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By John Helmer in Moscow Victor Chernomyrdin, one of the creators of Gazprom and Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister from 1992 to 1998, once famously said :“we wanted to do the best, but it came out as always”. What the sly duffer meant was: “we tried to serve a better interest than our own, but only […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow Evraz, Russia’s largest vertically integrated steel group, has been ordered by the federal mine safety agency Rostekhnadzor (RTN) and a Kemerovo court to stop production at the Esaulskaya mine, in the Kemerovo region, until inspectors have resolved reported methane problems. Esaulskaya is one of several mines in the wholly owned […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow A deteriorating personal relationship between chief shareholders, and growing financial pressures on loss-making Far Eastern Shipping Company (Fesco), the Russian multimodal transportation leader, have led to a buyout offer for Fesco’s 50% stake in the National Container Company (NCC), which operates the First Container Terminal of St. Petersburg, the biggest […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow Russia’s anti-trust buster, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), has established a record of making much ado about little; and of regulating only those corners of the Russian market where no oligarch-sized interest is threatened – unless the threat is pre-authorized by the Kremlin’s running orders. But this week the agency […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow Tax-free exports of crude oil from Kozmino, on the Sea of Japan — Russia’s newest oil tanker loading terminal — may be eliminated by April, after a showdown last Friday between the oil industry tsar, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, and the budget tsar, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. For the […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow Alexei Mordashov (left figure) has a special thing for the Italians. He’s been rewarded for it in a number of ways. Last July, he was awarded the Order of Merit from the Italian Ambasador to Russia. The order, according to a Severstal release, is the highest award in Italy. It […]

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Cutting-edge recognition machines – supplied by the Russian state corporation, Nanotechnologies, courtesy of chief executive Anatoly Chubais – report that one of the largest groups of readers of this site uses the Rusal company server to gain access and read the reports. If to these are counted Rusal’s civil litigation lawyer Bryan Cave and Rusal’s […]

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  If you have been having trouble loading this site, that’s because an attack was launched against the server on Thursday afternoon. After the repair, the site statistics show readers more than doubled. Also, a fake disinformation bio has been loaded on Wikipedia placed by three men with pseudonyms almost as transparent as the fake […]

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Tatiana Borisovna Yumasheva (aka Dyachenko) has been the politically active of the late President Boris Yeltsin’s two daughters. After shunning publication for years, preserving her privacy, her residence abroad, and her domestic political interests, Yumasheva began publishing a blog on December 3. New essays or comments appear every one or two days – altogether, 38 […]

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By John Helmer in Moscow The spokesman for Alrosa, the state-owned Russian diamond miner, Andrei Polyakov, has made a statement this week to reporters that Alrosa is considering spinning off three of its diamond mining units, and selling a minority shareholding in each at an initial public offering (IPO). According to a news agency, Polyakov […]