Premier Blames Ex-Officials for Russia’s Loss of Credibility

Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, seeking aid from the International Monetary Fund, said Wednesday that he will not bring back so-called reformers from Russia’s previous government to handle negotiations because they have lost credibility in the West.

Speaking to members of parliament, an irritated Primakov aimed his comments at Anatoly B. Chubais, a former government official who said after negotiating a huge international bailout this summer that Russia had “conned” foreign financial institutions out of $20 billion.

Since Chubais’ remark--first reported in September by the Kommersant Daily newspaper and then by The Times--Russia’s efforts to secure a much-needed $4.3-billion installment of the IMF loan have been unsuccessful.

Russia has also faced difficulty in securing foreign loans because it squandered the $4.8 billion it received from the IMF in the first installment of the $22.6-billion loan package negotiated by Chubais. The money, largely spent to prop up the ruble, disappeared into the hands of bankers and investors within weeks.

Russia, with its economy in shambles and no clear plan to resolve its fiscal crisis, is desperately in need of cash. First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri D. Maslyukov said Saturday that Moscow must find $3.5 billion this year and $17.5 billion next year just to repay debts.

At a meeting Wednesday with members of parliament’s lower house, Primakov was asked by lawmakers to find new negotiators to take over the ongoing talks with foreign lenders.

“You suggest that we replace the negotiators. With whom?” the prime minister asked. “I want to ask you a question: with the person who said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that we conned you out of $20 billion? Do you think they [the IMF] will talk to him? No one will talk to him.”

Chubais, a key architect of Russia’s economic transformation who ran President Boris N. Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign and later served as his chief of staff, could not be reached for comment Wednesday. His spokesman, Andrei V. Trapeznikov, said he could not comment on Primakov’s statement because he and Chubais had not discussed the matter.

In the lengthy Sept. 8 interview with Kommersant Daily, which was quoted in The Times a day later, Chubais was asked whether the government had the right to lie about Russia’s fiscal instability.

“In such situations, the authorities have to do it,” Chubais told Kommersant. “We ought to. The international financial institutions understand, despite the fact that we conned them out of $20 billion, that we had no other way out.”

Chubais, 43, praised by Western newspapers as a “young reformer,” bitterly denounced The Times for its article reporting that he said Russia had “conned” the international community out of the money by concealing the severity of the country’s economic crisis.

In one interview, Chubais charged that he was the victim of an attack by “the opponents of Russia.” In a letter widely distributed to news organizations, Chubais wrote that The Times’ article “absolutely distorted” his position; it was investors, he wrote, not international lenders, who were “cheated” out of $20 billion.

But Wednesday was not the first time that Chubais’ words have come back to plague the new government. His comments prompted some U.S. lawmakers to question the wisdom of future aid to Russia.

And in September, then-Deputy Prime Minister Alexander N. Shokhin, who had begun negotiating new loans with the West, quit after a week on the job when Primakov reappointed a Chubais associate--Mikhail M. Zadornov--as finance minister.

“I had thought that we needed to renew the face . . . of the government, not to create the feeling that we are negotiating only to take the money and swindle our partners later,” Shokhin said.

Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.