By John Helmer, Moscow

As war and economic recession eat into their incomes, Russians are making fewer trips to restaurants and cafes. But because the tab is smaller, fast-drinks vendors are taking a larger share of the retail market than fast food. That ought to be good for Shokoladnitsa, Russia’s leading chain of hot-drinks and quick-service cafes. But cost-cutting by the chain has shortened menus and closed cafes, industry sources are now reporting. If Shokoladnitsa’s liabilities are overtaking its assets, the sources warn that Shokoladnitsa may follow the Russian shoe market’s leading retailer, TsentrObuv. In that financial black hole, the question is whether revenues and loan funds for another Russian retail market leader are being diverted to shareholder havens offshore.
(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, July 19th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

At the end of this month the Irish High Court in Dublin will consider an application for the arrest of Cyprus President Nikos Anastasiades’s (lead image, left) law partner, Theofanis Philippou, and for an order to disclose company documents produced by them both on behalf of their client, the fugitive Russian businessman and former senator, Leonid Lebedev. An order for attachment and committal, as it is called in Ireland, directed against powerful figures in a neighbouring European Union (EU) country, is almost unprecedented, Dublin court sources say.

If the Dublin court agrees, Cyprus officials say they expect an Irish arrest order will be passed to the Irish police, and from them to the Cyprus Ministry of Justice. From there it will go to Cyprus Attorney-General Costas Clerides (2nd image, right). “We are interested to see,” officials say. “We will be waiting for this request.”
(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, July 13th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

In “Any Old Iron”, a popular British music-hall song of a century ago, the cockney comedian Harry Champion made audiences laugh at the vanity of people showing off wealth they don’t have, and at pretentiousness in general. In our century there’s said to be a homosexual come-on in the words of the song, but they still mean the same thing — you aren’t worth what you say you are. This is the punchline: “Any old iron, any old iron, any, any, any old iron? You look neat, talk about a treat… But I wouldn’t give you tuppence for your old watch chain. Old iron, old iron.”

When Mikhail Prokhorov (lead image, right) announced last week that he wants to sell his 17.02% of United Company Rusal, the Russian state aluminium monopoly, he was asking the audience to believe the company controlled by Oleg Deripaska (left) is worth much more than it is. The market didn’t laugh or sing along. It did move more than the usual number of Rusal shares traded daily – 2.5 million – but the price went down by 4%. This means the market isn’t betting on Prokhorov to get his price.

In the Bloomberg version of what had happened, Prokhorov’s Moscow holding “made informal approaches in the past three months to sell its 17 percent stake to two other Rusal partners, Sual, a group led by billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, and Glencore Plc, the people said, asking not be identified because the discussions are private. No official talks were held because the two sides have different views on the value of the stake. While Onexim wants a premium to the current value, the potential buyers aren’t ready to offer it, the people said.”
(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, July 12th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Radosław Sikorski (lead image, left), the ex-foreign minister of Poland, ousted Speaker of the Polish Sejm (parliament), and premature retiree from the Bydgoszcz constituency, doesn’t speak his mind so much as his interest. So why has he announced he is now in favour of leaving Crimea in Russia; a separate peace with the Kremlin for the Lugansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine, and a strategy for the government in Kiev to “concentrate on creating success for the 90 percent of the country’s territory which it controls”?

Sikorski has also publicly broken with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has been employing Sikorski as a foreign advisor, by declaring the Ukrainian president must make his own business dealings less illegal. “The fight against corruption must come from the top,” Sikorski has said of Poroshenko. “The people in the top layer must show that their finances are in order, they are open to scrutiny and lead by example.”
(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, July 6th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Paul Dibb, the former head of two Australian spy organizations and a deputy defence minister, has just published a call for Australian troops to be ready to fight in Europe against “Russia’s refusal to act in ways consistent with international law and standards of behaviour.” Dibb is known in Australia as “the country’s leading Cold War Russia expert.”

The Dibb report appeared on June 29, on the eve of last week’s Australian parliamentary election, when voters repudiated incumbent prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. He had called the snap poll, confident of expanding his majority in the two houses of parliament. He has now suffered a 3% negative swing by the voters; the loss of at least 23 seats; and months of political uncertainty ahead, including the possibility his party will replace him as leader.

Among Turnbull’s last-minute ploys to attract votes, one was the leak last month of Australian cabinet plans for an Australian Army force to fight in eastern Ukraine, alongside Dutch and other NATO units, to destroy the Donetsk and Lugansk rebellion against the regime in Kiev. Turnbull’s leak had suggested that Tony Abbott, the prime minister Turnbull had pushed aside to take the job, dreamed up the plan of Australian war at the Russian frontier by himself. The new report by Dibb now corroborates the idea of an Australian military expedition against Russia, in exchange for improved American commitments to defend Australia from the Chinese closer to home, in the Pacific. “How things work out in Europe,” Dibb claims, “ will affect Washington’s ability to reassure allies and partners everywhere, including those in our region who must contend with increasing coercion by China.” Unless Australia does more fighting with the Americans on the Russian front, he concludes, “China will take advantage of this, and allies and partners of the US in the region—including Australia—would be subject to further uncertainty about American military commitments to Asia.” Combating “Russia’s aggressive military behaviour “is necessary because, otherwise, “both Moscow and Beijing will be seen as getting away with it.”
(more…)

by Editor - Monday, July 4th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Melchior Wathelet (lead image, left), the Advocate-General of the European Court in Luxembourg, publicly recommended on May 31 that the court should dismiss a challenge to the legality of European Union sanctions by the Russian state oil company Rosneft. Wathelet has a history of secret operations against Moscow. That history ought to have disqualified Wathelet from participating in the Rosneft case, lawyers at the court say. “He should have done so voluntarily,” one of the lawyers adds. “Instead, Wathelet, along with the Belgian President of the Court, Koen Lenaerts, have kept the past secret, allowing a serious conflict of interest to influence the outcome of the case.”

As the minister of justice in his native Belgium, Wathelet supervised the Belgian state security service, and officially participated himself over several years in NATO spying, military operations and propaganda schemes against Russia and the Soviet Union. Details of Wathelet’s involvement in NATO’s Operation Gladio were not known to Rosneft when Wathelet was assigned to the case. Rosneft’s Anglo-American law firm did not investigate Wathelet’s bacckgournd. Also, the law firm, Hage Joseph Aaronson, has kept from Rosneft the knowledge that one of their own lawyers was a long-serving officer in the US Defence Intelligence Agency.

Lawyers engaged in European Court cases in Luxembourg say they are astonished by the conflict of interest. “This case is hugely important,” said one source engaged in a parallel sanctions proceeding. “If Rosneft were to win, the legality of sanctions would collapse”. A London lawyer adds he is surprised that Rosneft management and its lawyers in Luxembourg failed to challenge Wathelet’s participation in the case.

Wathelet is not denying the information about his past involvement in NATO operations. He won’t explain why he and the presiding judge, Court President Koen Lenaerts, acted together to arrange his assessment of the Rosneft legal papers.
(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, June 29th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

A week ago, Russia’s leading retailer of shoes, TsentrObuv (“Shoe Center”), was taken to the Moscow Arbitrazh Court by 99 plaintiffs, the largest group of creditors ever recorded against an insolvent business of TsentrObuv’s size and national name recognition. This is only the most recent claim to be filed against TsentrObuv and its associated companies. More than a thousand cases are pending in the arbitrazh court system nationwide.

The debts are owed to Chinese and Russian suppliers of the shoes which the TsentrObuv chain of shops has been selling. Some of the debts are owed to owners and agents for the lease of hundreds of shops; to construction companies for their fitting out; to freight delivery companies; to advertisers and employees; and to banks and trade finance houses. The debts have yet to be toted up by the court –appointed trustees; they are estimated in the trade at more than Rb29 billion – that’s $446 million.

Offshore in Cyprus, British Virgin Islands (BVI), Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Delaware (US), where a chain of entities has been passing the Russian cashflow of TsentrObuv through to company names and trusts controlled by the shoe group’s shareholders, the debts personally guaranteed to banks have been reported by the company at $143 million in US dollars and Euros, plus almost $270 million equivalent in roubles. That was in 2012. How much of these offshore debts is still owed is not known. Just one of the companies, Kalisto Business Corporation of BVI, was reported as owing $33.5 million about one year ago. Since then the shops have been closing down, the revenues plummeting, the number of creditors multiplying.

Sources at TsentrObuv’s headquarters in Moscow admit the group is in liquidation. But this is not a normal bankruptcy. Criminal investigations now under way in Moscow, Tomsk, Ryazan, and other cities and regions indicate that shareholders and managers of TsentrObuv have been looting the cash takings of the shops, along with loans from banks, and hiding the money offshore. Theirs has been no soft-shoe routine. Altogether, the TsentrObuv stealing scheme appears to have made off with at least half a billion dollars.

When President Vladimir Putin promised last week in St. Petersburg that the Kremlin is committed to “drastically reduce illegal criminal prosecutions”, he might have asked the Russians in the audience to look down at their shoes. If they came from TsentrObuv, the question to be asked of the Kremlin’s new “working group on law enforcement in entrepreneurial activity” is not how much prosecutors have done to protect the shoe market, but why they have done so little for so long. The affair of TsentrObuv puts the Kremlin shoe on the other foot.
(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, June 28th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Secret negotiations have been under way for some time between high German and Russian officials, to which Chancellor Angela Merkel has been excluded. Warned by US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and in a recent coded communication from outgoing President Barack Obama that she must act to save her authority, and enforce European Union sanctions against Russia, Merkel has also received an ultimatum from her cabinet and party. This was delivered in the form of a page torn out of an Old German bible in which a large black spot had been inked. Either she step aside in secret, Merkel understood the signal, or she will be forced to resign in public.
(more…)

by Editor - Friday, June 24th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

On November 15, 2015, I told you so.

“Since the US started the regime dominoes falling in Kiev in February 2014, the Polish regime has already toppled, and the French one is doomed – President Francois Hollande will be defeated by every one of the candidates now running to succeed him, including Marine Le Pen of the National Front. The British Prime Minister David Cameron can postpone his day of reckoning, but on the margins of Europe, not inside. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel has less time, fewer supporters. When Merkel topples, she will take the European Union (EU) into the shambles with her.”
(more…)

by Editor - Friday, June 24th, 2016
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

In countries where sugar is grown as a consumer staple or for export, the stuff is proverbially blamed for the temptation to exaggerate and to steal. In Madagascar, they say “truth is like sugar cane. Even if you chew it for a long time, it is still sweet.” But in Malawi, they say: “ants die in sugar”. If this means you can chew too much on a good thing, that isn’t so in India. According to the Indian maxim, “stolen sugar is the sweetest.”

In the villages of western Russia – one of the world’s largest producers of beets — the proverbial wisdom doesn’t even recognize the sugar content of the crop. In fact, the villagers warn: “Shut up, you beets! Remember shchi is cooked with cabbage.”

On April 29, Ros Agro (ticker AGRO:LI), one of Russia’s largest sugar producers and one of the London market’s sweetest Russian stocks, suddenly went sour. Almost 5 million shares, a record number for a day’s trading in Ros Agro, were sold, causing a price collapse. Was Vadim Moshkovich, the control shareholder, selling? Moshkovich is not explaining. So which is it – a case of the stolen sugar of the Indian proverb, or a case of the familiar Russian soup?
(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, June 23rd, 2016
No Comments »