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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By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska has filed a lawsuit in federal US court in Washington, DC, requesting US help to save him “from… the devastating power of U.S. economic sanctions… in a manner that is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution.”

Deripaska has also accused the US Government of aiding and abetting the Russian Communist Party by accepting false accusations against him. In court papers lodged last Friday in federal district court in Washington, DC,  Deripaska’s lawyer, Erich Ferrari, claimed that the Communist Party “which holds the second highest number of seats in the Russian Parliament and whose leader has publicly attacked Deripaska and organized rallies against him because of his divestment and relinquishment of control in the companies that were recently delisted by OFAC.  Specifically, Gennady Zyuganov, has called for a criminal investigation of Deripaska for allegedly giving the companies ‘to the Anglo Saxons to control’ and for acting against the strategic policy and national security of Russia.”   (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 17th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

“We have the right to expect,” Mikhail Gorbachev, then President of the Soviet Union, declared to James Baker, US Secretary of State, in Washington on February 10, 1990, “that you won’t just wait until the fruit falls into your basket”.

Baker relaxed. By “right” he knew Gorbachev was holding out a begging bowl. By “expect” Baker  understood Gorbachev was crossing his fingers. By “just wait” Baker marvelled that Gorbachev appeared to be deaf to his advisors and the Soviet chief of staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev.  By “fruit” Gorbachev meant Russia and the Soviet Union. Of course, Baker and his colleagues and successors did more than wait, as Akhromeyev warned they would.  The fruit did fall, Gorbachev first of all.

The lesson of Gorbachev’s political biography is that every Russian has the duty to expect the US Government will be doing much more than wait for Russia to fall into the American basket. Instead, to accelerate the fall and make it irreversible, the US Government wages permanent war against Russia.  Failing to understand this was one of the reasons for Gorbachev’s retreat from the advance of American forces on all of Russia’s frontiers – the advance which President Vladimir Putin must defend against today.

What fresh lessons can an American historian’s study of Gorbachev add to the story which Gorbachev’s subordinates, one-time friends and former  allies have already told in their own memoirs? Lessons which ordinary Russians have acknowledged for years?  The lessons start with the Russian proverb President Ronald Reagan used to repeat at Gorbachev —   Доверяй, но проверяй, trust but verify. This cannot be Russian policy towards the US because it’s never been American policy towards Russia. The correct expression should be:  Никогда не доверяй, они мошенничают —  never trust, they always cheat.  (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, March 14th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

 The new rules-based order.

That’s an expression invented by western politicians for their schemes of Russia warmongering, and for their media, universities and think-tanks to promote the military budgets required.  

In this month’s case of Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian foreign minister  scheming to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in time to win the election eight months away, the expression means her  rules-based order, not anyone else’s rules-based order. Freeland means Ukrainian rules, not Russian rules; US rules, not Venezuelan rules; Canadian court rules, not Chinese court rules;  and most of all, she means Freeland to rule, not Trudeau to rule.

In Moscow, according to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, “we saw the attempts to usurp multilateral institutions, erode their interstate character and replace universal norms of international law by a sort of rules-based order. This term hides the desire to invent rules based on the political environment and in the interests of using them as a tool for exerting pressure against targeted states, and very often against their allies.” 

In Russia since January 1, there is a new rules-based order.

It’s for fishing in the domestic rivers and lakes. Millions of amateur and sports fishermen across the country are up in rods and nets, if not up in arms, over what the rules will do to them. They accuse the government in Moscow of privatizing the fish with rules to reserve the choicest fishing spots for affluent angling clubs, hotels, foreign tourist companies,   and other outsiders with money the locals lack. By limiting the amateurs to single-line rods and by prohibiting nets,  the new rules-based order makes sure the fish stay plentiful where the well-heeled fishermen want them, turning everyone else into poachers. In this new rules-based order, poachers are easier to net than fish. (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, March 12th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

O dear! O dear me! O dearie, dearie me!

William Burns is the man who might have been US Secretary of State if Hillary Clinton had been elected President in November 2016. Since then he has been composing an apologia pro vita sua — a book of religious convictions describing what went wrong through no fault of his own or of God’s, explaining what a victim Burns and the United States have been of bad luck; bad timing; President Donald Trump’s “narcissism”, “erratic leadership” and “active sabotage”; and Russian malevolence.

To the ex-Ambassador to Russia and ex-Deputy Secretary of State, the Russian evil is a motiveless, psychopathological crime. Russians, especially the few high-ranking ones Burns met as a State Department apparatchik, can’t help themselves. There is no cause and effect between action and reaction, between US offence and Russian defence. Nothing Christian Brothers alumni and missionary Americans like Burns have done explains (in Burns’s tract) why the Russians behave so badly, and why their souls must forever burn in hell unless they repent. Five hundred pages of holier-than-thou, confessor to the wicked Russians — that’s been the Burns mission. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 10th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

When India, one of Russia’s largest and longest-serving allies, was attacked by Pakistan in Kashmir since mid-February, the Kremlin sent condolences, expressed hope for a “prompt settlement”, and authorized Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to offer to mediate between the ally and its enemy.  “Russia is ready to offer a negotiating platform for India and Pakistan to settle relations”, Lavrov told the state news agency Tass. “If they want to,  of course.”  The display of Russian equanimity and neutrality between its Indian ally and Pakistan, long a US ally, has produced open anger in the Indian media; dismay among senior Indian politicians, civilian officials and military officers.

“Indians would not admit it,” comments an influential Indian in Moscow, “but there are signs that Putin is fence-sitting. Lavrov even proposed mediation. That would be like India proposing to mediate between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea. On the one hand, Lavrov says India and China will shape the new world order, but on the other,  he talks like a [US] State Department spokesman.”

For the India-Russia alliance, the question Indians ask is: if not now, then when? Russia’s other strategic allies – China, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela – ask the same thing.  (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 3rd, 2019
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