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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 [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow If seated in the dark at the Bolshoi Theatre, even a man of consuming narcissism as Boris Yeltsin was could tell the tights from the tutus. But Yeltsin saw himself as the prima donna, battementing and glissading into the old tsar’s box, Dress Circle centre front. At the Bolshoi, Stalin preferred [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow The share price of United Company Rusal, the Russian aluminium monopoly, has dropped into the three Hong Kong-dollar range for the first time. In three years of its stock market history, the company’s chief executive, Oleg Deripaska, has let slip about $13 billion in value, two-thirds of Rusal’s original worth. At [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow Lars Nyberg (right), chief executive until Friday afternoon of TeliaSonera, the Swedish and Finnish telecommunications group, is something of an expert on the blowback effect. Firearms and forensics experts understand that blowback is what happens after a gunshot, when the vacuum inside the gun barrel draws in blood and tissue from [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow There is rule on corruption which everyone in public office in every corner of the world knows – you mustn’t use your office to advance your private profit. When he was Mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov was not supposed to put lucrative city business in the way of himself or his [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow There are 7,018 pages in the four-volume paper print of Lord Leveson’s report on the ethics and practices of the British press. But just three references to Russia. One of them is a reflection on press freedom in primitive Russia and Ethiopia, compared with civilized UK by Alexander Lebedev, owner of [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow Reporters can hardly call themselves investigative journalists if their object is to report the obvious in plain sight — that people keep their purposes and their assets to themselves. But when reporters hide their own purposes and fortunes as assiduously as those they investigate, the purpose of the chase has been [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow Not even the two people usually familiar with the matter were able to convince Bloomberg that there has been genuine demand in the London market for Megafon shares at Alisher Usmanov’s asking price. Instead, as the company and its underwriters tried to sign buyers before the subscription book closed this afternoon, [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow The November 15 announcement by Megafon, the telephone property of Alisher Usmanov and Andrei Skoch, reveals a discount on last month’s valuation targets of up to 20%, depending on how the assets for sale are counted. To attract buyers for shares at bargain-basement prices, the company is promising to pay out [...]
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By John Helmer, Moscow It happened at the same time in February, when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was rehearsing members of the Pussy Riot group, recording voice-over of a script against then presidential candidate Vladimir Putin , and fabricating a performance in Christ the Saviour Cathedral for which two members of the group are [...]
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