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In the city centre, new glass and steel office blocks are still springing up. And great restaurants are everywhere. In the suburbs, it's brand new blocks of luxury flats for the burgeoning middle class, often cheek-by-jowl with the older municipal stock that houses most Muscovites.

On the ring road, it's shops gorging out lifestyle goods, including two vast IKEA hypermarkets - one of them the largest anywhere.

Financial district
Almost all Moscow's financial institutions sprang up overnight in the heady capitalist renaissance of the early 1990s and are strewn almost haphazardly around the city centre.

With staffs expanding and real estate seriously overpriced, some - ING's Russian subsidiary, for example - are moving out to the suburbs. Others have been there for years, e.g. Russia's largest company, Gazprom, whose skyscraper headquarters towers over a south-side residential area 12 kilometres from the Kremlin.

Nevertheless, foreign banks (including the most active, such as Citigroup, BNP Paribas, West LB and ABN Amro), law firms (including Baker Mackenzie, Akin Gump and White & Case) and local investment houses (including the three largest, Renaissance Capital, United Financial Group and Troika) have gravitated to a triangle bounded by Novy Arbat (the New Arbat) that runs westward from the Kremlin and ulitsa Tverskaya (Tverskaya Street) that runs north-west. If anywhere has the makings of a financial district, it's there.

The Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange is there too, while the Moscow Central Stock Exchange and the Central Bank are on the eastern side of the city centre.

Travel and commuting Most business people travel to daytime meetings in a company (usually chauffeur-driven) car, or by taxi (easily ordered by phone). If you live outside the city and travel in by car, beware of the traffic jams and of the shortage of city-centre parking spaces.

While road transport is unpredictable, slow and stressful, commuting by metro is fast, completely reliable and ridiculously cheap. Muscovites are justly proud of the system, which gets millions of them to work each day: the trains arrive every 2-3 minutes during the day, and breakdowns are almost unheard of. Rush-hour crowding is worse than in other big cities.

Entertainment
The choice of restaurants to entertain clients is enormous. Café Pushkin is ideal for a relatively formal gathering; Oblomov, Tiflis or a seemingly limitless choice of French and Italian restaurants are good too. Scandinavia is popular among expats. For colleagues or partners you know well, themed restaurants, such as Beloe Solntse Pustiny (White Sun of the Desert) or Kavkazkaya Plenitsa (The Caucasian Prisoner) that refer to 1970s film hits, are all the rage.

In the evening, Moscow's opera, theatre, concerts and cinemas rival the world's best. Tickets for the incomparable Bolshoi theatre are sometimes overpriced, and its company is often touring overseas - but try the range of smaller opera houses and theatres, whose productions are exciting and innovative, and whose standards are phenomenally high..

Moscow has its parks, such as Gorky Park and the Sparrow Hills, but every weekend from March to October many Muscovites head out of the city to their country dachas, which range from the standard plot with a small wooden house to luxurious mansions. An invitation to you as a foreigner is an honour which you should accept.

Housing and family
Moscow's residential housing market is soaring and real estate is a popular investment vehicle for new Russian money. Overall, 2003 sale prices were 35% higher than 2002, and rental prices 20-30% higher, says estate agent Knight Frank - and yet demand far outstripped supply.

The average cost of residential property at the end of March 2004 was $1800 per metre, up from $1600 a year earlier. Knight Frank calculates an average elite residential price across Moscow of $4,500 per sq metre, and $5,500 for penthouses.

Many expats rent rather than buy. 'Separate the investment decision from the lifestyle decision,' suggests the expat cfo of a major private company. Popular districts are the city centre, Arbat and Zamoskvorech'e. Landlords are now asking for rent in euros rather than dollars, with a deposit equal to one month's rent that will not be returned if the contract is ended in less than a year.

Many expats with families prefer residential compounds in the suburbs. The most well known, Pokrovsky Hills - where rents for town houses of 150-250 sq m are $8,000-$11,000 per month - is based around the new Anglo-American school.

Customs, culture and business relationships
'If people come here and think in stereotypes, they will be in trouble', says a veteran expat financier. 'And if they think they are going to come and tell their Russian partners and colleagues how to run things, people will run rings round them.'

Most people you deal with in Moscow financial circles will be young, well-educated and very smart. They usually speak English; many have been educated abroad and/or worked in western European or American business. Their expectations, attitudes and customs are pretty much indistinguishable from those of their counterparts in New York, London or Frankfurt.

Bear in mind the generations. Russia's famous 'oligarchs' are mostly in their early 40s, because late-1980s graduates were best-placed to take the initiative as the Soviet Union collapsed. The under-35s never worked in the Soviet system; the under-25s left it behind with primary school. The older generation is different: the survivors who have succesfully adapted to capitalist Russia and remain in business not only understand Soviet tradition, but also often have especially valuable insights into officialdom and decision-making processes.

Business meetings differ little from those in western Europe. A dark suit, and a tie for men, is appropriate. Visiting a smaller corporate client or travelling outside Moscow may involve acquaintance with older traditions - but that is more likely to mean an unexpected banquet at lunchtime than anything more exotic. The days when people arrived at a 10am meeting and opened a bottle of cognac have gone.

Some everyday customs should be noted, e.g. do not shake hands across a doorway. And, although practices are changing among younger western-educated people, you should use the polite form of address, i.e. the first name and patronymic (e.g. 'Vladimir Vladimirovich', rather than 'Mr Putin').

Visas, work permits and bureaucracy in general
If you fly in to Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, which is used by all international carriers except British Airways, you may experience an unpleasant left-over of the past: overweaning bureaucracy. The complacent border officials who welcome you with an hour or two's wait in an unruly scrum to reach passport control are as inefficient as they were 20 years ago.

The Sheremetyevo queues are untypical of modern Moscow, and unnecessary - as one discovers when flying with BA in to Domodedovo, Moscow's second airport, where passport control is as efficient as anywhere. You will come across, and learn to live with, other examples of inefficient bureaucracy while living and working in Moscow. (Corruption is now less evident, although it remains a problem in the traffic police, for example.)

Foreigners require a single-, double- or one year multi-entry visa to enter Russia; the latter is obviously standard for resident expats. Check on the paperwork required and don't apply at the last minute. Within three days of arrival you need to register with the local police.

Tax
Russian residents' worldwide income is taxed at a flat rate of 13%; income received by non-residents from Russian sources (including income for work, rental income from property, dividends etc) at 30%. An individual is considered resident if physically present in Russia for 183 or more days in a calendar year. Note that double tax treaties are in force with some countries.

Dividends are taxed at 6%; and some income from prizes, insurance benefits and excessive interest on bank deposits arnd loans at 35%. Benefits in kind, including provision of a car for private purposes, for example, are treated as taxable income valued at market prices.