Shaken & Stirred: Moscow Millionaire's Fair

Those who thought that Moscovites still battle for rationing tickets will be surprised to hear that nearly 40,000 people attended, a minority of Moscow’s millionaires: Russia has 100,000 of them, and Moscow’s super-rich are in a league of their own. With so much affluence, keeping up with the Ivanovs takes an increasing level of imagination. As sophisticated Westerners, we tend to be non-plussed by such common luxury items as private islands, expensive cars, helicopters, horses, watches, cliff-top villas, £50k (€70k) perfume, £7k (€10k) Mercedes keyrings or glass kitchens. We’are also unimpressed by diamond-encrusted i-Pod headphones. We’ve seen it all before. However, some items in Moscow really appealed to our Eurotrash sensibility. A few miles down the road, you could almost hear Lenin twitching in his grave!

From itsmyBinky.com

A diamond encrusted mobile phone. Don’t forget the £5 top-up Orange theft insurance, because this handset, designed by Swiss jeweller Goldvish, costs a cool €1m. Don’t you dare mentioning the Bang & Olufsen Serene, the Dolce & Gabbana Liquid Gold or the 18-carat gold Motorola covered with 1200 diamonds (£28,000; €40,000), even though we would still take one for a free advert.

We all like to think that we were born with a silver spoon in our mouth, but from this year, some Russian babies will actually be born with a solid white gold dummy. There’s also 278 encrusted diamonds air-side, for mummy to look at. That should sort the daily supply of minerals, but doctors advise against using the so-called Diamond Pacifier. That’s just too bad, at £10,000 (€15,000).

Vladenie (“ownership”), a new store in Moscow, can’t be bothered to sell anything worth less than $1m.

Another great export from Russia's blossoming luxury industry is virgin hair extensions. God forbid, they’re not from virgins, which I was led to believe. In fact, they are made from unprocessed hair and “hand-picked” (hopefully with scissors) in Siberia. They are not cheap – a full hairdo can cost a few thousand pounds - but who wouldn’t want the hair of a Russian peasant?

It is become increasingly difficult to beat the Russians at the flaunt game, but many parts of Europe have also developed a taste for the high life. Here is the best of Europe’s Shaken & Stirred lifestyle:

London. London is opulent enough for Abramovitch and Chelsea footballers’ wives: Selfridges, the department store, has a £85 (€125) Wagyu beef sandwich and Gordon Ramsay cooks a seasonal £100 (€150) pizza (albeit with truffles). Cherie Blair of course is the grande dame of London S&S, with a £7,700 (€11,400) hair bill during the last election campaign. Not to be outdone, Victoria Beckham recently ordered the Hempel Hotel to adjust the royal suite prior to her stay, at a cost of £20,000 (€30,000) including £5,000 (€7,400) Italian bedlinens, a few thousand pounds worth of orchids and more surprisingly, cakes for herself and newspapers for David. In November, Michael Jackson placed stringent requests on the same hotel, but he also ran a £50,000 (€75,000) daily bill for himself and his entourage. In general, London luxury hotels have become so squalid that Paris Hilton checked out of the Hilton on Park Lane last month.

Paris S&S. French President Jacques Chirac had a taste for the high life when he was Mayor of Paris: his household food bill (excluding official functions: that’s just him and his wife, and the occasional Sunday meal with the kids) was reportedly running at £170,000 (€250,000) a year – that’s £500 (€750) a day. Over his 20-year “reign”, he amassed such a wine collection that the current Mayor placed 5,000 bottles at auction and raised €1m last month: €200 a bottle, including bottles fetching €5,000 each. That’s 100 “insertion” jobs for Paris’ unemployed youth (some of Europe’s highest employers’ taxes not included).

Kosovo S&S. Out of a budget of €700m for Kosovo’s 2m inhabitants, Kosovar civil servants managed to spend €8.3m worth of car fuel, €2.5m on mobile phone bills, and €4.5m on of food and drinks. That’s certainly a lot for Kosovo, and quite lavish in a country with so little roads and such a shortage of Michelin-starred restaurants.

Brussels S&S. Only Eurocrats can give Russians a run for their money, at least according to the British Taxpayers’ Alliance. The lavish lifestyle of Brussels civil servants is substantiated, and we’d rather be one of the 2 new Commissioners for stray cats and dogs (€220,000 a year) – the EU has 27 Commissioners - than, say, Norwegian Prime Minister (€120k). Besides high salaries, accounts of (falsified) expenses, low taxation and non-contributory pensions, the book depicts funnier entitlements for Brussels civil servants, like the 60 mudbaths a year allowed to MEPs and their immediate families, the notorious £7,000 shower heads installed in their offices and €5,000 language course entitlements, a fact lost on most of them apparently, since European institutions spend €1bn a year on translations for 380 language permutations. The perks also include holidays paid for by Greek shipping magnates! Ca plane pour moi...

Farmers S&S. According to the EU Court of Auditors, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) expenditure is “affected by a material level of error”, and the Court took pride in tracing €2.2bn worth of ineligible payments. We’re not sure if this includes the £421k subsidy to the Duke of Westminster (one of Britain’s richest), but it does include many payments to bogus Portuguese suckler cow farmers, Italian olive producers and fishermen in the fish-less parts of Greenland. Congratulations to Greece for being singled out as the biggest cheat in Europe – quite an achievement.

Thanks to The Bumper Book of Government Waste by Matthew Elliott & Lee Rotherham (Harriman House) for these great examples!