Put economic security in the hands of professionals.
Put economic security in the hands of professionals
The 1990s have shown that force methods have become a permanent and necessary element of economic life in the Russian economy. Over the past 10 years, professional law enforcement agencies have been formed and continue to actively develop — legal and criminal, state and non-state. They are actively looking for their niches in business. All this indicates that the law of supply and demand also operates in this sector of the economy.
If there were no constant and stable demand for law enforcement services, it is unlikely that from 1993 to 1999 the number of security and detective agencies would have grown by 2.4 times (from 4,540 to 10,804), including private security agencies — by 4.8 times (from 1,237 to 5,995), and security services (SB) — by 1.9 times (from 2,356 to 4,580).
This process is connected with the fact that for the Russian entrepreneur the concept of “economic security” has transformed from an abstract theoretical concept into a really popular and extremely necessary permanent system of measures to ensure the economic security of his enterprise.
In the early 90s, most Russian entrepreneurs understood the economic security of a company as the physical security of its managers and their relatives and solved this problem according to the principle: the more «thugs», the higher the security. However, subsequent years convincingly showed that even security recruited from former employees of the famous 9th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR does not provide not only the entire range of personal security (the uniqueness of the «nine» and its highest efficiency were based on the fact that all other operational units of the KGB — intelligence and counterintelligence — worked for it and supplied the necessary information), but most importantly — business security. This situation required an immediate solution to two interrelated problems.
Firstly, the involvement of specialists, since only professional operatives, agents, analysts, and surveillance officers (former employees of special services and law enforcement agencies) are able to effectively solve the problems of ensuring economic security. Thus, in Russia (1997), 148.5 thousand licensed employees worked in 10.5 thousand registered security companies and the Security Service, of which approximately 35 thousand were former employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, almost 15 thousand were former employees of state security agencies, and about 1.5 thousand had experience working in the prosecutor's office, courts, and other law enforcement agencies.
Secondly, the creation of their own security banks, since, as world and Russian experience shows, the most protected structures are those that have their own security banks. Therefore, a rapid growth of registered security banks begins — from 2356 (1993) to 5287 (1994), from 1993 to 1997 the number of registered security banks significantly exceeded private security companies (PSC). It should be noted that the «fluctuations» in the number of security banks in our country are associated with the following. Since security banks exist at the expense of the enterprise's profit, they are more susceptible to economic blows than PSCs (the latest example is August 1998). In addition, financial pyramids, «soap» banks and similar structures had security banks that were liquidated along with the enterprise.
The essence of the Security Service's activities to ensure the security of a company in practice comes down to predicting threats and determining measures to localize them. Currently, in Russia, the main threats to any business entity in the external environment are crime, competitors, and the state, and in the internal environment — personnel. Therefore, the main areas of work of the Security Service are the following:
• studying the criminal aspects of the market, the state and influence of the shadow economy on the market;
• establishing the circumstances of unfair competition on the part of other companies;
• considering the facts of illegal use of the enterprise's trademarks;
• investigation of facts of disclosure of the company's commercial secrets;
• collection of information about persons who have concluded contracts with the enterprise;
• constant work using certain means and methods of operational activity with the following groups of personnel — employees whose relatives work for competitors; previously convicted; dismissed from the enterprise; security service employees; auxiliary personnel who have access to commercial secrets;
• identifying insolvent and unreliable business partners;
• providing the company's management with the necessary information when conducting business negotiations;
• ensuring the necessary level of security in places where the company holds confidential, representative and mass events;
• consulting and providing recommendations to the company's management and personnel on security issues.
To work effectively in these areas, intelligence and counterintelligence units must be created in the SB structure. If at the dawn of its creation (1992-1993) only a few SB leaders not only dared to propose this to the management of the enterprise, but also sought to create such units (the legendary F. D. Bobkov is one of them), today many SBs have them. If earlier the majority of Russian entrepreneurs believed that former employees of the special services transfer stereotypes from the civil service to the market system, where these structures are not needed, then at present, having learned from their own experience, the same entrepreneurs who managed to preserve their business, realized that this is not a figment of the imagination of former security officers, but a necessary and mandatory condition for minimizing entrepreneurial risks.
Intelligence and counterintelligence are antipodes. However, it should be noted that espionage, in comparison with its opponent, counterespionage (counterintelligence), has the advantage that it is the attacking side and, as a result, uses the element of surprise, determines the location of the action, the nature of its operations, and their executors. As the saying goes, a wolf has a hundred roads, a hunter has only one.
Currently, the following names for the intelligence activities of the Security Service are used in Russia: economic intelligence, business intelligence, business intelligence, and competitive intelligence. Although they have some differences and features, they can probably be considered synonyms. There are various options for the existence of an intelligence unit:
• is included in the Security Council;
• is not included in the Security Council and is disguised as a department of economic analysis, marketing research or even a public relations department;
• is not part of the enterprise structure, but is an “independent” information or legal firm.
Regardless of the name and location, economic intelligence should work in three directions. The first is collecting information, monitoring competitors, which makes it possible
timely disclosure of competitors' plans to seize leadership or commit other dangerous actions for the company. Second — search for development paths that allow the enterprise to gain significant advantages over its competitors. Third — development of fundamentally new approaches to doing business that open the way for the company to seize leadership in the industry.
Currently, economic intelligence is one of the basic functions of modern management. Therefore, there are features
both in the personnel of this unit and in its interaction with other structures of the company. Modern business intelligence is not only operational and analytical work, but also audit, finance, accounting, information technology and much more. None of the units that ensure the economic security of the enterprise has such constant contacts with the economic, financial, legal structures of the company. Business intelligence not only participates in the development of the economic strategy of the enterprise, but directly contributes to its implementation. Therefore, if in the counterintelligence unit all employees must have experience in operational^ investigative activities, then in intelligence, as Russian practice shows, 30% of professionals are enough, and the rest are specialists in the field of economics, finance, accounting, audit, law.
It should be noted that until the company's managers realize that economic intelligence is a necessary condition for effective enterprise management in modern conditions, an important lever for achieving victory in the competitive struggle, there is no point in organizing an intelligence unit at all. As Russian reality has shown, if business intelligence in this situation is not allocated the necessary resources (according to experts, 1.5% of the company's turnover should be spent on intelligence), it will be insufficiently informed about the current, but not yet fully realized problems facing the enterprise, and it will be given secondary tasks. As a result, the materials provided by intelligence will be irrelevant, that is, the impact on the enterprise's activities will be negligible.
At present, the following «pain points» of business security can be identified, which can only be effectively resolved by in-house security services.
The first direction is to combat economic espionage, the scale of which is constantly growing. According to estimates by the Russian FSB, every second Russian company is engaged in industrial espionage, and competitors are doing the same against them (we are not talking about «beer kiosks»). According to expert estimates, economic espionage accounts for 60% of enterprise losses from unfair competition. According to available data, of the facts that have become public in St. Petersburg and that fall under the definition of «industrial espionage» (since our Criminal Code does not have an article for such actions, Russian companies do not always make such facts public), about 20% are professionally conducted events pursuing purely economic goals, the remaining 80% are either not yet professional enough actions of competitors, or criminal actions. According to experts, the third stage of industrial espionage is coming to an end in Russia. Each previous one was accompanied by the emergence of more qualified personnel and more advanced special equipment, which allowed such operations to be carried out more professionally. In Russia, fortunately, economic espionage has not yet become an independent type of entrepreneurship. Although in our country there are already separate companies specializing in economic intelligence and counterintelligence using the most modern equipment. Apparently, in the near future, given the pace and scale of growth of industrial espionage, we will also have analogues of the American George Walkenham Corporation with a staff of about 20 thousand employees.
The events of August 17, 1998 have further exacerbated the problems of ensuring the security of companies. Today, the main areas of economic espionage are the following: interception of profitable contracts and investment projects, interception of suppliers and distribution channels, expansion programs and R & D.
In addition, it is necessary to remember that enterprises and organizations of both Russia as a whole and our city in particular have not yet lost their attractiveness for foreign state and corporate security services.
It should be noted that none of the areas of economic security for Russian business has received such fundamental coverage in specialized literature as industrial espionage. Thus, in 1997, a two-volume work entitled “R-system: introduction to economic espionage. Practical training in economic intelligence in modern Russian entrepreneurship” was published in Moscow. On 970 pages, the authors quite originally implement the goal of the work, which they formulated as follows: “Our goal is to deal the cards for an equal game — to teach operational work to everyone who cannot afford us” (meaning the impossibility of paying for the services of professionals). However, as the experience of the author and his colleagues shows, there are no people in nature who are able to learn operational work from a book. However, as Russian reality has clearly shown, a certain portion of our entrepreneurs suffer from greed and ignorance, so they spare money on ensuring security and do not understand the essence of a comprehensive security system, that is, they do not understand the fact that only professionals are capable of ensuring the development and functioning of a security system.
The second direction is conducting business intelligence on current and potential partners, clients, customers. As is known, deception, fraud, failure to fulfill contract terms have become a «national feature» of Russian business. Therefore, conducting an audit is a necessary and mandatory condition for Russian firms that do not want to join the ranks of «suckers». Currently, three options for such an audit are possible: by their own security services, with the help of specialized Russian and foreign information firms, and using the friendly connections of the head of the security service in government agencies (the Ministry of Internal Affairs, RUBOP, FSB, FSNP). In practice, a combination of all three is most often encountered. In addition, most of the employees of St. Petersburg (as well as Moscow) firms providing information services are professionals from the KGBFSB, who quickly learned to speak with the absurd Russian business in a language it understands and with whom it is easier to deal with the heads of the security service, who, for the most part, also come from this system. Finally, only a real operative will be able to organize everything in such a way when contacting an information company that it will not be clear what he is really interested in. There is no need to explain that the majority of managers and the overwhelming majority of employees of private security companies are not capable of conducting business intelligence.
The third area is monitoring the situation with the company's securities (shares, bonds, bills), with loans (preferential terms of provision, alternative offers of the creditor for their repayment, etc.), with the timely fulfillment of their obligations to companies that may be the «fifth column» of competitors. This area of the SB's activity is quite new, and, as the practice of our city shows, the SB is not yet ready for such activities. In St. Petersburg, there are already examples when the SB worked unprofessionally. For example, a world-famous enterprise located in Peterhof was very elegantly «led» by a bank, which initially provided it with a loan on fairly favorable terms. When the enterprise was unable to repay it on time, the bank offered the transfer of a block of shares as a possible repayment of the debt. As a result, four out of seven seats on the Board of Directors were held by the bank. Then their targeted activities brought the enterprise almost to the brink of bankruptcy. After that, the bank sold all its creditor claims against the plant to a certain company. As it turned out, the bank was controlled by structures that were the owners of one of the main competitors of the St. Petersburg enterprise. With a high degree of certainty, it can be predicted that the purchase of share packages (blocking and controlling) with the help of unknown firms from offshore zones, changes in the database of these owners and managers of the enterprise, the deliberate bringing of it to bankruptcy and the arrival of an external manager with the subsequent sale of the enterprise for a pittance to competitors — all this will become a constant headache for many Russian JSCs and will require changes in the work of the Security Council.
Since the third area of activity is new and unknown for many SB managers, several articles can be recommended where these problems are considered. First, two articles by the author in the journal «Security. Reliability. Information (BDI)», which is deservedly popular among professionals: «Contract killings of enterprises: redistribution of property on an especially large scale» (1999, No. 4) and «Shares: some practical advice for SB employees. Modern mythology of the market economy» (1999, No. 5). Second, two articles by A. Doronin in the journal «World of Security»: «Intelligence and counterintelligence support for entrepreneurial activity» (1999, No. 6) and «The system of economic counterintelligence of an industrial enterprise» (1999, No. 9).
As the author and his colleagues have spent two years conducting seminars on economic security issues for the heads and employees of the Security Service, even professionals (former employees of the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the GRU) need to rethink and adjust their extensive operational experience in the new conditions of the Russian market. The most optimal form is such seminars, where security experts together with the students analyze various situations in this area and show possible solutions to the most pressing problems today. In addition, for five days, students from different regions and different business areas communicate with each other, which also increases their level of training. Since they are not competitors, the conversation is quite frank. Thus, in St. Petersburg in recent years, several training centers have been formed where such training sessions are conducted at a high professional level, for example, the Scientific and Information Center for Security Problems and the Institute of Non-State Security Structures.