By John Helmer, Moscow

The Canadian Government announced last week it is giving away another
C$200 million to Ukraine, topping the $200 million handed to Kiev last September.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Rob Nicholson concedes the money is not being audited as the announced loan agreements require. Nicholson, according to Johanna Quinney in Ottawa, doesn’t know whether the first $200 million has been spent through the Ukrainian budget on military operations in the civil war in the east, or against Russia. In signing for the money to fund the war, Nicholson, who is running for election in six months’ time in the Niagara Falls constituency near the US frontier, may be violating Canadian law, Ottawa sources say.
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by Editor - Wednesday, April 8th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Cyprus Government’s unit for combating money-laundering will consider an investigation of Igor Kolomoisky if it is requested by the Ukrainian or US Governments, Eva Papakyriacou revealed on Tuesday. Papakyriacou is the head of the unit, whose acronym, following the Greek, is MOKAS.

She declined to say if there has been a request for investigation, either by a foreign government, or by the Cyprus government agencies responsible for Kolomoisky’s Cyprus passport, or the source of funds of his Privatbank group in Cyprus. “All the information possessed by MOKAS is confidential,” Papakyriakou said. “However, it is noted that the source of funds is checked by the Banks and the Supervisory Authority for Banks is the Central Bank.”
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by Editor - Tuesday, April 7th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

On July 17, 2014, at 1320 Universal Time Coordinated (UTC)* , Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine. The investigating authority, the Dutch Safety Board (DSB), reported within five days that the two black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR – lead image, left) and the flight data recorder (FDR), had been recovered. On September 9, eight weeks after the crash, the DSB issued what it called a preliminary report.

On March 24, 2015, at 1041 local time, Germanwings flight 4U9525 crashed in southeastern France. The first black box, the CVR (lead image, right), was recovered within the first 12 hours, and the contents reported to the media by investigators of the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile (BEA). The second black box, the FDR, was found on April 2. The BEA released a summary of what it contained one day later. According to French reporters, the time elapsing between the discovery of the CVR and public disclosure of its contents was less than 24 hours – “overnight we went from zero information to knowing everything”, Paris-Match has reported.

Comparing the two crash investigations, the Dutch and the French, the disclosures have been very much slower in release for the MH17 case – and almost totally unrevealing. Is this evidence about what really happened to the aircraft – or is it evidence about the forces to which the investigators have succumbed?
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by Editor - Monday, April 6th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Forgery in the Russian art market is diminishing. “The situation is becoming much better. There are now very few fakes,” reports James Butterwick, a London-based dealer and specialist in Russian art. “This has nothing to do with the experts. The market is the expert now, and it’s become very difficult to buy a picture of dubious authenticity. Save us from the academics and the connoisseurs.”
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by Editor - Friday, April 3rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska, control shareholder and chief executive of the Russian state aluminium monopoly Rusal, hasn’t exactly made a positive rate of return for Asian investors. In fact, share-buyers at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange are likely to conclude that he’s made a hash of every venture he’s tried to bring to that particular market.

Starting with Rusal, the first Russian corporate issue on the Hong Kong exchange, the share dropped 8% on its debut in January 2010, and the company has subsequently lost more than half its initial capitalization. Why then should Deripaska risk his reputation and asset value again with a fresh offer to Asian investors, particularly the Chinese? Answer: he has no reputation and little asset value left to lose.
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by Editor - Wednesday, April 1st, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

War, devaluation, and recession aren’t usually something to drink champagne to. So it was inevitable that Abrau-Durso, Russia’s only champagne house listed on the stock exchange, would suffer.

When President Vladimir Putin told the leadership of the Federal Security Service (FSB) on Thursday that “the situation cannot remain like this forever. It will change, for the better I hope,” he wasn’t exactly raising a toast in bubbly. The situation, added Putin, “will not change for the better if we succumb and yield at every step. It will only change for the better if we become stronger.”

Abrau-Durso has an anti-crisis strategy. This is to expand its vineyards; substitute home-grown for imports of wine-making materials from South Africa, Chile, and southern Europe; reduce costs and the sale price of each bottle; sell more wine at a lower margin of profit; combat what Abrau-Durso executives regretfully call “contempt for Russian wine.”
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by Editor - Sunday, March 29th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The late Yegor Gaidar, when acting prime minister of Russia, thought up the idea of the Yeltsin Tax. The late Boris Nemtsov didn’t think it was such a bad one when he was first deputy prime minister. The one still surviving officeholder responsible for the idea is Anatoly Chubais, chief executive of the state technology corporation Rusnano; he is unelectable to anything and fortunate to be alive. Their idea was the 100-percent withholding tax which Russians name after President Boris Yeltsin and his reforms.

In practice, it was the outcome of deliberate delay in paying wages by state and public institutions, for lack of budget funds from the federal Finance Ministry; and refusal to pay wages by commercial organizations, shareholding corporations, and private companies.
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by Editor - Thursday, March 26th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A porcelain figurine (lead image, left) produced by the Popov Manufactory of Moscow sold in London on Wednesday for £2,700. The auction by MacDougalls revealed unusually strong demand from Russian collectors. They paid record prices for some figurines, including Tsar Nicholas I (right), from the Sipyagin Manufactory, who fetched £29,700. The pre-sale estimates for the dancing Kolomoisky and the tsar had been in the range of £2,000 to £3,000. Bidding interest in the tsar pushed him to a value almost ten times the estimate. According to Catherine MacDougall, co-director of the leading Russian art auction house, “it is the first mid-season sale outside the biannual Russian art week [in June]. We were very impressed by the result.”
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by Editor - Wednesday, March 25th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Igor Kolomoisky, the single largest beneficiary of international lending to Ukraine and until Tuesday night the most powerful figure in the country, has lost his residence permit for Switzerland, according to a reliable source in Geneva. Coming after the news of Kolomoisky’s armed and vocal clash in Kiev with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the Swiss action adds to Kolomoisky’s isolation.
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by Editor - Tuesday, March 24th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Works of art are only reliable investment assets if the trade in them is tested and transparent enough to prove they aren’t stolen goods, forgeries, or what is known in Russian as falshak (фальшак), a term originally applied to counterfeit coins.

Naturally, as the art trade generates higher and higher prices for individual works, the lure of expensive objects becomes irresistible for those with cash on the run. That is, if it can be laundered, er exchanged, through international auction houses like Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams – institutions less regulated, and apparently more reputable than banks. Just as these house names claim to be setting records for auction prices for their goods, the margin of profit to be gained from fraud and forgery attracts almost as many well-heeled crooks for sellers as for buyers.

The relatively short time in which Russian art has been traded in international markets has meant that the swiftly earned riches of the Russian oligarchs have been bidding up auction house prices for objects with dim histories, uneducated demand, and short or non-existent records of ownership. For a London auction house like Bonhams, the record-setting value of Russian art it has been able to find for sale has turned into an opportunity for exchanging the auction house itself for cash. If the privately-owned Bonhams, whose turnover is a tenth of the two bigger houses, were to trade at the price to earnings ratio (P/E) of Sotheby’s, it might fetch over £530 million. But prices like that don’t fetch if there is slightest suspicion of falshak.
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by Editor - Monday, March 23rd, 2015
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