By John Helmer in Moscow It will take more than a pair of silken toe-shoes for Russian Aluminium (Rusal), sponsor of the Bolshoi Theatre’s programme at Covent Garden this month, to dance its way out of serious drama in the English courts.

by John Helmer - Sunday, July 30th, 2006
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By John Helmer In the Russian folk tradition, Dyed Moroz (Father Christmas) doesn’t give children their presents because they have been well-behaved all year. Instead, he responds to those who shout the loudest to catch his attention.

by John Helmer - Friday, July 14th, 2006
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Some people like to watch the sun going down. Alexei Mordashov, the third-ranked Russian steelmaker, and a 40-year old man with enormous personal vanity, has been persuaded by some desperate, but clever fellows in Luxembourg that, to watch his own sun going down, and exiting Russia, Mordashov should pay a ticket price of $2.7 billion. […]

by John Helmer - Monday, May 29th, 2006
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — In football parlance, a ghost goal is usually understood to be the one that scores without the goalkeeper seeing where it came from, or who booted it. Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who now lives in England, might be considered an expert on the matter since he owns the Chelsea Football Club, […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
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BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS – Roman Abramovich, Russia’s and England’s richest man, quietly lost a court case in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) last week. But the sound of the judge’s ruling is about to toll right round the world, For the first time in one of the most successful careers in the world of what […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, July 17th, 2005
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Laundering a man’s reputation is a little like laundering money. The more you churn the facts, the harder it is to remember them; the less damage they can do; and the whiter the outcome. It is for this reason that Russia’s oligarchs have spent so much effort bringing defamation cases against their critics and investigators […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 18th, 2004
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Oleg Deripaska is a very brave man, in all likelihood. When Ernest Hemingway wrote “Death in the Afternoon,” his study of Spanish bullfighting almost 75 years ago, he made a point of appreciating the quality of bravery in both bullfighters and bulls. So does the audience at corridas today. The most common degree of bravery, […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, September 30th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – Cash cows need careful herding, just like the lactating and the beef species. As every cowboy knows, if you don’t fence them in properly, on cloudy nights you run the risk losing then to rustlers or wolves. Gazprom, Russia’s leading resource company and the world’s largest gas producer and exporter, has been […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 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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