By John Helmer, Moscow It’s a cliché about greed. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon allows four witnesses to an affair of lust, robbery and murder to tell their own versions of what had happened. There is one corpse, and several versions of how it got that way – at the hand of the wife, the […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 14th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Oleg Deripaska (image centre) is not having a good week. It started more or less out of harm’s way with a report in a London magazine, Private Eye. This claims that at least two Caribbean companies and one UK entity, which Deripaska uses to channel sales revenues from United Company Rusal […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, December 13th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow There is rule on corruption which everyone in public office in every corner of the world knows – you mustn’t use your office to advance your private profit. When he was Mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov was not supposed to put lucrative city business in the way of himself or his […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, December 12th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow There are 7,018 pages in the four-volume paper print of Lord Leveson’s report on the ethics and practices of the British press. But just three references to Russia. One of them is a reflection on press freedom in primitive Russia and Ethiopia, compared with civilized UK by Alexander Lebedev, owner of […]

by John Helmer - Monday, December 10th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Negotiations are under way between Pacific Andes of Hong Kong, and its Singapore subsidiary China Fishery Group, with Russian Sea, the leading Russian fishing fleet operator, to resolve longstanding conflict between Chinese and Russians over access to waters in Russia’s exclusive economic zone, and to fish catch quotas. Under Russian law, […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 7th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow If you believe that in July 1941, a few days after the start of the German invasion, Lavrenty Beria was telling Josef Stalin that one of their NKVD agents had gotten her information “from the horse’s mouth, as the peasants say”, this book is for you. Actually, the expression is American […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, December 6th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Blimps long ago lost their value as a means of cargo transportation, military reconnaissance, or anti-aircraft defence; whilst the helium that fills them – more safely than the combustible hydrogen gas which brought down the Hindenburg in 1937 – is sharply increasing its value in other applications. But the US, which […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow The state-owned tanker company Sovcomflot is to avoid the London Stock Exchange (LSE) for its initial public offering (IPO). Instead, it is reviving a decade-old plan of former chief executive Dmitry Skarga and will attempt to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). A source in a position […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow There is a famous old anecdote in which Zmei Gorinich, the three-headed Russian dragon, sits hungrily down to table, and proceeds to stuff each of his mouths with food presented to him by villagers too terrified to do otherwise. At night, however, the dragon’s stomach rumbles, then swells, and finally explodes. […]

by John Helmer - Friday, November 30th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Alrosa, the Russian diamond miner, signed an agreement on Wednesday [November 28] to supply selected rough diamonds to Tiffany of New York. Signing with Alrosa chief executive Fyodor Andreyev was Andrew Hart, president of Laurelton Diamonds, a Belgian subsidiary of Tiffany, as well as executive vice president of Tiffany Corporation in […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 29th, 2012
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