After the auction ended, a delighted Konstantin personally attended the evening banquet and held a close-range exchange with the capitalists who had taken part in the auction.
Of course, that was all there was to it. To prevent collusion between officials and businessmen, the Bulgarian government prohibited officials from maintaining overly close ties with capitalists. Konstantin naturally had no intention of truly becoming friends with them.
His personal appearance at the banquet was merely a gesture of goodwill toward the Russian capitalists, showing that the Bulgarian government would treat everyone equally and would not suppress foreign capital.
As for preferential treatment? Sorry, Bulgaria had never had any policy of favoring capitalists, whether domestic or foreign!
The Russians knew this perfectly well. Bulgaria-Russia economic integration was not merely a slogan; before the outbreak of the World War, the two countries' economies had genuinely become intertwined.
Now, of course, they had been separated. Taking advantage of the World War, the Bulgarian government had taken over more than 90 percent of the nation's enterprises. How could restructuring them be difficult?
More than two years had passed, and naturally the economic links between the two sides were no longer so close. Yet though the lotus roots had snapped, their silk threads still remained.
Bulgaria's economic policies had always been a target of criticism for Russian capitalists. In particular, the government's forced intervention in the market, its strict corporate laws, and its labor protection laws were all things they hated with a burning passion.
But now, they instead hoped Bulgarian laws would become even stricter, because while these laws harmed their interests, they also protected them!
It was precisely because they understood so much that the Russian capitalists dared to pour money into investments here. Without Ferdinand's butterfly effect, most of them would have fallen