By John Helmer, Moscow

Rusal announced on March 9 that its earnings for 2015 were up, and its profit too. But Rusal’s share price, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, shot downwards by one of the largest one-day falls in months.

Hong Kong Exchange sources say the Rusal share is so illiquid, there is no real market demand, and so there is no response to good news – or to bad. Rusal insiders say the reason for this month’s share price collapse is that Moscow took a two-day holiday on March 7 and 8, and the company’s share operators were still asleep when the price in Hong Kong began to fall. They didn’t wake up in time to stop the decline, as they usually do in the Hong Kong afternoon, Moscow morning. If that sounds like stock price manipulation in violation of the exchange rules, the insider says it is.
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by Editor - Tuesday, March 15th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Washington, DC, is not a death penalty state. So the local authorities don’t know how to put someone to death judicially. They also don’t have the knack of knowing when a death has been caused by a crime. That is what the Metropolitan Police Department and the Office of the Medical Examiner were saying when they released last week a 5-line report on the death of Mikhail Lesin (lead image, left), the former Kremlin media official, who died at a Washington hotel four months earlier, on November 5.

The long investigation and the short announcement have been coordinated with the State Department’s official in charge of Russia, Victoria Nuland (right). Her spokesman revealed on Friday that she wants the world to think a crime was committed even if it was not. “I’m not going to speak to an ongoing criminal investigation”, the spokesman announced, before adjusting the remark . “Okay, okay. I used the word ‘criminal investigation’ inappropriately. It is an investigation by the Metropolitan Police Department. Let me correct my transcript right now. That investigation is ongoing and I’m not going to get ahead of it.” Getting ahead of it is exactly what the State Department is doing.

According to a US lawyer active in Russian and American litigation, “if Lesin was murdered, the State Department, if not CIA and NSA, must have been aware of this shortly thereafter. It is inconceivable that the DC police department would be so incompetent not to be aware he was murdered or to have notified the federal government.”

So the death of Lesin has become a case of rounding up the usual suspects to be accused in the press of a murder there is no evidence actually happened. It is now US Government policy not to tell the difference between a fact and a fiction, or in the case of Nuland, a factotum.
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by Editor - Sunday, March 13th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It was a marching song in 1915: “What’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile, so Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, And smile, smile, smile.” Three more years of war in Europe obliterated the smiles, and also the song.

Under pressure from the US campaigns on the Ukraine and Syrian fronts, in the propaganda media, and on the international capital markets, the Russian home front is marching with dwindling income and growing fear. There is no smiling. But the political impact is stable support for President Vladimir Putin; growing support for ministers regarded as fighting effectively against the foreign enemy; and weakening support for ministers seen to be pro-American, like Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. If you invest in the Russian grocery basket, this tune will grow on you.
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by Editor - Thursday, March 10th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

For Women’s Day, Mark Kurtser has a secret present for Russian women. His gynecology, obstetrics and maternal care company, Mother & Child (aka MD Medical Group, MDMG), is offering medical services at a rising price in cities across the country where the local governments have been persuaded to close down the publicly funded alternative. If you want a baby in Russia, Kurtser is saying, the state can’t be trusted to deliver.

What is secret about this is that the international stock market thinks Kurtser’s pitch is such an unlikely sell, it has slashed MDMG’s London share price to one-third in three years. Sales revenues and profits appear to be going up for Kurtser, but market confidence is going down. What is also secret is that Kurtser’s company and its London share broker, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, refuse to answer questions about their financials, and can’t explain why their present for Russian women is being turned down by the men in the market.
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by Editor - Thursday, March 3rd, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A fact which nobody can verify is usually a fiction, sometimes a lie. In the business of reporting news for sale, the demand for lies is less than the supply, so profit is bound to turn into loss. The only successful business models for reporting and repeating lies are government propaganda and commercial pornography.

Last July, when the Japanese Nikkei group paid £884 million for the Financial Times – saving Pearson Plc from reporting a loss for the financial year – Nikkei’s chief executive Tsuneo Kita said: “Our motto of providing high-quality reporting on economic and other news, while maintaining fairness and impartiality, is very close to that of the FT. We share the same journalistic values. Together, we will strive to contribute to the development of the global economy.” If Kita was asked how much money he would spend on Sam Jones to sell lies about Russia three times a week, he would do more than ask: “Sam Who?”

There are 558,000 people named Jones in the UK; 1.6 million in the US. Altogether, 2.2 million. Among the Sam Joneses, of whom there are more than a thousand, the majority would never think of repeating, unverified, every word passed in a classified file from US intelligence, British MI6 and NATO. There is just one Sam Jones in the world who does that. At the Financial Times office in London, he is called “defence and security editor”.

In Boolean searches on the internet, the AND operator returns a value of TRUE if both its operands are TRUE, and FALSE otherwise. If you are paying Nikkei for the Jones defence and security stories each week, you are getting double the falsehood for your money.
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by Editor - Sunday, February 28th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The law partner of the President of Cyprus is under investigation in Cyprus and in New York for allegedly concealing assets, cashflows, and money-laundering, and for lying to a Cyprus court and to the Cyprus Ministry of Interior, for the benefit of a former Russian politician now on the run.
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by Editor - Wednesday, February 24th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Dutch government prosecutors investigating the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 have reported that secret US satellite intelligence they have been shown cannot be used in evidence in a prosecution in an international or Dutch court, and that no evidence is currently available to charge anyone for the crime of firing on the aircraft, killing the 298 passengers and crew on board. The report, in the form of a 5-page letter addressed to families of the victims was signed by Fred Westerbeke, the Dutch official in charge of the investigation, and mailed last week.

Yesterday the Australian government, whose federal police are participating with the Dutch in the criminal investigation, dissociated itself from the contents and conclusions of the Dutch government letter, despite the claim on the signature line by Westerbeke that he was reporting “on behalf of the Joint Investigation Team [comprising] Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, Ukraine and Netherlands”.

The Dutch letter has not been sent to Denise Kenke, daughter of Willem Grootscholten, one of the Dutch passengers killed on MH17. To date, she is the only MH17 family member to launch a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights or in any other court in Europe. She is charging the Ukraine Government with culpable negligence. The court has placed a secrecy order on the Kenke case; reassigned the judges on the case; and refused to hear evidence on the charges against Ukraine.
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by Editor - Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016
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by Editor - Saturday, February 20th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

As the Kremlin’s apparatchik for the state aluminium monopoly, Oleg Deripaska (lead image), chief executive of United Company Rusal, has a personal price problem which threatens to turn into an income problem for Russians. If it does that, and loss of income turns into negative opinion polls and protest votes, Deripaska has a political problem with President Vladimir Putin.
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by Editor - Thursday, February 18th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

An American lawyer and an Australian law firm will go into court in Sydney this week to explain to a judge why Malaysian Airlines should be ordered to pay A$220,000 (US$159,000) to the son of an Australian passenger killed when Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was destroyed in Ukraine on July 17, 2014, plus fees for the lawyers for bringing the case to court, plus billion-dollar damages to follow, if the court agrees.

For the moment this is the only case of an MH17 victim proceeding in any court in the world. The claim filed for a Dutch victim charging the Ukraine Government with culpable negligence, has been before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) since November 2014. But it has been buried in secrecy, as the court refuses to say whether it will accept the proceeding or try the case at all.

In Sydney the lawyers have so far presented no evidence of what caused the crash or the deaths of the 298 passengers and crew. Publicly, in Australian newspapers and in one of the lawyer’s blogs, they have accused the airline of intentionally delaying the passenger payout. They have attacked the Berlin lawyer in the Dutch victim’s case for making the Ukraine Government the defendant in the ECHR case. In the press they have also accused the Russian government, and President Vladimir Putin in particular, of causing the crash.

In advertising their services to the Australian victims, the lawyers have hinted at their hope for a payday comparable to the Libyan Government’s settlement of $2.7 billion for the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, of Pan American Flight 103. The US lawyers in that case, representing almost 200 of the 270 victims, negotiated an out-of-court settlement of $10 million per casualty, earning for themselves at least $1 million per client, or about $200 million.
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by Editor - Sunday, February 14th, 2016
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