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By John Helmer in Moscow The world’s largest potash miner, Russia’s Uralkali, reports recovery of growth, as commodity prices jump. Uralkali, the world’s largest potash exporter, is recovering momentum in a global market that is likely to see the Russian miner challenge its Canadian peers for earnings growth, profitability, and share valuation. “Despite difficulties in […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow President Vladimir Putin signed this week a decree allowing a limited association of Russia’s state controlled shipping companies, Sovcomflot and Novorossiysk Shipping Company (Novoship). Promoted as a merger of the two, Putin’s brief decree, a text of which has been released publicly, puts a stop to a market selloff, which […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow If you recall Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling’s Hypothetical Future Value (HFV) system of accounting, one might find some parallels in Polyus Gold’s share marketing program. The man who invented the accounting system for promoting the value of a share today, for what it will be worth in the future, when […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow In a recent commentary on Iranian political thinking [A grand bargain Russia might just refuse, Jun 14] Kaveh L Afrasiabi takes seriously this proposal from the US academic Joseph Nye: “We should offer Russia a grand bargain: we delay our plans for missile defense in Eastern Europe, while the Russians […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow The modern history of making money the easy way — by taking it from people who didn’t know they had it, and couldn’t notice when it was gone — is founded on the most elegant of the irreducible fractions, one third. According to a series of reports this month by […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow 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 […]