I read a note about footballers with champagne for 250,000 and I remembered a long-forgotten story that initially added me gray hair.

I needed to "wash" $10 million at the dawn of the 90s, don't think of anything bad - no crime. Honestly earned, honestly earned. How else in our country? If the engineer who made the invention and successfully sold it to a Western company, according to the laws of the time, had to pay to the treasury of the total payments of 116% of the sale of intellectual property. This is what happened in the legislation at the time. Try not to pay. Of course, there were other options – through bandits, for example. Then you lost not 116%, but only 100 and guaranteed a bonus to get a free pit with views of the forest.

To leave for me at the time was virtually unrealistic - family, children and lunch from what they gathered in their landscape. Since before I started looking for a buyer in the West, I had the stupidity of offering my solution to domestic enterprises, then after going through all the circles of communication with officials, I was unable to sell them anything, but I quickly fell into the area of attention of interested persons. Foreign economic activity was supervised by the relevant persons and during the negotiations I was passed so that the whole essence of our pursuits became clear - it is terrible to chase the bandits, it is much easier to pretend that you are "passing" the engineer-headpiece.

Letting go of the details of my correspondence with potential Western companies, I can say: I found buyers quickly. But since attacks of brain activity periodically happened to me, I understood that after receiving the money I would immediately lose them and then in the contract instead of money I asked as a payment for the collection wine for the specified amount.

Representatives of the buyer’s firm came, invited me to the restaurant of the hotel, where I signed a contract with them, received barter documents with their Moscow representative office (there was such a popular type of transaction in the country, not taxable) and two wine boxes. With whom I went home.

Taxpayers came to me, authorities, bandits came to me. They looked at the documents and could not accept that they were fooled somewhere here in the shrouded two-room Khrushchev and instead of money behind the refrigerator next to the garbage barrel there were two wooden boxes with wine. Two boxes of wine for a $10 million contract. Everything was so unusual that neither the organs nor the bandits even tried to resort to the stake or the solder. To those who behaved decently and without shame, I placed glasses right on the kitchen table and opened a bottle from the box and offered to taste. Over the course of two months, the examining walkers drank all 12 bottles. I think they still talk about it in their narrow circles, if they are alive, of course.

Later, in the late 1990s, I reconciled myself to science and became a simple car repairman, earned money, traveled with my family to Geneva and turned my ownership documents into money for the Two Boxes of Collective Wine, a subsidiary of the old Swiss Investment Fund, which I read about in the Economic Periodicals Department of the Library of Foreign Literature.