On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”

by Editor - Sunday, August 23rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has taken sides in the homicide trial of Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian military volunteer who is standing trial in Russia for the murder last year of two Russian journalists reporting on the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Jerome Vacher, the resident representative of the IMF in Kiev, appeared at the Ukraine art pavilion at the Venice Biennale, at the official opening sponsored by the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. The event took place on Thursday, May 7, and Vacher was there at the invitation of the Pinchuk Art Centre. The day was a regular working day in the Ukraine office of the IMF, and at IMF headquarters in Washington, DC. Pinchuk’s insolvent Ukrainian bank and steel company are beneficiaries of the current multi-billion dollar IMF loan to Ukraine, the disbursement of which Vacher is responsible for supervising.
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by Editor - Wednesday, August 5th, 2015
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It’s traditional at this time of year to rest, chew things over, do a little flossing of the teeth, and return sharper than ever.

by Editor - Monday, August 3rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Leonid Lebedev (lead image) has been charged with stripping millions of dollars from TGK-2, the regional electricity utility he controls. Details of the lawsuit have been revealed this week in the files of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in Tortola, British Virgin Islands (BVI).

The 4-page court filing of June 24, 2015, names Lebedev personally, according to the court’s registry clerk, plus seven of his companies in the scheme. The core allegation against Lebedev is that he arranged to strip cash out of TGK-2 through transactions with Russian subsidiaries of his Sintez holding and offshore companies which Lebedev registered as TGK-2 shareholders. These sold shares among themselves, passing cash out of TGK-2 on terms which ran up TGK-2’s liabilities and diminished the value of its assets, and hence the equity value left to minority shareholders and investors. When they woke up, they described the “knowingly unprofitable transactions” on the internet in this way. Unless the culprits are sent to jail, another investor said, the probability of recovering the money which has been moved offshore “tends to zero.”
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by Editor - Monday, August 3rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The board of directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was unsure until the last minute on Friday that the Ukrainian government in Kiev would get their delayed loan instalment of $1.7 billion. The board and management were much swifter in erasing personal communications which the IMF representative in Kiev, Jerome Vacher, has been conducting on Facebook with Ukrainian officials; with his personal stylist and hairdresser; and with public relations agents and media publicists for the Ukrainian government.

A Facebook publication by Vacher, in which he identified as his friends the Minister of Finance, Natalie Jaresko; a deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), Vladyslav Rashkovan; and the former governor of the NBU, Stepan Kubiv, was erased last week, hours after a Polish investigative reporter Stanislas Balcerac, queried the propriety of the publication with Vacher’s superiors in Washington.
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by Editor - Monday, August 3rd, 2015
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Comment by GB, London

We used to fly the Zimbabwe roses (and some Zambian) to the Dutch auctions; about 100 tonnes a week on Boeing 747s. Ours were cut, trimmed and boxed, and we delivered them to Amsterdam very early in the morning so that they could make the auction at the flower market in Aalsmeer that morning.

The Dutch control the flower producers in Africa as well. We spoke with some friends in Russia who wanted to import the roses directly into Russia, avoiding the Dutch middlemen. They were incensed that the price the Zimbabwean growers earned from the roses was less than a quarter of the delivered price to Russia – an important flower consumer; especially on Women’s Day.
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by Editor - Friday, July 31st, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Dutch auction, as it’s called in the wholesale flower trade of Europe, is a clever scheme which simulates competitive bidding while it hides premiums in the prices Dutch growers and traders rig for their flowers. To cut the cost of flowers you have to deadhead the Dutch. And that’s exactly what Russia is threatening to do this week.

The Dutch are crying foul. That’s what monopolists usually do when the game is up. In Dutch history going back to the time when the Amsterdam merchants held a monopoly on the world supply of nutmeg – a prophylactic against bubonic plague , it was believed at the time — they organized slavery, torture, and other atrocities to protect their nutmeg trading scheme. Before you jump to condemn the Russian phytosanitary authority for issuing a warning against Dutch flower exports, remember the Amboyna Massacre of March 9, 1623.*
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by Editor - Wednesday, July 29th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It’s midsummer. Time for the oligarchs, even the insolvent ones, to go aboard their yachts, and set sail for the resorts of the Mediterranean. Oleg Deripaska’s Queen K is this week cruising in the eastern Aegean between the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. Andrei Melnichenko’s A is in the Gulf of St. Tropez, while Victor Pinchuk’s Oneness has made its way from Monaco to Sardinia. Suleiman Kerimov’s financial indisposition cost him his Ice, which is in Gibraltar flying someone else’s flag; his relief boat Air is currently at anchor at Cala di Volpe, on the east coast of Sardinia.

Last week Leonid Lebedev’s Synergy was sailing off the Tuscan coast. But Lebedev (lead image, left) himself is washed up – onshore, that is.
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by Editor - Monday, July 27th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

With three tweets Radoslaw Sikorski (lead image, right), the leading Russia-hater of Poland, and his wife, Anne Applebaum (left), a member of a Russia-hating think-tank in London called Legatum, acknowledged on Monday that they have been ousted from the very frontiers they claim to be threatened with Russian invasion; dismissed by the very people they claim to have been representing; and discredited by the very souls they have been saving from devils they have been conjuring up for years. If you are in the propaganda and disinformation business, this is a bitter dose of something Poles no longer trust Sikorski or Applebaum to speak – the truth.
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by Editor - Tuesday, July 21st, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russia’s misfortunes aren’t exactly sweet for the country’s leading sugar producers, but they can’t complain. On the back of sharply rising sugar prices in January, first-quarter earnings and profits have jumped at the listed sugar producers, and the trend is expected to continue through the second quarter. Prodimex, the leading sugar producer in Russia, isn’t saying so because it’s a private corporation controlled by Igor Khudokormov (lead image, left). He isn’t complaining. In fact, while his sugar business and holdings of farmland grow larger and richer, Russia’s sugar daddy is almost invisible.
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by Editor - Monday, July 20th, 2015
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