By John Helmer in Moscow In the Russian fertilizer business, the days are gone when you could make enormous profits mixing fertilizer ingredients into sacks; loading the sacks aboard ship; and earning your profit margin between the rising export price of the sack, and the government-fixed price of its constituents in the home market. Today, […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
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1. Recently, President Medvedev urged Russian oligarchs to pay their “moral debt”? What does this mean in concrete terms? Moral debt in Russia is a case of the three monkeys who see, hear, and speak no evil. In theory, the Russian President means that men who seized most of Russia’s natural resource wealth more than […]

by John Helmer - Monday, March 30th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow The announcement from Mechel on March 26 that it has agreed with its bankers on a 51-day extension of time to repay or refinance a $1.5 billion loan, which fell due on March 20, has exposed a grave failure of arithmetic in the marketplace. And that’s not all. Headlined by […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, March 29th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow Far Eastern Shipping Company (Fesco) has released through a wire service a set of unaudited financial estimates for the full year 2008. The release was unusual, analysts said, and appears timed to counteract the impact of a downgrade by the Moody’s rating agency in Moscow on Thursday. Despite better than […]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 27th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow For weeks, Alrosa, Russia’s diamond mining challenger to De Beers, has been waiting for the appearance of a miracle to keep the mines producing at last year’s volumes, and avoid layoffs and financial damage to the fareastern region of Sakha, where Alrosa is the chief income generator. That miracle is […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, March 26th, 2009
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Starting in the third quarter of last year, United Company Rusal started cancelling shipping contracts for cargoes of bauxite between Australia and Sardinia. On February 4, 2009, Norden, a Danish company with whom Rusal had a long-term contract for vessel delivery of its bauxite, filed suit in the federal US Court in New York, seeking […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has put his signature on one of the strangest mining prospector’s pay-sheets ever drafted in the history of mining. According to the prevailingRussian law, now one year old, if a miner does not qualify as Russian, and if what he discovers is big and valuable enough, […]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 20th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow The Moscow and New York stock markets appear to have been taken unawares by the disclosure that Igor Zyuzin’s steel and coal-mining group Mechel is in court over an unpaid demand by BNP Paribas for $60 million. The share price of the fifth-ranked Russian steelmaker rose 1.3% in Wednesday’s Moscow […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, March 19th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow Sometimes it can happen that men of steel have a soft underbelly. It’s to protect that that they wear armour-plate. The release this week of group financial results for Severstal, the third ranked Russian steelmaker owned by Alexei Mordashov, exposes the high cost, and poor judgement perhaps, of Mordashov’s purchases […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow Steelworkers at the Zlatoust steel mill, which is owned by Vadim Varshavsky’s Estar group, have won an unprecedented claim for wages cut by the company, following a local court ruling and a 5-day hunger strike. It is the first known case of a successful protest action by Russian steelworkers since […]

by John Helmer - Monday, March 16th, 2009
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