Doing business in Russia? Get your arsenal ready

“They don’t take prisoners if you step out of line,” says Tony Goodwin, who founded global recruitment company Antal International in 1993 and entered the Russian market a year later.

“After seven years with the same commercial landlord, we accidentally missed one rent payment on our office by a couple of days.

"We came back from lunch to find he’d locked us out and wouldn’t let us back in until he had his cash (plus a few more hours just to teach us a lesson!).”

If you’re in the early stages of doing business in Russia and haven’t yet negotiated office space out there, stay in a serviced apartment in Moscow. It’s a far better option than the capital’s over-priced hotels, where you’ll end up forking out £500 for a standard room with no breakfast.

With the Rossiya, Moskva and the Minsk hotels all knocked down but not yet rebuilt, hotel rooms are also in short supply and get snapped up quickly. To avoid the predicament of the 50,000 English football fans who struggled to locate available hotels during the European Champions League Final in Moscow last May, book early.

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