Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak. On today's show, why 16,000 shoe store workers are losing their jobs and the new role of technology in the 2020 campaign.

But first, an American investor in Moscow. As we noted at the end of yesterday's show, Russian authorities recently arrested Mike Calvi,

a U.S. citizen in University of Oklahoma grad, who, for the past 25 years, has run a Moscow-based

venture capital and private equity firm called Bering Vostock Capital Partners.

And he's also run it pretty successfully.

So, for example, Bering Vostock once invested in a Russian

internet startup called Yandex, at the time valued at just $15 million. Today, it's publicly

traded on the NASDAQ at a market cap of $10.3 billion. Anyway, the accusations here relate

to a Bering Vostock investment in a Russian consumer bank, which eventually fell on hard times,

and for simplicity, let's call it Bank One.

Bering Vostock then merged Bank One with another local bank, Bank Two.

After the merger, Calvi determined that the main investor in Bank Two had improperly stripped

assets, and he filed a legal challenge in London that's now in the midst of arbitration.

But in

apparent retaliation, that investor in Bank 2, via an associate, accused Calvi of artificially

inflating the value of Bank 1. And because this is Russia, what here would be kind of a

civil shareholder dispute became criminal, with Calvi and several other Bering Vostok colleagues arrested,

and today still sitting in a Moscow jail.

Now, Bering Vostok remains operating in Russia through this kind of interim leadership structure

and is publicly expressing confidence that the Russian courts will not only determine

it's a commercial matter, but also will investigate how it turned criminal.

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