Even Russia's president concurs. A year ago, he muttered ominously about "enormous amounts of misspent money (in Gazprom)". He replaced Rem Vyakhirev, the oligarch that ran Gazprom, with his own protege. Russia owns 38 percent of the company. Gazprom is just the latest in an inordinately long stream of companies with dubious methods. Avto VAZ bled itself white - under PwC's nose - shipping cars to dealers, without guarantees or advance payments. The penumbral dealers then vanished without a trace. Avto VAZ wrote off more than $1 billion in "uncollected bills" by late 1995. PwC did make a mild comment in the 1997 audit. But the first real warning appeared only three years later in the audit for the year 2000. Andrei Sharonov, deputy minister in the federal Ministry of Economics said, in an interview he granted "Business Week" last February: "Auditors have been working on behalf of management rather than shareholders." In a series of outlandish ads, published in Russian business dailies in late February, senior partners in the PwC Moscow office made this incredible statement: "(Audit) does not represent a review of each transaction, or a qualitative assessment of a company's performance." The New York Times quotes a former employee of Ernst&Young in Moscow as saying: "A big client is god. You do what they want and tell you to do. You can play straight-laced and try to be upright and protect your reputation with minor clients, but you can't do it with the big guys. If you lose that account, no matter how justified you are, that's the end of a career." PwC should know. When it mentioned suspicious heavily discounted sales of oil to Rosneft in a 1998 audit report, its client, Purneftegaz, replaced it with Arthur Andersen. The dubious deals dutifully vanished from the audit reports, though they continue apace. Andersen claims such transactions do not require disclosure under Russian law. How times change! Throughout the 1990's, Russia and its nascent private sector were subjected to self-righteous harangues from visiting Big Five accountants. The hectoring targeted the lack of good governance among Russia's corporations and public administration alike. Hordes of pampered speakers and consultants espoused transparent accounting, minority shareholders' rights, management accessibility and accountability and other noble goals. That was before Enron. The tables have turned. The Big Five - from disintegrating Andersen to KPMG - are being chastised and fined for negligent practices, flagrant conflicts of interests, misrepresentation, questionable ethics and worse. Their worldwide clout, moral authority, and professional standing have been considerably dented.