MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – Victor Vekselberg has taken so much value out of the Siberian region of Tyumen, it’s understandable that he says he is thinking of putting something back. According to Vekseiberg’s spokesman, Tyumen – the oil-rich region that has been home to one of Vekseiberg’s properties, the Tyumen Oil Company (TNK) – is being […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, July 15th, 2004
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MOSCOW – It used to be said about a fraudster in Australia that he was too crooked to lie straight in bed. Until now, however crooked the Russian oligarchs – the handful of men who seized control of Russia’s oil and mineral wealth a decade ago – may have seemed, the lure of their money […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, July 7th, 2004
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MOSCOW – It used to be said about a fraudster in Australia that he was too crooked to lie straight in bed. Until now, however crooked the Russian oligarchs – the handful of men who seized control of Russia’s oil and mineral wealth a decade ago – may have seemed, the lure of their money […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – At the turn of the last century, when Americans were the conspicuously new oligarchs of the western world F.Scott Fitzgerald was their story-teller. In his novel about a rich young man of upper-class New York, called The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald stuck a warning of his fate as an epigram at the […]

by John Helmer - Monday, July 5th, 2004
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In October of 1812, when Napoleon began his withdrawal from Moscow, the initial mood of the French troops was much more optimistic than we suppose today. Of fighting men, the French army was down to 95,000; but opposing them was scarcely the same number in the surviving Russian army. Buoying the high spirits of the […]

by John Helmer - Friday, June 25th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — Doveryai, no proveryai. It’s a hoary Russian maxim, meaning “trust but verify.” US President Ronald Reagan often used it, never managing to get the pronunciation right, during his scripted appearances with Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the Soviet Union. It was Reagan’s way of convincing the diehards at home that even […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, June 1st, 2004
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“There are two famous last words,” Charles Bohlen, a US Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War, once warned. “One is ‘alcohol doesn’t affect me’. The other is ‘I understand the Russians’.” Russians who confidently say they know what the Kremlin is about to do fall into both categories. Russia’s […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
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MOSCOW – Roald Dahl, the English humorist, once wrote a tale about a man who had acquired the secret of seeing through cards. Naturally, he had to conceal it, if he was to make a killing at casinos. As professional gamblers all know, casino managements are constantly on the lookout for players with systems that […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, May 5th, 2004
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In the snow, Russian peasants still say, the law is like a sleigh. A clever judge can steer it either way. Vladimir Potanin, the controlling shareholder of Norilsk Nickel (NorNickel), Russia’s largest mining company, ought to know. In a decade of acquiring the assets that comprise his Moscow-based, multi-billion dollar holding Interros, he has had […]

by John Helmer - Monday, May 3rd, 2004
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MOSCOW – Vladimir Potanin has a plan to cash out somewhere between $3 and $5 billion worth of his fortune in Norilsk Nickel by converting it into a controlling shareholding of the South African mining company, Gold Fields. If he succeeds, he will have achieved a bigger transfer of Russian wealth offshore – beyond the […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, April 28th, 2004
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