By John Helmer, Moscow Russia’s state aluminium monopoly, United Company Rusal, has requested the help of the federal US court in Los Angeles in an attempt to delay or prevent the Nigerian courts and Nigerian government returning the country’s sole aluminium smelter to the Nigerian-American company which originally won the privatization auction of the asset […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, January 30th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow You don’t have to be a commercial rival of Ziyavudin Magomedov to notice that the billion-dollar business ventures he promises to deliver often fail to materialize. There was his claim, for example, that with his control stake of the United Grain Company (OZK is the Russian acronym), he intended to bid […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow Noone at Davos this week owes as much money to as many banks, and has escaped as many default notices, as Oleg Deripaska, the Kremlin’s trustee for the state aluminium monopoly United Company Rusal. No surprise then that as he flew into Zurich enroute for this week’s World Economic Forum, the […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, January 24th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow The old oligarchs, and several new aspirants, have a new playground in the Russian transportation sector, where their profits are guaranteed by the state budget. Carrying cargo from mine and wellhead to plant and port, and back again from port to market, is already profitable in conventional terms, and so the […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, January 17th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow Last month Oleg Deripaska authorized a Washington lobbyist he employs to submit to the US Department of Justice the claim that Deripaska meets with American “businesspeople to assess economic development in the United States in connection with his role as an economic advisor to the President of the Russian Federation.” The […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, January 17th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow “I can promise to say nothing that is untrue”, wrote Giuseppe di Lampedusa, the Sicilian prince, the Italian writer, when introducing a chapter of his brief memoirs. “But I shall not want to say all; and I reserve the right to lie by omission. Unless I change my mind.” If somebody […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, December 29th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Russians have an uninhibited good humour at this time of year, but Alisher Usmanov aims to be the spoiler, holding his nose over all the treats. According to Usmanov, the transaction “has the smell of the 90s and oligarch conspiracies. It’s not acceptable for us.” Usmanov is referring to the transaction, […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 28th, 2012
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, December 18th, 2012
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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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