By John Helmer, Moscow

In the year since we last wished you well, Dear Reader, you have read on average three of our new stories every working week. Also, you’ve spent an average of more than thirty minutes reading each story. (more…)

by Editor - Friday, December 22nd, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Central Bank of Russia has called for state prosecutors in Moscow to investigate its most costly bank takeover and bailout,  the three-year refinancing and reorganization of National Bank Trust and Otkritie Bank, on suspicion of multibillion-dollar fraud by Vadim Belyaev, the former chief executive  and leading shareholder of Otkritie.

In fear of arrest,  Belyaev has reportedly taken refuge in the UK. According to a press leak  from the Central Bank on Wednesday, “Vadim Belyaev, the owner of Otkritie Bank, is hiding in London now and doesn’t intend to return to Russia. The [Central Bank] financial regulator sees no reason for cooperation with Belyaev any longer, and is ready to consider his activities at Otkritie as fraud.  At the request of the deputy head of the Central Bank,  Vasily Pozdyshev,  the General Prosecutor is studying transactions of Otkritie involving the [largescale] withdrawal of capital.” The Central Bank source reports “the weight of evidence suggests that 127 billion rubles [$2.2 billion] allocated to Otkritie for the rehabilitation of Trust have been despatched, not to their intended purpose but in an unknown direction.”

Other Otkritie Bank shareholders  involved in the transactions now under investigation by the prosecutors include Vagit Alekperov of LUKoil;  Ruben Aganbegyan of the Moscow Stock Exchange, and  Alexander Mamut,  an investor in the Russian insurer Ingosstrakh and the Polymetal goldmining group. 

Today the Central Bank refused officially to confirm or deny the details reported so far. Alexander Dmitriev, spokesman for Belyaev and the Otkritie board before its takeover by the Central Bank, also refused to respond to the reported allegations. (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, December 21st, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A man who hates the subject of his writings is as pitiable as a coprophagic with haemorrhoids. The more he consumes of what he desires, the more painful he knows will be the consequence.

Termites and rabbits do plenty of the former, but Mother Nature has relieved them of the latter.  Russia-hating writers on Russia are not so favoured; they are the only cases I know which combine, and enjoy,  the perversity with the pain. In their cases, there’s always been something missing between their upper and lower holes – I mean more is missing than a sense of taste and a sense of humour.

Michel de Montaigne, the French politician and writer of sixteenth century France – inventor of the essay – is their antithesis. He deserves to be remembered for two mottoes we shall need in 2018. Re-read the essays in the translation by Donald Frame here.  Ignore the recent biography by a Chicago professor of French origin named Philippe Desan; he has spent an academic career and eight hundred fresh printed pages revealing his envy that Montaigne will be read for longer than Desan will be forgotten.  Envy like this will also have to be overcome to get through the coming year; more of that in a moment. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, December 18th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

This isn’t news:  President Vladimir Putin (lead image, right) is running for re-election on March 18.

According to the latest national polls, he is likely to win with a larger majority of a smaller turnout than in 2012. As Tiny Tim (left) almost said in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, God bless us, almost every one!

What is news is that after declaring his re-election bid to a group of autoworkers; proclaiming a hike in pensions from New Year’s Day; and announcing to Russian troops in Syria that most of them will return home,  Putin is not – repeat not — hosting his annual Christmas dinner for the oligarchs.  God bless us, almost every one! (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, December 14th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russia’s leading state banker German Gref (lead image, left) and members of the Russian intelligentsia have written to the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, announcing their judgement that Suleiman Kerimov (centre) is innocent of the indictment the French prosecutor has filed in Nice. This charges Kerimov with laundering  more than half a billion US dollars, allegedly transported in suitcases of cash through Nice airport; and evasion of millions of Euros in French property sale taxes through fraudulent transactions extending from the south of France to Switzerland.  

The Russian group also reveals that Kerimov suffers from severe cardiological problems for which the letter proposes he would be better cared for medically in Russia, rather than in France.

Heading the eleven signatories of the letter to Macron is Mikhail Prokhorov (right) and his sister, Irina. She is a member of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a French honorific well below the Légion; she then obtained a promotion to the Legion in 2012. The first honour conferred by the French on her brother is that until Kerimov,  he was  the only Russian oligarch to have been jailed in France on a criminal charge.

According to Prokhorov, Gref and the others, Kerimov is “a supreme statesman of the Russian Federation”, and accordingly, he should be released from detention in France to “continue his  work in the Federation Council of the Russian Federation.”  This is the first time a Russian has publicly identified any work Kerimov has done in the upper house of parliament since his election in 2008. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, December 11th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19^th century German soldier and military strategist, famously remarked that war is the continuation of policy (politics) by other means.

By war, von Clausewitz meant the old-fashioned idea of running people through or making them run away, so they give up their territory, treasure, and women.  By war these days there are fresh ways of running people through and grabbing treasure and women. There’s cyber warfare, which strikes at the enemy’s minds, not their bodies; sanctions, which are  the modern form of siege warfare, starving the enemy of cash for food; and sports warfare, which means killing the most popular entertainment in the world.  Olympic Games  and World Cup football have replaced rape and rapine of olden times, at least in countries which regard themselves as civilized.

Since the US has been at war with Russia from 2014, the military junta in Washington has lost its  campaign on the Syrian front. On the Ukraine front it has been so bogged down that Kiev has lost  more treasure than it can hope to recover in a generation, or two.  The US is also losing its military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya.  The escalation of military operations and sanctions war on the Korean front has achieved no American policy goals. Quite the opposite. (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, December 7th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Extracting guilty pleas from the innocent was the specialty of the Spanish Inquisition and its Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada (lead image, centre).

Extracting guilty pleas from the dead is the specialty of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill (right), and Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov (left), head of the Church commission investigating the deaths of Tsar Nicholai II and the Romanov family. They were executed on July 17, 1918, by the revolutionary government.  Kirill has also declared that his inquisition has the backing of the Russian state, in the person of President Vladimir Putin with whom Kirill claims to have had a private conversation on the matter recently.

There followed last week the announcement from the General Prosecutor in Moscow that its department for special cases is conducting a new investigation of the charge that the execution of the tsar was a ritual killing carried out by Jews. (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, December 5th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Since the American war against Russia began in 2014, the market for Russian art has been driven by rich Russians running away, both buyers and sellers, as well as Americans making disposals. This week, in the semi-annual London auctions, there was a surge of demand for the art which American Russia-haters, not to mention the Kremlin and the Russian Church, have reviled, particularly this year. Soviet art – the celebration of the post-1917 values of secularism, republicanism, socialism, anti-imperialism —  hit prices never recorded before. For the first time in the second century of the Russian republic, revolution fetched a higher price than reaction.    (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, November 29th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

 The arrest and indictment of Suleiman Kerimov in Nice last week on charges of tax fraud and money laundering have begun loosening the tongues of international bankers and commodity trade financiers who have done business with Kerimov in the past, and who have been  guests at his Cap d’Antibes villa parties.

They say Kerimov’s wealth is illusory and exaggerated by the press, because his assets are heavily leveraged by bank loans which can be called in by material changes in borrower condition; Kerimov’s arrest may be one of them.

The sources also believe the money for Kerimov’s villa purchases in Cap d’Antibes, which are the target of the French prosecution, originated from Russian state banks.  “The international banks largely dropped Kerimov’s business after 2008 when the share value securing his borrowings collapsed, and he had to sell up,” comments a source who was involved in financing for Kerimov before the crash. “Since then he’s been a dependent of Sberbank.  The Sberbank officials knew he was high risk, and they treated him like a slave. Kerimov had to kiss their feet.”

Investigations in Nice, Moscow and Switzerland, where Kerimov’s asset holdings are managed, confirm that Kerimov’s chief creditors today are the state banks, Sberbank and VTB, run by German Gref and Andrei Kostin. A smaller line of credit has been extended by a third state lender, Gazprombank. The international bankers say they don’t know whether Russian state bankers are also beneficiaries of the villas at Cap d’Antibes.

In Moscow there is nervousness over what Kerimov’s telephone conversations, tapped by  French prosecutors, have revealed already; and what he will admit under interrogation about who may be the owners of the real estate, if not himself.   An international bank source believes the real villa owners aren’t Russian bankers. “They don’t like people like Kerimov,” the source says. “Certainly not [Sberbank chief executive German] Gref and [VTB chief executive Andrei] Kostin. They are independently rich; they don’t need guys like Kerimov. They would not put themselves into Kerimov’s hands. These houses are never worth what the papers are reporting but they are all Kerimov’s stuff.  That’s been his business style. He buys assets in bagloads – bank shares, commodities, real estate. But now the market has turned like it did for his other assets. You can’t sell a house on the Cote d’Azur at the price Kerimov paid. His business is show business. That’s caught up with him now.” (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, November 28th, 2017
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Evasion of French taxes is the criminal case against Suleiman Kerimov (lead image, rear left), who was jailed in Nice on November 20; indicted two days later; then released on €5 million in bail, his passport confiscated and his freedom curtailed by French police surveillance which may last for years, before the French judicial process is complete.

If convicted on the charges, Kerimov faces a penalty of ten years in prison. If he pleads guilty, pays the back taxes, a money fine or asset forfeit, he may be released to return to Russia. There, the French evidence and Kerimov’s plea will prove he is liable to criminal violations of the Russian law on disclosing offshore assets, and of failing to pay Russian taxes on the money used to acquire them. A Russian prosecution of Kerimov would then become the basis for a criminal prosecution for money laundering in Switzerland against the entities through which Kerimov has operated, and the Studhalter family which has served as his agents for more than a decade.

For the Kremlin, the Kerimov affair represents as great a criminal case as the trial, thirteen years ago, of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky – except that this time the courts, prosecutors, and jailors in Kerimov’s case are all impeccably French. Not a single Russian lawyer, journalist, publication, radio or television broadcast has noticed. The silence is deafening. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, November 26th, 2017
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