By John Helmer, Moscow Tethered high above Victor Pinchuk’s newest steel smelter at the Interpipe plant, visible for miles around the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk, is a large balloon. It’s meant to symbolize what the Interpipe website is calling the smelter’s state-of-the-art technology — “the construction plant has no harmful effect on the atmosphere [...]

by John Helmer - Thursday, May 23rd, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow Roman Abramovich (left) landed in Hong Kong on Tuesday afternoon. Abramovich is an influential shareholder in Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s largest mining and metals company, on whose dividends the loss-making United Company Rusal now depends to stay out of the red. Rusal is the Russian aluminium monopoly, but Hong Kong is home [...]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow If you are looking for Gennady Timchenko (second from right), the dominant Russian in the partnership which created the oil trader Gunvor, you won’t find him in the market prospectus Gunvor has just released to the market. That’s because the document, dated May 10, 2013, spells his name Guennadi Timtchenko. The [...]

by John Helmer - Monday, May 20th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow So far Elsie Leung Oi-Se has been paid $632,000 by United Company Rusal to listen attentively, read carefully, and speak her mind at meetings of the main board of directors, and also the audit committee of the board. Rusal titles her an independent non-executive director. She is one of five of [...]

by John Helmer - Thursday, May 16th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow Righteous indignation is to investigative journalism what Joseph Goebbels was to truth. So what was really going on in the last days of April when the London media celebrated the Russians who this year topped the UK Rich List, but discovered something going badly, maybe criminally wrong at Eurasian Natural Resources [...]

by John Helmer - Monday, May 6th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow In the research for its profile on Alisher Usmanov, BBC Radio-4 was told by its sources in Russia that claims Usmanov is close to the Kremlin have been invented; and that Usmanov has never been granted a personal audience with President (Prime Minister) Vladimir Putin. The BBC programme was broadcast on [...]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow Alisher Usmanov’s fortune began with a business of making plastic bags when they were in short supply in Moscow in the last days of the USSR. At least, that’s the asset in the self-start, self-made fortune story which reporters for global rich lists have been persuaded to believe about Usmanov. How [...]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 29th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow Two schemes for the survival of United Company Rusal have now emerged in Moscow to compete head to head for President Vladimir Putin’s approval. Neither is assessed by Rusal’s bank creditors as potent enough to staunch forecasts of steadily eroding asset and share value, on which the company’s $10.4 billion in [...]

by John Helmer - Thursday, April 25th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow Igor Zyuzin (right) is almost entirely dependent on the Russian government for the solvency of his Mechel steelmaking and coalmining group. With between $9 billion and $10 billion in debt, Zyuzin, who owns 65.49% of Mechel’s shares and controls the company as chairman of its board, is now the steel and [...]

by John Helmer - Saturday, April 20th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow When Oleg Mukhamedshin, head of investment strategy for United Company Rusal, was in London recently, he complained the stock market isn’t giving Rusal’s share price a fair valuation, taking into account how much profit the non-aluminium line of business – that’s the dividend to be paid to Rusal by Norilsk Nickel [...]

by John Helmer - Sunday, April 14th, 2013
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