparently 2015, when Ukraine's economy took a hit bad enough to earn it this dubious honor. The underlying reality is that life outside the capital is extremely hard, life in the capital is just hard, and the rules of the game are set by the elites that own whatever little wealth is to be found in Moldova. More to the point regarding the OP of the thread, the capital, Chișinău, and its power and business community, is so small that in the very best scenario of a successful intervention from the outside, their long- and medium- term survival chances are zero. Any Moldovan company's most valuable business asset is the right connections, and apparently that's the asset that RIT Labs no longer has. If they really don't have any funds stashed outside of Moldova, they're completely out of their minds. In any case, they really should realize they're de-facto already insolvent and focus on how to setup their business outside the country and ask their supporters to help them with that. It's extremely sad, but they couldn't have possibly not known what country they were operating in (for nearly twenty years now) and what the risks are.
- paul_milovanov 11y ago
  thrway has pointed out quite thoughtfully elsewhere that another more efficient way to get out of this situation would be to pay the right "tax" to the right "government department". Crowdfunding ransom money instead of international pressure is a far more reasonable approach.
- cbnotfromthere 11y ago
  " $1B stolen from it. Not from a company, but from the country!" You exhibit a severe case of reading comprehension disability. For these money to be stolen "from the country" it would have required the disappearance of funds from the Treasury or the bank accounts belonging to the central administration. That was not the case: the money had been syphoned off from 2/two commercial banks, namely Banca de Economii (Savings Bank), Banca Sociala (Social Bank), and Unibank. Except for the names, all this info in in the CNN linked to. And to pre-empt a silly reply, no, the National Bank bailing out these banks doesn't mean the theft extended to the government. That's the government being either stupid or having no choice. The theft itself was from companies.
ommunist 11y ago
oh, heck, these are guys behind TheBat email client snd FAR. Some of the most useful Win progs I ever seen before I falled to *nix.
- leonardinius 11y ago
  Not FAR. It was Eugene Roshal[1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Roshal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Roshal
  - ommunist 11y ago
    ah, sorry, that was DOS Navigator, also very useful, it even had trash bin!
- eistrati 11y ago
  First product these guys done together was DOS Navigator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Navigator
eistrati 11y ago
I'm originally from Moldova and it's very sad to read yet another abuse story from Moldovan authorities :( Communist roots are so deep, not even Vlad Dracula will be able to fix it. Will help as much as I can, but a piece of advice to Ritlab team - Consider moving your company outside of Moldova and afterwards write a "Thank You" letter ;)
trhway 11y ago
kind of surrealism : https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritlabs https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritlabs "В 2013 году фирма удостоилась звания «Сознательный налогоплательщик»[4], учрежденного Главной Государственной Налоговой Инспекцией Республики Молдова." translation: "In 2013 the company was awarded the title "Conscious Taxpayer" by the Moldova State Tax Agency (ie. like IRS) " and according to this http://logos.press.md/node/38228 http://logos.press.md/node/38228 the company was also given "Certificate of Trust" along with the title which meant official guarantee of absence of tax audits for the 2 years following that. Edit: After spending some time Google-ing it seems just a simple case of extortion by the team consisting of a local police inspector, prosecutor and a judge, i.e. it looks like RitLabs, despite their good taxpayer status, has still missed (and seems to be stubbornly refusing) to pay some local "tax" :)
- rhabarba 11y ago
  Depends. Here's the full story: http://pastebin.com/gKqTcH4j http://pastebin.com/gKqTcH4j
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    Why is this all in pastebins? As opposed to company website, personal blog, Kickstarter, something even vaguely reputable...?
    - vhbit 11y ago
      Looks like those messages are copied from mailing lists (TBBETA and/or TBUDL). Considering The Bat! was the most popular product[1] and its users were email addicted those mailing lists are the best way to reach their users directly. I've seen publications in local[2] "press" about the case although it focuses only on corruption and there is no mention of internal company's politics there. [1] at time I worked there it was the only source of revenue, not sure if any other product take off since [2] yep, I'm in Moldova
  - 3princip 11y ago
    I'm from a similarly corrupt European country, and while these things are common (misuse of the judiciary, police being indistinguishable from criminals etc), there is often more to these stories. In this case, it appears to be the result of a dispute between a former owner and current one. In that case, this appeal is only one side of the story, and the judge may well be proceeding based on evidence provided to back up any allegations. I'm writing this because as much as I've witnessed corruption, I've also witnessed shady characters blaming everyone else for their misdeeds, especially the country, judiciary etc. "It's the oppressive regime that caused me to do something wrong, now they're repressing me" etc. While I'm not suggesting the company is at fault, it is also not clear that there is no cause for what is happening. Calling for foreigners to apply diplomatic pressure to the Moldovan state without having the facts of the case is also a form of extra-judiciary pressure, much like the alleged conspiracy against the company.
restalis 11y ago
I'm sympathetic with their plea, but I don't quite understand this: "There is no such a law in Moldova to permit for a Moldovan court to allow an ex parte suspension of a bank account. But this law was violated in case of Ritlabs, SRL." How can an inexistent law be violated?

150 points by rhabarba 11y ago

rdtsc 11y ago

That is sad to hear. As a rule, when Moldova is in the news, it is rarely good news. > We think it is a deliberate attempt to destroy our company. That would probably be true. Knowing how things work there. This is the country which had $1B stolen from it. Not from a company, but from the country! Sounds too crazy to be true? Nope, it is true in Moldova. http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/news/economy/moldova-stolen-billion/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/news/economy/moldova-stolen-... That is a whooping 12% of its GDP. Imagine someone walking away with $2T away from US. On the other hand, if you are a corrupt criminal, Moldova is a nice place to hang out. You can make your own laws, pay your way out of anything. Corruption attracts corruption. EDIT: This is also a country were when I lived there, someone put a bomb under the door of someone they don't like in a 5 story apartment building. I was in the evening on the phone with someone and the whole building shook, thought it was an earthquake. Nope, apartment building next door was bombed. The part of the roof and the part of the wall was missing. Could see people's furniture inside and all after the dust settled. It was miracle nobody died.

mtgx 11y ago
> Imagine someone walking away with $2T away from US. Not so hard to imagine: https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/want-cut-government-waste-8-5-trillion-pentagon-142321339.html https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/want-cut-govern... Moldova's $1 billion probably got "lost" in a similar way - corruption that doesn't appear in the books.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  At least criminality in Moldova can be agile ;-) you don't need a whole military contractor company to steal billions from taxpayers to say build "infrastructure" in Iraq or Afghanistan. Alone or with a few accomplices can efficiently take the money and cut out all the fakery in between.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    So it seems Moldova offers a lesson for startups on how to disrupt corruption industry. It's time for the dinosaurs of military-industrial complex to shake in fear as the agile lean Bribe-as-a-Service companies take their marketshare. ;).
- paul_milovanov 11y ago
  Provincial amateurs. Don't have to look as far as US: every municipality, region and the federal gov't in Russia is doing the same but with more skill and elegance. Speaking of which, any official GDP statistic is probably a number with zero significant digits. Figuring out what the off-the-grid money flows are is a difficult and personally reckless task, and there's a million reasons to suspect a great deal of artistic licence in any above-ground records.
- rtpg 11y ago
  This "$8.5 trillion stolen by the pentagon" meme keeps on getting touted about, but that story is about the pentagon not submitting properly audited spending trails for this money. It's not like $8.5 trillion went into private citizen's pockets (though I wouldn't be surprised if, say, 1% did).
paul_milovanov 11y ago
> As a rule, when Moldova is in the news, it is rarely good news. That, unfortunately, is exactly true. I was lucky to emigrate as a child, and my sad, cynical reaction to whenever I see "Moldova" on a page out of a corner of my eye is "oh boy, this is going to be a good one" -- not because I wish them ill, but because the only real hope there is for individuals who can emigrate, not for the country. Fortunately, Romania is handing out citizenships to any Moldovan that cares to ask (in Romanian), and throughout the nineties and the naughts hundreds of thousands of Moldovans have been working throughout Russia, Ukraine and the EU. The remittances from emigres to their relatives left behind are a significant part of all money flows into the country. I can't see any path forward for them until they become part of either Romania or Russia, whole or in pieces. That, in turn, won't happen, partly for geopolitical reasons, and partly because small new nations are fucked in the head and will rather cut their own balls off than let go of any territory. Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia are excellent post-soviet examples: to continue the unfortunate metaphor, the respective sets of balls (which Russia's got a firm grasp on through military presence and financial assistance) are the separatist Transnistria, Eastern Ukraine, Abkhasia and Ossetia. This is a clever technique, and the fact that it's by now simultaneously well-understood and consistently successful unfortunately suggests that these countries' geopolitical limbo is partly of their own making. The kind of news that pop up are: - Moldovan police arrest a guy looking for a buyer for 2 kg of plutonium in his car - Moscow road police arrest a Moldovan for naked drunk-driving - A sad, sad, hopeless BBC documentary about an orphanage 30km away from the capital that the foreign volunteers come to renovate and donate mattresses and toys to, only to find the toys gone and building materials stolen when they come back for a visit six months later. - Moldova becomes one of the desperately poor countries chosen for Michelle Obama's program that supports the education of girls. I remember being surprised when I saw Moldova declared the poorest country in Europe -- we were far from rich, but we lived in the capital and my parents shielded us well. Unfortunately, Moldova shows up at the top of that ranking year after year, except for apparently 2015, when Ukraine's economy took a hit bad enough to earn it this dubious honor. The underlying reality is that life outside the capital is extremely hard, life in the capital is just hard, and the rules of the game are set by the elites that own whatever little wealth is to be found in Moldova. More to the point regarding the OP of the thread, the capital, Chișinău, and its power and business community, is so small that in the very best scenario of a successful intervention from the outside, their long- and medium- term survival chances are zero. Any Moldovan company's most valuable business asset is the right connections, and apparently that's the asset that RIT Labs no longer has. If they really don't have any funds stashed outside of Moldova, they're completely out of their minds. In any case, they really should realize they're de-facto already insolvent and focus on how to setup their business outside the country and ask their supporters to help them with that. It's extremely sad, but they couldn't have possibly not known what country they were operating in (for nearly twenty years now) and what the risks are.
paul_milovanov 11y ago
thrway has pointed out quite thoughtfully elsewhere that another more efficient way to get out of this situation would be to pay the right "tax" to the right "government department". Crowdfunding ransom money instead of international pressure is a far more reasonable approach.
cbnotfromthere 11y ago
" $1B stolen from it. Not from a company, but from the country!" You exhibit a severe case of reading comprehension disability. For these money to be stolen "from the country" it would have required the disappearance of funds from the Treasury or the bank accounts belonging to the central administration. That was not the case: the money had been syphoned off from 2/two commercial banks, namely Banca de Economii (Savings Bank), Banca Sociala (Social Bank), and Unibank. Except for the names, all this info in in the CNN linked to. And to pre-empt a silly reply, no, the National Bank bailing out these banks doesn't mean the theft extended to the government. That's the government being either stupid or having no choice. The theft itself was from companies.

ommunist 11y ago

oh, heck, these are guys behind TheBat email client snd FAR. Some of the most useful Win progs I ever seen before I falled to *nix.

leonardinius 11y ago
Not FAR. It was Eugene Roshal[1] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Roshal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Roshal
- ommunist 11y ago
  ah, sorry, that was DOS Navigator, also very useful, it even had trash bin!
eistrati 11y ago
First product these guys done together was DOS Navigator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Navigator

eistrati 11y ago

I'm originally from Moldova and it's very sad to read yet another abuse story from Moldovan authorities :( Communist roots are so deep, not even Vlad Dracula will be able to fix it. Will help as much as I can, but a piece of advice to Ritlab team - Consider moving your company outside of Moldova and afterwards write a "Thank You" letter ;)

trhway 11y ago

kind of surrealism : https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritlabs https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritlabs "В 2013 году фирма удостоилась звания «Сознательный налогоплательщик»[4], учрежденного Главной Государственной Налоговой Инспекцией Республики Молдова." translation: "In 2013 the company was awarded the title "Conscious Taxpayer" by the Moldova State Tax Agency (ie. like IRS) " and according to this http://logos.press.md/node/38228 http://logos.press.md/node/38228 the company was also given "Certificate of Trust" along with the title which meant official guarantee of absence of tax audits for the 2 years following that. Edit: After spending some time Google-ing it seems just a simple case of extortion by the team consisting of a local police inspector, prosecutor and a judge, i.e. it looks like RitLabs, despite their good taxpayer status, has still missed (and seems to be stubbornly refusing) to pay some local "tax" :)

rhabarba 11y ago
Depends. Here's the full story: http://pastebin.com/gKqTcH4j http://pastebin.com/gKqTcH4j
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Why is this all in pastebins? As opposed to company website, personal blog, Kickstarter, something even vaguely reputable...?
  - vhbit 11y ago
    Looks like those messages are copied from mailing lists (TBBETA and/or TBUDL). Considering The Bat! was the most popular product[1] and its users were email addicted those mailing lists are the best way to reach their users directly. I've seen publications in local[2] "press" about the case although it focuses only on corruption and there is no mention of internal company's politics there. [1] at time I worked there it was the only source of revenue, not sure if any other product take off since [2] yep, I'm in Moldova
- 3princip 11y ago
  I'm from a similarly corrupt European country, and while these things are common (misuse of the judiciary, police being indistinguishable from criminals etc), there is often more to these stories. In this case, it appears to be the result of a dispute between a former owner and current one. In that case, this appeal is only one side of the story, and the judge may well be proceeding based on evidence provided to back up any allegations. I'm writing this because as much as I've witnessed corruption, I've also witnessed shady characters blaming everyone else for their misdeeds, especially the country, judiciary etc. "It's the oppressive regime that caused me to do something wrong, now they're repressing me" etc. While I'm not suggesting the company is at fault, it is also not clear that there is no cause for what is happening. Calling for foreigners to apply diplomatic pressure to the Moldovan state without having the facts of the case is also a form of extra-judiciary pressure, much like the alleged conspiracy against the company.

restalis 11y ago

I'm sympathetic with their plea, but I don't quite understand this: "There is no such a law in Moldova to permit for a Moldovan court to allow an ex parte suspension of a bank account. But this law was violated in case of Ritlabs, SRL." How can an inexistent law be violated?