By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Evgeny Dobrenko (lead image, left) is a letter-perfect demonstration of several things he appears, despite years of learning at universities from Odessa to Durham (North Carolina) and Sheffield (Yorkshire), not to have heard of.   In the academic world, like any other business, it’s the money which does the talking, pays […]

Filed under: DwB by Editor - Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021
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By John Helmer, Moscow In “Any Old Iron”, a popular British music-hall song of a century ago, the cockney comedian Harry Champion made audiences laugh at the vanity of people showing off wealth they don’t have, and at pretentiousness in general. In our century there’s said to be a homosexual come-on in the words of […]

Filed under: Aluminium, Oligarchs by Editor - Tuesday, July 12th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow Since he first came to Russia as a Dutch journalist with leftwing claims, money, unlike butter, has always melted in Derk Sauer’s mouth (lead image). Until last week there’s been a quite lot of it — more of it for Sauer to keep than for the string of loss-making publications he […]

Filed under: Media, Oligarchs by Editor - Thursday, May 19th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow It can be no surprise, not even to Russian dunces, that Suleiman Kerimov, the only Russian oligarch and senator of the Russian parliament who has never answered a question in public, has been trying to cash out of Polyus Gold, and can find no takers. Especially not at the current price […]

Filed under: Gold by Editor - Friday, November 14th, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow Mikhail Prokhorov thinks that his American basketball franchise, the Brooklyn (née New Jersey) Nets has grown eightfold in value in the five years since he acquired it for $223 million. For the time being, though, noone agrees with him. That’s to say there is no buyer at Prokhorov’s asking price of […]

Filed under: Oligarchs by Editor - Friday, October 31st, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow United Company Rusal, the state aluminium monopoly run by Oleg Deripaska, is selling the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria (Alscon). Only the Rusal announcement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEx) doesn’t put a name to the asset. Rusal is also not accepting that the Nigerian courts have already decided the […]

Filed under: Africa-Russia, Aluminium by John Helmer - Thursday, April 10th, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow It was a specialty of the Chicago Irish at the turn of the 20th century. A Mickey Finn was a drug that was slipped into your cocktail without your knowing, in order to incapacitate you. When you came to, the only thing you knew was that you were missing your valuables. […]

Filed under: Gold, Mining by John Helmer - Friday, December 20th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow The share price of United Company Rusal, the state-controlled Russian aluminium monopoly, lost 3% in value in Hong Kong Stock Exchange trading on Monday on news that Barry Cheung, a prominent Hong Kong businessman, had resigned from the Rusal board as his own business collapsed, and that he was the target […]

Filed under: Aluminium, Asia-Russia, Oligarchs by John Helmer - Monday, May 27th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow At a physicists’ teaparty, Albert Einstein once asked Niels Bohr whether the two of them should accept that “the moon does not exist if nobody is looking at it.” Bohr’s reply was that, hard as Einstein might try, so long as the moon was accompanied by noone, Einstein’s proof would be […]

Filed under: Gold, Mining by John Helmer - Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow It’s a cliché about greed. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon allows four witnesses to an affair of lust, robbery and murder to tell their own versions of what had happened. There is one corpse, and several versions of how it got that way – at the hand of the wife, the […]

Filed under: Oligarchs by John Helmer - Friday, December 14th, 2012
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