- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow Depending on whose opinion you trust, there’s not a great deal of difference between the business of Rod Christie-Miller (image) and the business of Anton Malevsky. It’s the business of conveying fear to motivate action – or inaction. A parachute jump put an end to Malevsky’s line of work. The UK […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow In the London marketplace, there are less circumspect descriptions of the way Nathaniel Rothschild (image top) behaves in the presence of Oleg Deripaska (image front right). Last week, the UK High Court Justice Sir Michael Tugendhat decided the term which applies is that Rothschild ingratiates himself with Deripaska for financial gain. […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow The UK High Court action by the Schillings law firm, acting for Nathaniel Rothschild in a libel claim against the Daily Mail and Associated Newspapers, was dismissed today by Justice Sir Michael Tugendhat. The ruling also undermines libel threats by Schillings acting for Deripaska against newspapers in South Africa, Hong Kong, […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow Ten months ago in Russia, the venerable Chinese idea of penitence silver was proposed as a method of making the most powerful wrongdoers of the land pay for their sins — at least their original ones. It was recommended as an alternative to that Bolshevik cue, Expropriate the Expropriators!; the Khodorkovsky […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow There is no family relationship between the fish and the bacteria; the latter are named after their discoverer, Daniel Elmer Salmon (1850-1914). But how much of a relationship there may be at the moment between salmonella in Norwegian salmon and Russian fish-eating security depends on another creature, the land-based red herring. […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin (image centre), the overseer of Russia’s ports and shipping, as well as of the trade which passes through them, has recommended that the state shareholdings in Novorossiysk Commercial Seaport Company (NMTP is the Russian ticker, NCSP the English) be sold to Rosneft, the state oil company. […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow Mechel, the steelmaker and coalminer owned by Igor Zyuzin, is the dominant producer in Russia of the type of alloyed steel known in the English-speaking world as stainless. In French, it is known as inox (inoxydable). Neither term is quite accurate, but what is meant is everywhere clear. Because the steel […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow After he left Soviet trade union and youth organization work behind, Igor Yurgens became an advocate of the commercial Russian insurance industry. So he knows how to calculate risk and how to write an insurance premium to cover it. The Centre for Contemporary Development (INSOR), which Yurgens directs, has been widely […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow Oleg Deripaska appears to have lost a nine-year long battle to take control of Vanino, an eastern seabord port on which Deripaska depends for imports of alumina to feed his aluminium smelters in Siberia, and to load finished aluminium for export to buyers in the US and East Asia. The man […]

- Print This Post Print This Post

By John Helmer, Moscow Quadraturin was the stuff which, when squeezed out of a tube and painted on the walls of an 8 square-metre Moscow room, turned it into a much larger one. Biggerized it — is the translator’s term from the Russian. Russian politicians have been using it for years, long before the arrival […]