Every time Russian property developer Denis Semykin sells a new apartment, he is required by law to register the deal at a special government office. But there is a snag: the office does not exist. "We ... go to every office that might look like this place so they can put the stamp on the piece of paper but they say: 'Sorry chaps it's not us.' Everyone sits there scratching their heads," said Semykin.
Months of newspaper headlines about the Kremlin dismantling oil major YUKOS and jailing its founder have painted a picture of Russia's business climate in which political intrigue, crude oil and gun-toting police loom large.
But for firms like Semykin's 150-strong outfit based next to a factory in an industrial district of Moscow, the reality of doing business in Russia is one of suffocating -- and at times surreal -- bureaucracy.
The biggest victims are smaller businesses, a sector economists say is even more important than the traditional mainstays, the oil and metals giants, if Russia is to rescue its spluttering growth and achieve lasting prosperity.
"There are lots of hassles that small businesses have to face in Russia on a daily basis," said John Litwack, lead economist with the World Bank in Moscow.
"I think that small and medium enterprises are key to dynamism in the economy in general ... (But Russia) is one of the only emerging market countries where we don't see real substantial increases in small businesses," he said.
Though official graft is widely cited as one of the biggest brakes on Russian economic growth, Semykin says he has never encountered a corrupt bureaucrat.
The real problem, he says, is the half-baked legislation adopted by politicians ignorant about business that the bureaucrats have to enforce.
"You constantly come across the fact that the laws do not correspond to the demands of the market," he said.
Semykin, 30, and business partner Boris Bukatov, 37, run "VMP Corp", a holding company whose main activity is developing residential and commercial property in Moscow's commuter belt.
The pair have no shortage of examples to illustrate the problems they face.
Russia's immigration laws are so complicated, Bukatov said, that it is almost impossible to get work permits for the migrant workers who make up 99 percent of the manpower on his firm's construction sites.
As a result, immigration authorities raid the sites, take the workers away, fine their employer and then bring them back after two or three days. The whole process is then repeated, often just a fortnight later.
The fine is paltry but "work comes to a halt", said Bukatov. "There is no building going on but our money is going out."
Semykin, dressed in a designer suit and with shoulder-length hair, offers another example.
His company's application to re-develop an old ski resort on a hill near Moscow was turned down because the authorities ruled it would threaten ancient dwellings on the site.
But it turned out the dwellings had been buried under thousands of tonnes of earth in the late 1980s when the Communist authorities dumped waste soil on the site to form the hill, said Semykin.
Tangles of red tape like this are strangling the small business sector in Russia.
Small and medium firms account for 17 percent of Russian jobs, said Sergei Borisov, president of OPORA, a lobby group. In Britain, by comparison, that figure is 55.6 percent.
"Since 1994, that is for 11 years now, there has been practically no growth in the number of small businesses in Russia," said Borisov.
"A lot of people have acquaintances, family friends, who have tried this ... so they hear what it is like to be small entrepreneurs, these stories have become legends, and they scare people off," he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged there was a problem when he said in March that anyone starting a business "should be given a medal for personal courage."
Semykin says he sees the damage being done within his own industry. "We like to talk about a construction boom in Moscow," he said, looking out of his office window at a skyline punctuated by cranes.
"But if you look at our handful of construction projects -- which given our conditions are a real feat -- and compare it to the Chinese and Koreans, whom we like to think of as Third World countries ... then it is quite a sad picture."