By John Helmer in Moscow Russian aluminium giant, Rusal has held a secret briefing at London’s Skinners’ Hall for its London IPO investors . When Gioacchino Rossini, the 19th century opera composer, had grown famous and rich, he was told that a group of his admirers were collecting the equivalent of $50,000 to erect a […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow Alrosa is retrieving its diamond market positions after initial misstatements by new CEO Alrosa, the Russian diamond miner with the largest share of the global rough diamonds market after De Beers, is reconsidering its international market strategy, and correcting several misstatements by its newly appointed chief executive, Sergei Vybornov. Veteran […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
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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 […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, June 28th, 2007
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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 […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, June 21st, 2007
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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 […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, June 19th, 2007
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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 […]

by John Helmer - Friday, June 15th, 2007
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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 […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, June 14th, 2007
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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 […]

by John Helmer - Friday, June 8th, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow These days investors in gold-mining stocks are behaving like diners in fashionable restaurants, subject to the same fitful appetites. On Tuesday, for example, they sold Highland Gold (HGM:LN) down 21%. But on Wednesday, they bought it up by 20%. Highland is now trading at its all-time low since listing in […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, May 31st, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow Coal mining in Russia is a dirty business, and mine company finances are a black box. If the coal mines lose money, as they claim in recent financial reports, that could be because the coal is being priced for purchase by the steel company which consumes it, and also controls […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
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