Oleg Deripaska is probably too young, and certainly too self-confident, to contemplate those who marked the loss of their power, or their end, with famous last words. Farouk, the last king of Egypt, lived thirteen years after he was deposed, but nothing before, or afterwards, was as memorable as his words on losing his throne. […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 26th, 2004
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MOSCOW – Nuri Said was the puppet prime minister of Iraq during the 1950s, when the British pulled all the strings in Baghdad. When he was toppled by revolutionary Iraqi officers in 1958, Said’s mangled corpse was dragged through the streets. His end more or less confirmed what he used to say: “You can always […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, April 21st, 2004
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MOSCOW — There are so many different battles now going on for the assets of Yukos, inside the company, between the management and the shareholders, between different shareholders, between Yukos and Sibneft, and between the company and the state authorities, it is easy to mistake the plot. Last week, Yukos CEO Simon Kukes took out […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 19th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – The Faberge Easter eggs, which Viktor Vekselberg has bought from Forbes in New York and has brought back to Russia as his peace offering to the Kremlin, may also come in useful as pacifiers, now that Vekselberg has gone to war again with fellow aluminium oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. After appearing to agree […]

by John Helmer - Monday, April 19th, 2004
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MOSCOW – The Moscow Times published an editorial Friday, which could only have been written by Judas Iscariot. The editorial is a wholesale denunciation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, demonizing the man as he faces a likely prison sentence if the charges brought against him by Russian prosecutors are proven to be true. Talk about hitting a […]

by John Helmer - Friday, April 2nd, 2004
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MOSCOW – Mikhail Khodorkovsky has all the time in the world to practice his limbo technique. Remember the limbo? that exotic competition on the nightclub floor when Caribbean dancers would try to outdo each other as they swayed under the limbo bar to choruses of “Limbo! Limbo! How lowww can you gohhhh!” This week, Khodorkovsky […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 31st, 2004
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MOSCOW – Either way you look at it, Norilsk Nickel’s decision to spend $1.16 billion to buy 20 percent of the South African goldminer Gold Fields, much of it in borrowed funds, is a wager on President Vladimir Putin having too much to do right now to notice. If Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov, the […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 30th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – There is a popular, if bawdy Russian anecdote about an over-confident rabbit in a village, on a fine day…. One morning the little fellow wakes up, stretches, and as was his custom in good weather, he goes outside his front-door to scratch his private parts. When he reaches into his pants, however, […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 24th, 2004
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If Anatoly Chubais ever had scruples, or reluctance at setting them aside, he has understood the lesson offered by that arch-plotter, the Marquise de Merquise in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the pre-revolutionary French classic, who advised: “the best way of overcoming scruples is to leave those who have them with nothing more to lose.” In Chubais’s […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004
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MOSCOW – Despite a threat to take “strategic and tactical steps” against Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus, Moscow entrepreneur Alisher Usmanov is bluffing, and not for the first time. Usmanov made his threat in a report appearing in the March 16 issue of the Financial Times, which was characteristically impressed by the Russian bravado, and just as […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 17th, 2004
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