By John Helmer, Moscow

“Always George’s problem,” John le Carré (lead image, left) has written in his latest resurrection of his best-known MI6 officer, George Smiley (right), “seeing both sides of everything. Wore him out.”

“Breathtaking”, claimed an Irish novelist with no government experience, in a London newspaper review. “Gripping”, chimed a BBC journalist whose only official secret was an affair with another journalist he tried to stop other journalists reporting. “An unexpected treat”, blurbed one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper employees. “A nostalgic comparison between espionage then and now”, blurbed another. The Los Angeles Times was religious about le Carré’s theme —  “the toll exacted on the individual’s [spy] soul  by serving institutions that fail to live up to their professed values  will resonate as [readers] consider past and present  covert actions of British and US governments.”  This is a bite-back for the virulent hatred for the US and its intelligence services le Carré has written into his story, including disclosure of the MI6 document handling code, GUARD, which is so secret the British Government doesn’t mention it in its classification guidelines.   It means keep secret from Americans.

David Ignatius, a career-long mouthpiece for the US services at the Washington Post, warns his readers.  Le Carré “is at his worst describing characters he doesn’t like (in his recent books, many of the heavy-handed, unconvincing figures are American intelligence officers).”

Since the majority of le Carré’s readers are Americans,  le Carré is asking them to pay money and wear themselves out seeing both sides of everything. Only le Carré’s intelligence officers never see the Russian side of anything. What they do see – le Carré makes the point repeatedly in A Legacy of Spies, now in its fifth printing   – is the pointlessness of the intelligence they target, and the worthlessness of their methods for going about it. (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, April 9th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Jonathan Haslam, an Englishman employed by Anglo-American universities to report Soviet and Russian political, military and espionage history for the past century until now, suffers from a tic.  That’s tic as in fanatic, the adjective Haslam applies to everyone who is a target of his history. But look again: Haslam’s tic turns out to be a symptom of the one-eyed man who believes he’s king (professor) in the kingdom (university) of the blind.   (more…)

by Editor - Monday, April 8th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

This week, desperate for attention in New York’s overstocked literary market, a biographer of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife and of the witches of Salem, has reported the one-hundred year anniversary of the departure of the Nabokov family from Crimea in April 1919. “Amid frantic, last-minute negotiations, under a spray of machine-gun fire, Vladimir Nabokov fled Russia 100 years ago this week,” reported Stacy Schiff for the New York Times.   “His family had sought refuge from the Bolsheviks in the Crimean peninsula; those forces now made a vicious descent from the north.”

Schiff and her newspaper make a foot fault on that line. “At the time of the evacuation he [Vladimir] had spent 16 quiet months in the Crimea, the last speck of Russia in White hands. Already the Bolsheviks had murdered any number of harmless people.”

If Crimea was Russia then, if only a “speck” and no matter how “vicious” the Bolsheviks from the “north” turned out to be, how on earth could Crimea be otherwise now? (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, April 4th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The indictment of ex-minister Mikhail Abyzov is a clear signal; the arrest of former Khabarovsk Governor and ex-presidential representative Victor Ishayev is another. 

The system of high-level administrative protection, on which these two notoriously corrupt figures have relied for the past twenty years, has ceased protecting them. There is a legion to follow them; they no longer have the telephone number to call for early warning to quash investigations before they close in, or if they do, to escape in time to the US or London.  

When Abyzov recognizes he is doomed, he will start to testify against Anatoly Chubais and others.  When Alexei Kudrin, chairman of the Accounting Chamber, realizes his game is up, he will start sounding more like the accountant he was in St. Petersburg than the candidate for selection to the highest national office he has aspired to be.  Whether Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will be replaced before the next State Duma election falls due in September 2021, or before the election campaign commences, he is going; none of his men will be left in power.   

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman announced after Abyzov’s arrest: “The President received the report [on the Abyzov case] in advance [of his arrest].” That is precisely what happened, not because Putin gave the order to commence the prosecution of Abyzov, but because Putin wants no one to realize he didn’t. Putin has lost the initiative; he cannot protect those who have counted on his protection for two decades.

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, April 3rd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In crowded city life, crabs – plural – meant an invasion of lice into warm body parts covered by hair. For readers who are virgins or who have had Brazilian waxing and can’t imagine running into the crabs, the illustration shows the little fellows in the hair of the head. In fact, a case of the crabs usually meant the pubic hair. Rubbing intimately was the way you got the crabs.

Gleb Frank (lead image, left), owner of the Russian Fishery Company, his father Sergei Frank (centre), chief executive of the state shipping company Sovcomflot, and Gennady Timchenko (right), Gleb’s father-in-law, financier of his businesses, and candidate to take over Sovcomflot when it’s privatized, have been rubbing each other intimately. They know where the crabs are and how to catch them.  That’s because they are planning to create an oligopoly of the Russian crab industry, and dominate the Russian crab trade with the United States. That is, if the US Government, in defence of its crab fishermen, doesn’t  hit the two Franks with the same sanctions as have already been imposed on Timchenko because of Timchenko’s other association; that’s with President Vladimir Putin. He discussed the Frank crab-catching plan in a Kremlin meeting on December 14 last year.   

In the newest version of the US sanctions law against Russia, introduced in the US Senate on February 13,  Gleb Frank, Sergei Frank and Sovcomflot are potential targets, not only because they are “family members of persons [“political figures, oligarchs, and other persons that facilitate illicit and corrupt activities, directly or indirectly, on behalf of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin”] that derive significant benefits from such illicit and corrupt activities”;  but also because they are “entities operating in the shipbuilding sector of the Russian Federation.” (more…)

by Editor - Monday, April 1st, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A Financial Times reporter has just published the claim that a London arbitration tribunal decided last Sunday in favour of Michael Calvey’s claims against Artem Avetisyan and Sherzod   Yusupov. Calvey, Avetisyan and Yusupov are Moscow-based shareholders in the merger of  Vostochny Bank and Uniastrum Bank. Counting their combined assets, the re-named Vostochny (Orient Express Bank) is the largest of Russia’s regional banks; the 32^nd largest bank Russia-wide. 

The reporter Max Seddon (lead image, left) is concealing that his information was prompted by Calvey’s (second from right) company and his lawyers in violation of the confidentiality rules of the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA). Calvey remains in a Moscow jail, waiting for trial next month on fraud claims by Avetisyan (right) and Yusupov in relation to the Vostochny Bank which Calvey was in the process of selling to Avetisyan until they started to fall out. Seddon and his newspaper have taken Calvey’s side but they have yet to publish the evidence.

The true story of Calvey, his loss-making bank,  and his effort to get out of jail with the aid of the London and New York financial press, can be read here.  (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, March 27th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Mikhail Abyzov (lead image from 2014) was arrested yesterday on charges of embezzlement and fraud, and is in prison on remand. The case against Abyzov for theft of Rb4 billion ($62 million) from regional electricity companies is the most significant criminal case against a Russian figure so far this year. This is because Abyzov’s fate also threatens Anatoly Chubais, once the head of the state electricity utility, United Energy System (UES); and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev for whom Abyzov operated as a political financier and as Minister for Open Government.

“The President received the report [on the Abyzov case] in advance [of his arrest],”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has announced. 

Abyzov’s application for bail and the prosecutor’s motion for extension of his imprisonment will be considered in an arraignment hearing this morning in Moscow. The Bell, an offshore internet publication representing the US faction in Russian business, reports that Abyzov often travelled to Russia from one of his homes in the US and Italy,  and “did not suspect” he was under investigation. The Bell is reporting today that several others who worked with Chubais in the privatization of UES have already fled the country.  (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, March 27th, 2019
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By John Helmer. Moscow

According to the rule of Soviet law, which Russians over the age of 40 believe, most forms of capitalism are a crime, especially investment banking. By the rule of modern Russian politics, if Alexei Kudrin, German Gref, and Andrei Kostin announce a man is innocent, he is bound to be guilty of something. When the London newspapers claim a man is as innocent of their Russian indictments as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and William Browder, then their culpability is certain.

In the case of American banker Michael Calvey, he was arrested and imprisoned in Moscow on February 14.  He is charged with fraud by inflating the value of an asset he used his control  shareholding in Orient Express Bank (Vostochny Bank is the Russian name) to arrange for the bank to buy at a $37 million profit for himself,  and at a corresponding loss to the bank. He has made two court appearances and declared the charge is false. He has counter-charged two Russian minority shareholders in the bank for trumping up the case in their hostile takeover of the bank.  His trial is scheduled to commence early next month, Judge Artur Karpov presiding.  

The charge sheet has not been released by the court nor by the Moscow prosecutors. Calvey’s  advocates in the press claim he is innocent, but they have not seen the indictment nor the evidence from the bank and transaction records obtained by the Federal Security Service (FSB) before Calvey’s arrest.  Calvey’s lawyer refuses to answer questions. Papers from a Cyprus Supreme Court judgement involving  Cypriot front companies for the bank shareholders have been selectively leaked to the  pro-Calvey press, along with claims he is making in a confidential London arbitration proceeding. The reporters and lawyers won’t release these papers, or details from the asset valuations on which the case for fraud depends. One of the valuations has reportedly been carried out by the KPMG accounting firm; another by the Central Bank which has been inspecting Vostochny Bank’s books since it reached the verge of collapse in 2017.

Calvey raised his shareholding in the bank from 20% in 2010 to 64% by mid-2015. He was the control shareholder of the bank when its losses started to mount in 2013. Calvey was responsible on the bank board for losses in 2014 of Rb5.3 billion ($95 million); in 2015 the losses had almost doubled to Rb9.5 billion ($130 million); in 2016, the losses were Rb4.7 billion ($77 million). The Russian prosecutors haven’t charged Calvey with criminal loss-making, apart from the fraud count which allegedly occurred in February 2017. Calvey’s supporters have no explanation for his earlier mismanagement of the bank’s capital.  The two Russian shareholders whom Calvey accuses, Artem Avetisyan and Shersod Yusupov, didn’t become Vostochny shareholders until the second half of 2016.  That’s after Calvey had supervised accumulated losses over four years of $329 million.

“This is unprecedented. He’s a US citizen,” the Financial Times quoted a western backer of Calvey. He meant the fraud charge. Not the bank’s loss-making. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 24th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Twenty years ago, on April 25, 1999, the annual memorial service for ANZAC Day at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church of Moscow allowed the Turkish Ambassador to speak from the pulpit, in front of the altar. I walked out, and then protested to the Australian and New Zealand ambassadors – Ruth Pearce and John Larkindale at the time – for inviting the Turk to make a speech to the audience.  It was unfitting to the history of the event for the representative of the enemy against whom the ANZACs fought, and of a country which had invaded and continued to occupy an allied country, Cyprus, to be permitted to speak at the ceremony. The protest was ignored. I became persona non grata at the two embassies. (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, March 21st, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Alexei Kudrin (lead image) is the longest-running candidate for regime change in the Kremlin who is not in jail, or outside the country. “We need a friendly global environment,” he told  a business conference in Moscow last week. Currently chairman of the Accounting Chamber, the state auditor, Kudrin explained this is “currently not being achieved fully due to global geopolitical disagreements and sanctions. Russia should try to reduce this factor and to mitigate political disagreements and sanctions by way of talks and other means.”

Kudrin’s remedy, he added, is that Russia and the US “have to meet each other halfway.” (more…)

by Editor - Monday, March 18th, 2019
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