In the most famous words ever addressed to a gemstone ring, the Princess Elizabeth greeted news of the death of her rival, Queen Mary, with the words: “This is the Lord’s doing. It is marvellous in our eyes.” Alrosa officials said almost as much last week — without the hyperbole, but increasingly conscious of the […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 17th, 2006
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Lithuania, the little state on the shore of the Baltic Sea, has a proud, and under Adolf Hitler, an unpleasant history of hostility towards Russia. If its accession to the European Union was an understandable attempt to conserve, and build on its post-Soviet independence, Lithuania’s application to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sharpened […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, April 13th, 2006
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Hardly anyone can remember the Baroness Emmuska Orczy these days, and were it not for a Broadway musical, her best-selling novel would have been forgotten, too. It was called The Scarlet Pimpernel, and it concerned the adventures of an apparently witless, secretly intrepid English knight, who defied the French Revolution to save aristocrats, who may […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, April 6th, 2006
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — In football parlance, a ghost goal is usually understood to be the one that scores without the goalkeeper seeing where it came from, or who booted it. Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who now lives in England, might be considered an expert on the matter since he owns the Chelsea Football Club, […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — What is it that is drawing Russians like Victor Vekselberg and Alisher Usmanov to South Africa? In Russian villages, the peasants used to say that where there’s honey, there will always be flies. By that, they mean flies, not bees – raiders, not producers. For Vekselberg, manganese is the honey; for Usmanov, […]

by John Helmer - Friday, February 3rd, 2006
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — The two greatest boxing matches ever fought were the two that the slowing, but wily Muhammad Ali won as the 3-to-1 underdog. They were the Rumble in the Jungle (Kinshasa) against George Foreman, and the Thriller in Manila against Joe Frazier. One year separated the bouts, as Ali aged from 32 to […]

by John Helmer - Monday, January 30th, 2006
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – From one banker’s point of view, lending Russian aluminium oligarch Oleg Deripaska $22.5 million is peanuts – too little to warrant much concern about the creditworthiness or asset risk of Deripaska’s principal production company, Russian Aluminium (Rusal), the world’s no.3 producer and largest exporter of primary aluminium. To be sure, if Rusal […]

by John Helmer - Friday, January 20th, 2006
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – If Israeli diamantaire Lev Leviev and trade mediator Arkady Gaydamak buy football clubs, as they have recently done, the Roman Empire rule of thumb would be that the businesses of the two men are running into difficulty. English tabloid readers have been told that Roman Abramovich — the Russian oligarch who accumulated […]

by John Helmer - Monday, January 16th, 2006
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — It was a year ago when the President of the Sakha republic in fareastem Siberia, Vyacheslav Shtirov, was summoned to :the Kremlin for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin. That was not a jolly exchange of seasonal cheer; and because certain New Year promises that were made then have not been kept, […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 23rd, 2005
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By John Helmer in Moscow The two dominant Australian vices are not indigenous. Envy came with the Irish Catholics, who were at first the convict, then the indentured, and finally the working class. Hypocrisy came with the English Protestants, who began their economic enterprise in the country by declaring the land unoccupied (“terra nullius” was […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, December 21st, 2005
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