Does the fact that three Russian mining and metals companies are all seeking full listings in London at the same time signal jitters over the environment at home, with Vladimir Putin set to return as president next year?

Not according to Alexander Nesis, founder of one of them – the gold and silver producer Polymetal.

“The business climate is more stable than ever before,” Nesis, Russia’s 39th richest man, tells beyondbrics. “This is good for those businesses which exist today.”

But there is a catch. “It is so stable that it is not good for those companies that should be being built in Russia,” he adds. “There is not enough modernisation, there are not enough scientific centres, there are not enough [areas] where Russia can be competitive…Today Russia is not modernising at the proper pace.”

This is a message that has been frequently heard in recent years – including from the government. But it has added force coming from a man who, through his ICT Group, one of Russia’s largest privately-owned investment and industrial companies, has a history of nurturing businesses.

Nesis insists Polymetal’s desire for a premium London listing is not motivated by concerns over inadequate protection of property rights at home. Instead, it is about securing the future health of the business, as he moves on to develop other projects, by anchoring it in an environment that demands the best corporate governance standards.

His own business, he adds, is part of a wave of companies now opening up to international investors, such as internet companies Mail.Ru and Yandex, or retailer Magnit, which did not grow out of ex-Soviet assets privatised in the early-mid 1990s. (Polymetal, founded in 1998, formed its portfolio from “developing greenfield deposits and radically restructuring inoperative mining sites”, says its website.)

Owners of companies that include privatised assets – even if they have since created entirely new businesses and value – will always have a “legacy” that could create pretexts for problems with government or other businesses, he says.

Though Nesis does not mention it, a good example might be the courtroom battle in London between Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich over ownership of a stake in the oil giant Sibneft, privatised in the 1995 “loans-for-shares” auctions.

“Really I can’t think of any such issue between businesses, or between businesses and government, in cases where people have created new [companies],” says Nesis.

The wily former radiochemist clearly has no intention of creating problems for himself with Russia’s powers-that-be. Beyondbrics asks if he would have preferred Dmitry Medvedev, who as president has championed the need for modernisation, to keep the top job next year so he could push through his programme from the Kremlin. Nesis grins.

“Let’s just talk about business,” he says.