The decision to pull the initial public offering was announced on the last Sunday in May, late at night. The company that had been planning to sell its shares to the public — hoping to raise somewhere between $700 million and $1 billion — was the Domodedovo airport, the biggest and best-run of Moscow’s three airports, and the only one not owned by the state.
The airport’s investment bankers blamed the problem on the usual suspect: “market conditions” — meaning that they weren’t going to get the price that they had hoped for. And I suppose, in some literal sense, that was true. But it didn’t begin to capture the real story.
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