By John Helmer, Moscow

The soybean is an edible legume native to East Asia. For Russians
that means it’s a native of Siberia. Eighteen months ago, President Vladimir Putin declared Russian soybeans to be the best in the world.

The president was on a tour of the Russian Far East, the region of the country where most Russian soybeans are grown. He promised to increase federal budget support to accelerate the rate of growth of the soybean harvest until Russia can become self-sufficient in soybeans, and do without imports from the world’s two largest sources, the US and Brazil. The Russian harvest has been breaking records, but for the time being, it is far short of the domestic requirement. Can the annual import volume of two million tonnes – roughly one-half of consumer demand, and equal to the domestic harvest – be grown at home, and how quickly?
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by Editor - Tuesday, December 1st, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Never before has the personal animosity of the heads of state of the United States and Turkey towards the President of Russia been so sharp and expressed so obviously. The consequences, too.
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by Editor - Friday, November 27th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Andrei Melnichenko’s Eurochem group, one of Russia’s largest producers of fertilizers, has responded to a New York lawsuit this month from Alexander Mashkevich’s International Mineral Resources (IMR). Mashkevich is accusing Melnichenko of paying American agents to hack into his company computers, steal sensitive information, and promote litigation and propaganda damaging to Mashkevich and his companies’ reputations. Melnichenko says he has been vindicated.

In a press release issued in Moscow yesterday, Eurochem announced it has won “favourable decisions” from a US federal district court in Washington, DC, whose rulings followed a week after the IMR filed its accusations in the New York Supreme Court. Eurochem, its release says, “has obtained favorable judicial decisions in its legal dispute with a contractor retained for the construction of the cage shaft at the Group’s potash mining project in Russia’s Gremyachinskoe deposit. On November 17-18, 2015, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a series of decisions rejecting all allegations that the consulting expert hired by EuroChem-VolgaKaliy had engaged in unlawful information-gathering activity.” The contractor referred to in the judgement is Shaft Sinkers, an associated company of IMR under Mashkevich’s control.

The opening of the Washington court files, which had remained sealed or unreported for more than a year, also exposes a world of Washington lobbying and propaganda targeted at the Kazakhstan Government and President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
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by Editor - Thursday, November 26th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A generation ago, a Greek prime minister, whom the Soviet Politburo in Moscow underestimated, defeated a Turkish attack on Greek territory. That was Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou; the victory was the battle of the Aegean of March 26, 1987. Before that, no Russian had defeated a Turkish attack for more than a hundred years. Since 1991 Russians say Turkey has been “not merely a close neighbour, but a friendly state.”
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by Editor - Tuesday, November 24th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Proof that oligarchs have more money than sense isn’t hard to come by. For a man with no business reputation left to lose in London to ask a jury in New York to judge his business rival to be a scoundrel is a proof that Alexander Mashkevich (lead image, with glasses), control shareholder of International Mineral Resources, is determined to test against Andrei Melnichenko (lead image, without glasses), owner of the Eurochem fertilizer group.

International Mineral Resources (IMR), a Dutch company owned by Mashkevich and his two partners, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov, has been an offshoot of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC). When ENRC was at the peak of its London Stock Exchange value, Mashkevich was worth over $3 billion. He’s down to less than $2 billion now, according to Forbes which doesn’t count liabilities. Melnichenko, whose debts are also not counted by Forbes, is reported to be worth over $8 billion. By the arithmetical rule, having four times more money than Mashkevich, Melnichenko should have one-quarter the common sense. Or is it the other way round?
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by Editor - Tuesday, November 24th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Otkritie Bank has received Rb157 billion from the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) and the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) to rescue Trust Bank from bankruptcy. It is the second largest bailout in Russian bank history for what may be the longest lasting and most expensive bank fraud by its shareholders. But thus far the CBR, DIA and Otkritie have pursued in Moscow only a fraction of the money that has been lost, while the money trail leads to Cyprus, and to offshore entities operated from Cyprus. “Inexplicably”, observes an international bank regulator specializing in money laundering by Russian banks, “they won’t do the obvious — pursue the perpetrators of the Trust Bank fraud offshore where all the money went.”
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by Editor - Monday, November 23rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A federal US judge and jury have dismissed a billion-dollar claim by Oleg Deripaska’s companies against investment bank Morgan Stanley after three years of litigation and two weeks of trial in a Manhattan courtroom. The jury verdict was announced on November 13.

The case is the first in which Deripaska, chief executive and control shareholder of Rusal, Russian Machines and Basic Element, and Gulzhan Moldazhanova, his closest aide for more than a decade, have testified under cross-examination in a US court. Commencing with an initial filing against several international banks on August 3, 2012, the case has continued for three years and three months. Before the trial opened on November 2, the presiding judge McMahon had dismissed six other banks listed as defendants in Deripaska’s claim, and rejected all but one of the charges against Morgan Stanley.
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by Editor - Thursday, November 19th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The university that taught generations of American leaders that their manifest destiny is to make war on uncivilized people around the world is having a bad time of it, now that the US has lost the last four straight; and the losers are streaming in for their take of the manifest. Streaming into Europe, that is, but not into Harvard University, nor the state of Massachusetts, nor the United States.

It was comical when Timothy Colton, Harvard’s professor of Russian studies, turned out, a year ago, to be paid by a branch of the Pentagon to spy on the body movements of President Vladimir Putin. It was laughable last week when the Harvard Centre of European Studies, financed by the Seagram businesses, engaged Radoslaw Sikorski, the ousted Polish foreign minister, to teach. “The pursuit of ‘Veritas,’ as in Harvard’s motto, is always exciting,” the university quoted Sikorski as saying.

But now comes Professor Niall Ferguson, on Rupert Murdoch’s tab, to declaim that the reason for the terrorism which has stormed the boulevards and entertainments of Paris is that the French, and the European Union (EU), deserve it because they have let their guard down, inviting the barbarians in by “complacency”, “secularism”, and “decadence”. Like the Romans deserved the Visigoths and the Vandals, according to this Harvard version of the history of civilization, the Europeans deserve “the uncannily similar processes destroying the European Union today.”
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by Editor - Wednesday, November 18th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The three Russians with the largest fortunes in California are Mikhail Lesin, Leonid Lebedev, and Mikhail Abyzov. Lesin, a former government minister and Kremlin advisor on mass media, was found dead in a Washington, DC, hotel room on November 6; his death is being investigated by the homicide squad of the local police. Lebedev, a former senator, was forced to resign his Federation Council seat in April of this year; he announced the sale of his last Russian oilfield asset this month, and he is now on the run from Russian fraud charges. Abyzov is alive and well; he is the Minister of Open Government in the current Russian cabinet.
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by Editor - Tuesday, November 17th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

For Russians to eat as much cheese as they want, there aren’t enough cows in Russia, and too many palm trees in Malaysia. The impact of year-old sanctions in cutting off the flow of imported cheese from Russia’s suppliers in Europe is to stimulate the production of domestic cheese. But at the same time Russian cheesemakers face a lack of raw milk supplies. To feed the market, palm oil is being used instead for products the Russian dairy industry is calling fake. If the Russian milk supply is to match rising demand, then Russian farmers and traders say the government must subsidize the cost of domestic milk production and deter palm-oil substitution.

“Adulteration by palm oil and bad politics behind sanctions have produced an impossible position for the dairy producers,” says an independent dairy farmer near Moscow. “Today we cannot produce enough affordable cheese for the masses! In provincial supermarkets and shops pseudo-cheese is being sold at Rb500 to Rb600 a kilo. This is impossible when the average supermarket insists on its mark-up of 100%. For one kilo of genuine cheese you need 10 to 11 litres of milk. That means a minimum cost for one kilo of cheese of Rb300 – and that’s just the cost of the milk.”
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by Editor - Friday, November 13th, 2015
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