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By John Helmer The newsletter from the US Embassy warned recently that middle-aged American males should be on the lookout for a dangerous thief in Moscow who puts them to sleep before he or she steals their wallets, and any other property that can be carried off. At the start of the last century in […]

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President Vladimir Putin has surprised the Russian banking community, and global emerging market analysts, by dismissing the Central Bank chief Victor Gerashchenko, and replacing him with a man, who despite a decade of holding senior finance policy posts in Moscow, is totally unknown to have opinions of his own. Sergei Ignatiev, 54, currently deputy finance […]

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By John Helmer The only foreign-language sentence that managed to lodge itself correctly in the brain of Ronald Reagan, before he developed Alzheimer’s Disease but after he became President of the United States, was “doveryai no proveryai”. As he never tired of explaining, that is Russian for “trust but verify.” Reagan and his successors always […]

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When a tree falls in the forest, everywhere in the world the same thing happens. It makes a loud noise; it drops to the right or left; it crushes the life below unpredictably. But when a Russian bank crashes, it comes down in a way that’s unique – less like a doomed tree, more like […]