By John Helmer, Moscow
The state media organ British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is preparing a television broadcast on Oleg Deripaska and asking journalists in Moscow to help. Deripaska is the Russian state aluminium monopolist. The cue for the BBC is the new round of sanctions which the US Treasury says it is preparing, and the campaign of Russian race hatred which American and British government officials conduct each day. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
The Central Bank of Russia’s plan for saving two of Russia’s leading non-state retail banks, National Bank Trust (aka Trust Bank, NBT) and Otkritie Bank, is unravelling because the two key witnesses to the wrongdoing which caused the banks to collapse are now under investigation for alleged wrongdoing themselves.
On February 20 in London, Benedict Worsley, Otkritie Bank’s lead witness against the former administration of Trust Bank, was charged in the UK High Court with breach of trust, unlawful profiteering and taking bribes from Otkritie Bank. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
The Central Bank of Russia has authorized Suleiman Kerimov to take shareholding control of Vozrozhdenie Bank from Dmitry and Alexei Ananiev. The negotiation between Kerimov and the Central Bank occurred late last week. The Ananievs were absent abroad.
Eight weeks earlier, on December 15, the Central Bank had ousted them from shareholding control of Promsvyazbank, the first of the Ananiev banks; announced several billion dollars in bailout financing, and began an investigation of the Ananievs for grand larceny and fraud. The Central Bank and the Finance Ministry have subsequently decided to nationalize Promsvyazbank.
The new deal with Kerimov privatizes Vozrozhdenie Bank on terms which provide state bank funding and guarantees, details of which have not been officially announced.
The circumstances of the double bailout are unprecedented in Russian banking history. Never before have two suspected bank thieves on the run been replaced by a man under arrest and facing trial for money laundering, fraud, tax evasion and other crimes.
There is one difference between the Ananiev brothers and Kerimov. For the time being, the Ananievs have yet to face criminal or civil charges in a Russian court; they have taken the Central Bank to court in Moscow charging abuse of power. Kerimov, by contrast, is facing indictment by French prosecutors in Nice for financial transactions identified in the Nice magistrate’s records at almost one billion Euros. He is under house arrest at Cap d’Antibes, with a court-ordered bail of €40 million to relieve him of imprisonment after he had served two days.
There is one more difference. According to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) which Russia ratified in 2006, Kerimov as a senator in the Federation Council is a politically exposed person (PEP) who cannot be authorized to take control of a bank while he exercises political functions unless he meets exceptionally strict domestic and international standards of disclosure and supervision. Kerimov cannot qualify. In addition, Russian law on the status of elected officials prohibits Kerimov from conducting business transactions with the Central Bank or anyone else for personal gain.
The Central Bank was asked this week to confirm whether it had negotiated in Moscow with Kerimov and authorized him to take control of Vozrozhdenie from the Ananievs. The bank refused to say by telephone, and did not provide an official release. It requested an email of the question, and then refused to answer.
Senator Yury Vorobyov (Vorobiev), deputy speaker and head of the Federation Council’s control commission for enforcement of the senators’ code of conduct, was asked if Kerimov’s negotiations with the Ananievs in January and with the Central Bank a few days ago violate the law prohibiting members of the Council from carrying on business. Vorobyov refused to respond either directly, or through a spokesman.
By John Helmer, Moscow
The three types of power which decide the fate of regimes are force, fraud and subversion; that’s to say, arms, money, media.
The Roman Empire was good at using small armies to take on much bigger ones; by adeptly concentrating their force they managed to rule much larger large territories than the legions could cover. The Byzantine Empire excelled at using bribery of locals to stay loyal; the pre-requisite for that was the intelligence to identify who to pay, how much, and how often. The British Empire used subversion to divide and rule most of their colonial targets, but if the British were matched for firepower and intelligence, they failed and were defeated – by the American colonists, the Maoris, the Boers, the Germans, the Japanese.
The American Empire excels at subversion on the home front. But abroad it usually combines fraud with subversion. When these two fail to preserve or topple regimes, US-made wars have been a consistent failure. The Russians are better than Americans at force and fraud. Schemes of subversion like the US plots to promote Boris Yeltsin, Anatoly Chubais, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexei Navalny to rule the Kremlin, are not winners with Russians; they are judged successful only by foreigners who read the Washington Post and London Times.
The Kremlin official responsible for Russian media involvement in the US presidential election of 2016 was Dmitry Peskov (2nd image, left); he doubles as spokesman for President Vladimir Putin. For Peskov’s intention to employ social media he has not been indicted nor identified as a co-conspirator by Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III ( right). For the evidence Mueller has revealed of incompetence in the Russian campaign, the waste of money expended, and the failure of the campaign’s objectives, there are calls in Moscow for Peskov to be sacked.
He has so far avoided responding. “We have not yet familiarized ourselves [with the Mueller indictment], ” he told Reuters. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
The Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra (lead image, left) resigned his post this week after admitting he had publicly and repeatedly lied that he had met with President Vladimir Putin when he had not done so.
The Dutch press, which initiated the investigation exposing the lie, reports that in his resignation speech to the Dutch parliament Zijlstra confessed “the biggest mistake of my political life…The Netherlands deserves a minister who is above any doubt.”
In Canada, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland (right) – appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in January 2017 — has been lying about meeting President Putin when she did not.
No Canadian newspaper has investigated Freeland’s lying, and she has expanded the lie to meetings with other Russian officials, which also did not happen. The Toronto Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen and the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) have also failed to report Zijlstra’s resignation for his Putin lie; their editors blocked the Reuters and Bloomberg wire reports, which have been running on Canadian newsroom screens, from appearing in print. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
Oleg Deripaska (left) has issued a statement decrying a text and YouTube broadcast published last week which allege improprieties on a fishing trip off the Norwegian coast when Deripaska hosted Sergei Prikhodko (right). The trip occurred in August 2016. At the time, Prikhodko was Deputy Prime Minister and head of the government staff under Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Prikhodko, 61, started a career in the Soviet Foreign Ministry in 1981. He then transferred to the Kremlin where he has been a Kremlin staff assistant to Presidents Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and Medvedev. Prikhodko remains in his post until a new government is appointed following the presidential election on March 18.
“I will severely suppress any attempts to create and disseminate false information flow,” Deripaska has announced.
The broadcast about Prikhodko’s fishing trip with Deripaska first appeared on February 8. Since then it has drawn to date 4.8 million views. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
What is more alluring than a Swiss smile – and I don’t mean the ones displayed by the girls around Cornavin railway station in Geneva.
The question which Russian visitors, residents, and hopeful residents are asking is whether the Swiss have decided to abjure the smile and impose an informal sanction on Russians of wealth, and notable Ukrainians as well.
Sources who have been in social contact with Russians in January at the well-known ski resorts, as well as at elite boarding schools like Le Rosey, say large inter-bank transfers are being delayed or halted abruptly; longstanding bank accounts summarily closed; and applications to open new ones rejected.
The Swiss case of Roman Abramovich became a matter of public record on February 4, when Le Matin of Geneva reported that the oligarch with residences in the UK, US, and the Caribbean had his application for Swiss residency rejected in the Swiss manner – with an invitation to withdraw and to re-apply later. The case has become notorious because a judge in Zurich accepted an application from Abramovich to suppress publication in the Swiss media of the details of Abramovich’s case. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
Dmitry Pumpyansky’s (lead images) TMK, Russia’s largest steel pipemaking company, has announced that it is withdrawing its initial public offering (IPO) of shares in its US subsidiary, which had been planned for later this month on the New York Stock Exchange. The announcement has appeared in the western media, but not yet on the TMK website. TMK planned to retain 62% of the US company after the IPO; Pumpyansky controls 65% of TMK through a Cyprus offshore entity called TMK Steel Holding Ltd.
TMK’s Houston-based subsidiary known as IPSCO issued this release on Thursday, Texas time. “IPSCO Tubulars Inc. (“IPSCO”) today announced that it has decided to postpone its proposed initial public offering of its shares of common stock due to adverse market conditions. ‘While we received significant interest from potential investors, the continued market and economic volatility are not optimal conditions for an initial public offering,’ said Piotr Galitzine, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of IPSCO. ‘As a company, we’ve consistently made decisions in the best interests of our stockholders, employees and customers, and we will continue to do so.’”
Pumpyansky had been attempting to double his money. The attempt to spin off his American steel and pipemaking operations to American investors for a price approximately equal to the TMK group’s market capitalization was promoted by US banks seeking to recover loans they had extended; and by Anatoly Chubais, long one of the US Government’s candidates to rule Russia instead of the Kremlin incumbents since 1999. Chubais runs the state holding Rusnano, which bought a 5.5% stake in TMK in 2015. (more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
‘All politics is local’ was something Tip O’Neill, the late Massachusetts congressman and Speaker of the US House of Representatives, used to say. ‘A week is a long time in politics’ was something Harold Wilson, the late British Prime Minister, said at about the same time.
This week, you have several illustrations of putting the two together on battlefields in Syria, Russia’s southern front, and in the international financial markets. There, officials of the Trump Administration in Washington have pulled off attacks on Russian targets – some visible and direct, some indirect and camouflaged. These have caused serious casualties and costs on the Russian side, and produced military and financial gains on the American side. Plus hand-rubbing among Russia’s adversaries; denial talk in Washington and New York.
By John Helmer, Moscow
Steven (Steve) Mnuchin (lead image, right), a New York banker who has spent a year being Secretary of the US Treasury, is worse at dissembling his racket than his better-known American peers at racketeering, Alphonse (Al) Capone of the Chicago Outfit (left) and Charles (Lucky) Luciano of the New York Commission (centre). Mnuchin’s racket is billions of dollars bigger, but in legal principle and method, the fraud and extortion are much the same as the Outfit’s and the Commission’s. Mnuchin’s muscle is bigger too, though that requires warfare, which the Outfit and the Commission were established to do without.
Last week Mnuchin issued a Treasury report to Congress on the impact of US sanctions on Russian sovereign debt, which isn’t a report at all. It’s a leak to a news wire, so sloppily arranged that one of the seven pages is a duplicate of the first, though the leaker didn’t notice he had slapped the same page on to the copier screen twice. The US Treasury didn’t realize, Bloomberg, the newswire, didn’t check. In the 228-year history of US Government reports to the US Congress, such a goof has never happened before.
The fraud in Mnuchin’s report is to claim in public that he is attacking Russian financial operations and the future of the Russian economy when he is doing something quite different in private, protecting advantages for the leading US investment banks in which Mnuchin has had a life-long family interest. The extortion is what Mnuchin’s agents abroad are privately saying to persuade major foreign institutions competing with American ones not to buy or trade in Russian sovereign debt, when in public there is no legal authority for the US to do this.
At the same time, Mnuchin is threatening to do to Russian sovereign debt what the US has never done to a country with which it was in a Congressionally-declared war – not Spain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan. He also omits to identify what the consequences would be when China, the leading foreign holder of US sovereign debt, understands it will be next. China (including Hong Kong) currently holds $1.37 trillion in US sovereign debt, and the figure has been relatively stable since 2010. Russia holds one-tenth of that amount — just $105.7 billion; and it has been declining steadily over the same time. (more…)
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