By John Helmer, Moscow

Leonid Lebedev (lead image), the former Russian senator and energy trader, has lost fraud and deceit claims against Len Blavatnik and Victor Vekselberg in a New York Supreme Court ruling. After considering the case for eight months, state judge Salliann Scarpulla has also rejected Blavatnik’s and Vekselberg’s application to dismiss Lebedev’s entire lawsuit. This leaves one question to be decided next year — Lebedev’s claim of breach of a contract from 2001, which remained unsigned at the time; and which depends, according to Lebedev, on a conversation during a walk in New York’s Central Park.

The US judge has also ruled to allow Blavatnik and Vekselberg to continue their litigation in a London arbitration court, and the opportunity to file elsewhere. In London Blavatnik and Vekselberg say they paid Lebedev the $600 million he asked for and received through Irish and Cypriot front companies he is claiming didn’t pass on the money to him for more than a decade.
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by Editor - Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Eponymously, much of The Netherlands is close to or below sea level. So it’s susceptible to inundation by sea storms and heavy rains. So long as the man-made dykes hold the water back, the country can be saved.

According to a well-known Dutch history lesson from the 19th century, it took a little boy’s alertness to the dyke leak he spotted on his way to school, to sound the alarm; prevent the dyke from being breached; and save fortunes and lives. Russians, whose familiarity with Dutch dykes and little boys began with Tsar Peter the Great in 1697, regard this story as a harmless national fantasy. Actually, the story of the Little Dutch Boy, his finger and the dyke was invented by an American novelist in 1865. But the Dutch are so fond of the fiction, they have erected statues of the Boy and his Finger around their country. These provide opportunities for American tourists to leave coins beside them.
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by Editor - Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

On November 13, Gennady Timchenko (lead image), once the oligarch controlling the greater part of Russian oil movement from well-head to market, established a new line of business. He called it Carignan, after the Mediterranean grape variety, and he put his public relations agent in charge of the company as chief executive. The company is so new the President of the Russian Union of Winegrowers and Winemakers, Leonid Popovich, hadn’t heard of it.

Rival Russian winegrowers, who have heard of Timchenko, say he’s making his move to qualify for the large cash payouts from the Ministry of Agriculture to encourage new vine plantings, boost domestic wine production, replace imports, and revive Crimean winegrowing after a very bad year in 2014. This state cash represents 80% of outlays on new vineyards. Anton Kurevin, Timchenko’s spokesman, and chief executive of Carignan, responds: “an application for participation in this programme has not been lodged.”
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by Editor - Thursday, December 17th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Victorian state coroner Iain West (lead image) has concluded a 60-minute inquest into the deaths of Australians on board Malaysian Airlines MH17 by issuing a statement of findings contradicting the coroner’s own statements, as well as the evidence of reports from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and courtroom testimony from the senior Australian police officer investigating the MH17 crash.
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by Editor - Wednesday, December 16th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Australian Federal Police and Dutch police and prosecutors investigating the cause of the crash of Malaysian Airlines MH17 believe the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) has failed to provide “conclusive evidence” of what type of munition destroyed the aircraft, causing the deaths of 283 passengers and 15 crew on board.

After testifying for the first time in an international court, Detective Superintendent Andrew Donoghoe, the senior Australian policeman in the international MH17 investigation, said a “tougher standard than the DSB report” is required before the criminal investigation can identify the weapon which brought the aircraft down, or pinpoint the perpetrators. Their criminal investigation will continue into 2016, Donoghoe told the Victorian Coroners Court (lead image) on Tuesday morning. He and other international investigators are unconvinced by reports from the US and Ukrainian governments, and by the DSB, of a Buk missile firing. “Dutch prosecutors require conclusive evidence on other types of missile,” Donoghoe said, intimating that “initial information that the aircraft was shot down by a [Buk] surface to air missile” did not meet the Australian or international standard of evidence.
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by Editor - Tuesday, December 15th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

On what the Paris Agreement for climate change (COP21) should have decided last Saturday, no Russian business figure has been as outspoken as Oleg Deripaska (lead image), chief executive and control shareholder of the Russian aluminium monopoly, Rusal.

“Balderdash”, Deripaska said of the agreement terms during a whistlestop interview with a British newspaper in Paris. “We all know that countries submit [emission cuts] as a way to do nothing, to wait for the next election. They do not want to be criticised, they do not want to deal with the substantial issues.” Concretely, he added: “there is no other solution. For us engineers and managers who run companies, for the financial community,  the only way [to reduce emissions] is to put in a global carbon tax. Seriously, it is carbon tax or die.”
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by Editor - Sunday, December 13th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It isn’t exactly certain what the Turkish military saw on a foredeck deck of the Russian Navy’s landing ship, Caesar Kunikov, as it passed through the Bosphorus Strait last Sunday. What is certain is that the Turkish Foreign Ministry declared the Russians had launched “a pure provocation” at Turkey, and that the Turks would react with matching force. “The necessary answer will be given in situations deemed to be a threat,” announced Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who has been foreign minister for 12 days.

Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper, identified the source of its photograph as the Twitter account of “photographer Emre Dağdeviren”. The photograph has disappeared from that source, if it ever was there.

The London media also went on the attack. The Guardian published a photograph, but the caption, “Photograph: None”, failed to identify the source or the authenticity. The Financial Times reported its Istanbul correspondent as saying it was “a particularly chilling incident.” With more caution, Reuters claimed that the Turkish television channel NTV “broadcast photographs that it said showed a serviceman brandishing a rocket launcher on the deck”. Reuters wasn’t sure what had happened, or whether the photographs had been fabricated; but the Reuters headline declared “Turkey [was] angered by by rocket-brandishing on Russian naval ship passing Istanbul.”
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by Editor - Thursday, December 10th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

If the London art market is a test of reality, then last week’s Russian Week sales demonstrate that Russian buyers are poorer, and there is now less Russian money for buying Russian paintings, jewellery, porcelain and other art objects than at any time since Russian Week started in London in 2005.

Some dealers say there is another test of reality, and that’s the quality of the art, not the supply of cash bidding for it. According to James Butterwick, “Russian art has always been over-valued. People are now putting reasonable estimates on their items with the result that more will sell.”

Last week’s sale results from the four auction houses – Sotheby’s, Christie’s, MacDougall’s and Bonham’s – totalled £17.2 million. Simon Hewitt, international editor of Russian Art + Culture, reports this is “less than half the £40.7m generated by the corresponding Russian Week in late 2014, and down 18% on the £21.2m taken at Russian Week in June 2015 (even though all four firms staged slightly larger sales this time out, with the total number of lots on offer up 20% from 888 to 1069).” Hewitt explains the reason is “a host of calamitous factors — the weak ruble, increasingly isolated Russian economy, terrorism, Syria.”
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by Editor - Sunday, December 6th, 2015
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By Gary K. Busch, London

The most frustrating aspects of the media coverage of the current efforts to suppress the forces of Daesh (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria is that there is a dearth of ‘joined-up’ thinking behind most of the analyses. There is a lot of eyewitness reporting of daily events in the countries, cities bombed, planes downed, tactical struggles for control of cities and provinces, secret alliances and nefarious activities , as well as a litany of opportunism by politicians pressing self-serving analyses of the events. The most important problem, however, is that each aspect of the evaluation of the impact of the Syrian crisis is treated as a discrete problem, unrelated in any meaningful sense to the bigger picture.

There is probably no better example than the world’s reaction to events in Turkey and the search for a solution to the current crisis over Syria and its attendant problems. Turkey is the key to the Syrian crisis and its unique geographic, political, ethnic and military situations are the most important antecedent problems facing the world when trying to adopt a useful and credible policy for dealing with Syria.

Turkey has played, and continues to play, a duplicitous role in relation to Syria, and so it has found itself in conflict with enemies both international and domestic. It is bitterly opposed to the Assad regime but hates and attacks the Kurds even more, despite the fact that the Kurds have been doing much of the heavy lifting in the battles against Daesh. Turkey has supported Daesh in Syria; funded and supplied Al-Nusrah; attacked and bombed the Kurds to the south and east of the frontier; made a market in Syrian oil; refused (until recently) for the U.S. to use the Incirlik Air base; attacked and downed a Russian plane passing through Turkish air space for 17 seconds. Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı,MIT) has been the main supplier of explosives, ammunition, medicine, and free passage to Daesh fighters inside and alongside Turkey.
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by Editor - Thursday, December 3rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The International Monetary Fund has decided to delay fresh loan payments of $3.4 billion to Ukraine. In the meantime the World Bank has given the Deposit Guarantee Fund in Kiev $500 million to keep the leading Ukrainian banks solvent. The two international agencies have also agreed to the seizure of $174 million in funds held in a Kiev bank by the London-listed iron-ore miner, Ferrexpo. The state raid on Ferrexpo’s corporate account in Finance & Credit Bank, one of the top-10 Ukrainian banks in asset value, is the first cash confiscation from a Ukrainian oligarch for the benefit of the Ukrainian reform programme.

According to sources close to Konstantin Zhevago, control shareholder and chief executive of Ferrexpo, and owner of Finance & Credit Bank, the money is being used to prop up the banks of rival oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, owners of Privat Bank; Vasily Khmelnitsky’s Khreschatyk Bank ; and Bank Dnepr Credit belonging to Victor Pinchuk.
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by Editor - Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015
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