Imagine JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon accusing Jeff Bezos of cheating the U.S. government out of billions in tax revenue by offering discounts to Amazon shoppers. Now picture a letter from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell backing Dimon, addressed to the Treasury Department, leaking to the press and then Bezos firing back with his own open letter in The Wall Street Journal. It sounds convoluted. But that’s more or less what has unfolded in Russia over the past few weeks. What began as a niche policy argument has become an unusually public fight pitting Russia’s biggest banks and financial regulators against the country’s top e-commerce platforms over the seemingly mundane question of discounts. The clash erupted in mid-November when German Gref, the influential head of state-owned Sberbank, used an industry conference to accuse marketplaces of undercutting traditional lenders. Gref argued that online platforms were unfairly offering customers discounts if they used the platforms’ own in-house banking services rather than regular bank
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