MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) –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 the pseudo-legal expression), […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, December 21st, 2005
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – At the start of Raymond Chandler’s last novel,the private detective Philip Marlowe is on watch at the Los Angeles railway station. “There was nothing to it,” he says to himself. “The subject was easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.” Later, after trailing her to a hotel room down […]

by John Helmer - Monday, December 12th, 2005
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com)-Despite the visit this month to Moscow of a 64-person delegation of South African government and corporate officials – the largest ever to come to Russia – the outcome appears to be a cooling in mutual sentiment. One-sided lobbying by Russia’s natural resources minister, Yury allies is one of the reasons. Reluctance to challenge […]

by John Helmer - Friday, October 21st, 2005
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) –Among the world’s top producers of aluminium, all are public companies regulated by the laws, securities market and anti-trust regulations, and disclosure requirements of the United States and the European Union, save one. The exception is Russian Aluminium (Rusal), which is owned by Oleg Deripaska, a young Russian. What Deripaska allows to be […]

by John Helmer - Friday, October 14th, 2005
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Sukhoi Log (in Russian the name means “Dry Gulch”) is no longer an asset in which Kremlin and other government officials see value in mining. Value for themselves, that is. Russia’s largest unmined gold deposit, and the second largest unmined deposit in the world, Sukhoi Log is located in remote forests northeast of Lake Baikal, […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 11th, 2005
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BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS – Roman Abramovich, Russia’s and England’s richest man, quietly lost a court case in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) last week. But the sound of the judge’s ruling is about to toll right round the world, For the first time in one of the most successful careers in the world of what […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, July 17th, 2005
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By John Helmer Richard Cheney, the outgoing vice-president of the United States, is the modern version of Mime, second in command of the Niebelungs, the bad dwarfs of the mythical German underworld. It was Mime who forges a magical helmet to give his brother Alberich, the chief dwarf Niebelung, the power to change into anything […]

by John Helmer - Monday, May 30th, 2005
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By John Helmer in Moscow The English comedian, and co-founder of the Goons, Spike Milligan, once said that Americans are the new Germans. He wasn’t exactly joking, but he was being selective. Not every American, he meant, was susceptible to the type of fascism that everyone who has ever been jack-booted by the Germans recognizes. […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – For at least a few hours on Monday, Harmony Gold’s Bernard Swanepoel knew more about Norilsk Nickel’s plan to spin off its gold assets in an offshore placement than Norilsk Nickel itself. “Harmony wishes to advise”, a company announcement declared in Johannesburg, “that it has consented to the transfer by Norilsk Nickel […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 18th, 2005
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) –On the eve of Good Friday, President Vladimir Putin called the leaders of Russia’s major businesses to meet with him at the Kremlin. The oligarchs were hoping that Putin would go long on resurrection, and short on crucifixion, at least of the type that has kept their colleague, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in prison, and […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, March 26th, 2005
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