trade vet 704 Posted August 27, 2020 9 hours ago, oldmarcus said: Yes, that sort of fraud and thieving began when the Russians began to 'get their legs', rather later into the 90's ; I started as soon after the wall came down and as I could begin to figure out the logistics of it all and was up and running by Spring/Summer 1992. The issue then was paying not to have your lorry/s kidnapped - in Russia, you always have to know/pay the right people, I was lucky to make friends with a well connected lady lawyer, she could get anything sorted in St Petersburg. The profitability slowly got less and less and eventually, as said, they did it themselves, but I kept a exporting timber business until about 2007, then margins got bad on that, so I quit and sold the entire business except for keeping the office building, as it's in Riga City centre. I did most trade in Latvia & the other 2 Baltic states, I have no desire to go back to Russia - ever. That was pretty fortuitous really, as I sunk the money into USD at 2:1, plus managed to miss the 2008/9 crash during very long periods at the holiday house doing very little, I was totally exhausted after almost 15 years constant traveling by then TBH, plus I missed much of my kids growing up - but these chances don't happen often and at least they got a great private education which is more than I ever did. I really only first came back when I bought all the cars I had space for in Autumn 2009, kept them all until Summer 2010, then fed them into BCA Bedford weekly during June/July 2010 when there was no used stock available if you remember - that again was a big gamble, but also worked out rather well - not everything always did or does though...... And I thought driving up and down the Uk through the night to various far flung auctions at short notice was hard ! Very interesting Marcus. 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Frank Cannon 812 Posted September 20, 2021 Seth Twaddle more like Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
