Laundering a man’s reputation is a little like laundering money. The more you churn the facts, the harder it is to remember them; the less damage they can do; and the whiter the outcome. It is for this reason that Russia’s oligarchs have spent so much effort bringing defamation cases against their critics and investigators […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 18th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – Brian Gilbertson, the South African appointed a few months ago to head SUAL, a Russian mining and metals company, has run into a problem from a direction he couldn’t have anticipated — from the past. And unless he can quickly resolve the problem, the company he was hired to sell to foreign […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 18th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – There is an old Russian tradition of never speaking ill of the powerful. But in March, when President Vladimir Putin plucked Yury Trutnev from provincial obscurity to become his minister of natural resources, it was far from clear whether Trutnev had been chosen because he was already a powerful figure, or because […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 16th, 2004
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Oleg Deripaska is a very brave man, in all likelihood. When Ernest Hemingway wrote “Death in the Afternoon,” his study of Spanish bullfighting almost 75 years ago, he made a point of appreciating the quality of bravery in both bullfighters and bulls. So does the audience at corridas today. The most common degree of bravery, […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, September 30th, 2004
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If anyone should know how to rig a constitution, it’s me and George Bush, Jr. You might say it runs in the family. Take my uncle, for example.As the British Empire began to break apart in the aftermath of World War II, he was one of many former military intelligence officers assigned by the imperial […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — In Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”, the adventure begins with the approach of Blind Pew, emissary of Captain Flint’s pirate crew, to deliver the Black Spot, the verdict of death, to Billy Bones, the crewman who held Flint’s precious treasure map. In fear of his life, Bones was always on the alert […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, September 16th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – Cash cows need careful herding, just like the lactating and the beef species. As every cowboy knows, if you don’t fence them in properly, on cloudy nights you run the risk losing then to rustlers or wolves. Gazprom, Russia’s leading resource company and the world’s largest gas producer and exporter, has been […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 15th, 2004
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Among soldiers and other hired gunmen, it is said that the bullet always tell the truth. It’s the triggerman’s way of passing moral responsibility for his deed, and his good or ill fortune, from the trigger to the target. In interpreting a national shock like this month’s killings at Beslan, in the Northern Ossetian Republic, […]

by John Helmer - Monday, September 13th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – The official debut in Moscow this week of Brian Gilbertson as the new chief executive officer of SUAL International is the third swallow to fly. The first was Ian Cockerill’s Moscow round with Vladimir Potanin in April, following Norilsk Nickel’s purchase of a 20% stake in Gold Fields, with the promise of […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004
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To what extent is it possible for us to see what lurks behind the faces of Russia’s power elite? Among the exhibits of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci on display at the Louvre since May, there is a selection of four grotesques by the master. It is said that Leonardo’s keen ability to see […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, July 24th, 2004
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