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 (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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“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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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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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 – 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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