By John Helmer. Moscow

Confidential subscribers to Dances with Bears have been provided with directions and codes required to find, then open, the dead drops for leaving and collecting the sensitive information on which this website’s investigations depend. This month the dead drop is a rat.  Inside the rat there is a moisture-proof container for miniaturized rolls of film, tape-recordings, official documents, and secret messages.

This week the rat has disgorged two film negatives. The first reveals the face of Benedict Worsley, the man behind Russia’s biggest bank robbery who, until now, has kept his face out of the public media and off the internet. The second is Robert Owen-Jones, an Australian government espionage agent.   Next week he will take over as the Russia-hating chairman of the global diamond trade regulator known as the Kimberley Process. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, November 7th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

 If you were the only person in the world who thought yourself a genius, it would be an embarrassment to be named Barry Parsnip.

Robert Zimmerman solved the nomenclature problem. He became Bob Dylan – and Hey Presto! He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2016.

Barry Parsnip (aka Boris Pasternak) didn’t solve the problem. But it was solved for him by a combination of the British, US and Soviet secret services, with an assist from the Dutch and Italians.  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1958 before his novel, Doctor Zhivago, had been read in the original Russian by more than a thousand people, counting government officials. Following the prize-giving until now, about 10 million people have read it, mostly in translation. But time and numbers haven’t improved either on Parsnip or on Zhivago. It is still, as Vladimir Nabokov said at the start, “a sorry thing, clumsy, trite, and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers, and trite coincidences.”  Kornei  Chukovsky, Pasternak’s neighbour and comrade, thought the novel was “boring, banal.”  Yevgeny Yevtushenko said it was “disappointing”. Anna Akhmatova told Pasternak to his face that Zhivago was a bad novel “except for the landscapes.” She was being ironic – there are no landscapes in the book.

Not to Pasternak’s face, Nabokov went for Pasternak’s jugular – his vanity. Nabokov called Pasternak’s composition “goistrous and goggle-eyed.”  That turned out to be the perfect picture of a victim, and MI6 and the CIA were able to provoke the Soviet authorities into persecution  of Pasternak the victim. That operation, codenamed AEDINOSAUR,  confirmed  what the West wanted the world to believe – that Russians are bad by a standard noone else in the world is held to.

Pasternak’s story, when it happened and still today,  is also confirmation of the readiness of some Russians to believe that however crapulous and despised they are at home, there will always be love for them across the frontier, in the West.   (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, November 6th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In hot pursuit of the $3 billion fortune embezzled from Trust Bank of Moscow, English lawyers, Russian bankers, Swiss policemen, and Cypriot accountants need rest and recreation. Where better to study the evidence than in the south of France, where Benedict Worsley, son of a famous Old Bailey criminal lawyer, has refurbished an old farmhouse into luxury vacation villa. And for a weekly rental of £7,101, it’s a steal. (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Henry Kissinger has been elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, according to an announcement last Friday. He is the first American member of the Academy’s Department of Global Problems and International Relations. He is also the first Russian academician to have been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, Chile, Bangladesh and Cyprus.  The Academy voted for Kissinger, according to the Academy spokesman Irina Orestova, for “his political and diplomatic scientific works and lectures.”

Alexander Dynkin, the head of the the Academy’s Department of Global Problems and International Relations, said today that he had nominated Kissinger himself. He dismissed Kissinger’s political record, claiming that wasn’t considered in his election. According to Dynkin, there was a majority of  11 votes in support of Kissinger at his Department.  The Academy’s press office said  Kissinger’s nomination had been accepted by a majority of the Academy’s 1,125 voting members. Another academy source said that once Dynkin had won the vote for Kissinger at his Department, the Academy vote was a rubber-stamp exercise. No opposition to Kissinger has surfaced publicly among the Academy’s Russian members. (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Investigators searching for $3 billion in funds missing from Trust Bank of Moscow, the biggest Russian bank fraud in history, have found Benedict Worsley, the Cyprus-based manager of the bank’s offshore operations, at a heavily fortified house in the south of France, where he is guarded by British gunmen formerly employed by the British secret services.

The High Court in London has revealed that in return for cash and a promise of immunity from prosecution, Worsley has agreed to cooperate in the search for the missing money. He is now reported to be employed by Otkritie Bank, which is being financed by the Central Bank of Russia, to operate the old Trust Bank. However, sources close to the Central Bank say that officials at the bank are anxious to see Otkritie start repaying the bailout loans, and  reluctant to soften the terms or extend the repayment dates as Otkritie is reported to be requesting. Suspicion is also rife in Moscow banking circles, according to one source,  that “well-known names in high places were beneficiaries of the Trust Bank loans. They don’t want to be identified or obliged to repay.”  They, according to a Cyprus source  and another in London, who knows Worsley, are “threats to Worsley, and he knows it.” (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, October 30th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

 It’s the job of the Dorchester doorman to know his hotel guests’ sins; cater to them discreetly; but  keep them under his top-hat, forever secret.

During more than a decade of Sergei Frank’s trips to London to direct High Court litigations against the men he succeeded at Sovcomflot, the Russian state shipping company, he could count on the discretion of the hotel doorman.  After the final ruling came down on Thursday, Frank, chief executive of Sovcomflot (lead image, right), can’t be sure that his humiliation by more than a dozen British judges will not now make him a laughingstock.

In a new 4-page judgement , Frank’s appeal against $72 million in compensation and costs to be paid to Sovcomflot’s ex-shipping partner, Yury Nikitin, has been dismissed, and he has been ordered to start paying immediately, with a down-payment of £1 million.

“There is no doubt,” ruled Sir Stephen Males, the presiding judge, “that, overall, the defendants [Nikitin’s companies] were the successful party. They obtained a judgment for US $59.8 million on the inquiry.” More than that, according to Males, the award of the costs of litigating should be paid to Nikitin, plus interest on further delays the shipping company takes. Not to do so, according to the judgement, “would fail to recognise the overall success which the defendants achieved.” (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, October 27th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In the first tale of the thieves’ picnic, published by Leslie Charteris in 1937,a gang of robbers, kidnappers, and smugglers starts to fall apart over a $2 million lottery ticket one of the thieves stole from the gang’s pot. The detective who recovers the ticket, and rescues a diamond-cutter who’d been abducted for the gang’s diamond-smuggling operation, rolls up the crimes by pretending to be a gangster himself, and encouraging the others to betray each other.

By the standards of Ilya Yurov and Benedict Worsley, the original thieves’ picnic was a fight over peanuts. Yurov, the control shareholder of Trust Bank, managed the disappearance of $3.3 billion in Trust Bank funds until December 2014, when the Central Bank stopped his operations, and financed Otkritie Bank to take over in his place. Within weeks,  Russian government investigators found the gap between Trust’s assets and liabilities had jumped from Rb67.8 billion to Rb114 billion; in pre-devaluation terms, that’s from $2 billion to $3.3 billion — bigger larcenies than the previous records set by Sergei Pugachev at Mezhprombank  and Andrei Borodin at Bank of Moscow.

Worsley had helped Yurov by operating hundreds of offshore companies and bank accounts through which the money was moved, mostly as sham loans. Yurov is now living in Kent as a guest of the British government. Worsley, who divides his time between Cyprus and Dubai, is now employed by Otkritie Bank, Trust’s new owner. Worsley is being paid $32,500 per month as an informer, with a promise of a bounty of up to 4% of the recovery value of the assets Yurov and he allegedly stole and laundered, plus an indemnity from prosecution. The Worsley arrangement was kept secret by Otkritie Bank until revealed recently in the High Court in London.

The informer reward deal is unprecedented in the history of Russian bank fraud, according to London bankers and lawyers. “In a multi-billion fraud of this size,” said one international bank source, “a deal like this can be justified if the recovery is large enough – that is, if Otkritie Bank and the Russian  Deposit Insurance Agency couldn’t follow the money trail without the informer, and if they manage to recover significantly  more than they pay out to the informer. But why has Otkritie tried to keep the deal secret? The court papers show that $3.3 billion is missing from Trust Bank; Yurov’s bank accounts and assets add up to $830 million. How much is Worsley holding back? Does he stand to get richer with the Otkritie deal than he got with Yurov?” (more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, October 26th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In the war against Russia, the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan is a sideshow, although the Swedish Academy is doing what it can to elevate his monosyllabic rhyming to a moral high ground whose only precedent is the Norwegian award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama in 2009. Obama’s congratulations to Dylan for “a well-deserved Nobel” was issued before Dylan acknowledged receiving it.

Dylan’s lyrics have been in steady decline among US and NATO audiences for the past 40 years. They had dwindled to invisibility until last week’s Nobel prize announcement. Billboard, the US measure of plays and pays in the pop music market, has failed to record Dylan in its Top-100 artists for decades; Billboard’s 200 “Greatest of All Time” albums doesn’t count Dylan at all. The Nobel publicity for Dylan failed to revive the listening audience or move any of his songs into the Billboard Hot 100. That is currently led by a song by The Chainsmokers of New York City. Their lyrics open with: “Hey, I was doing just fine before I met you”; and close with “no we ain’t ever getting older.”

Russian war songs are more popular than ever, according to Russian audience measurements. But the best of the Russian bards at this genre, Vladimir Vysotsky and Victor Tsoi, can’t qualify for next year’s Nobel prize. That’s not because their verse isn’t superior to Dylan’s, but because they are dead. So next year’s Russian nominee will be Melnitsa.
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by Editor - Thursday, October 20th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Canadian governments are often portrayed as Dudley Do-Right, a caricature member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the 1960s television cartoon series, who was always trying to do good; never caught the villain, never got satisfaction from the girl. That was because Dudley had less brains than his horse, who did better with the girl. Since Dudley, er Justin Trudeau became prime minister of Canada a year ago, the PR gap between the caricature and the prime minister has widened; the IQ gap has contracted; the distance to the villain and the girl has stayed the same.

The villain in the new Dudley Do-Right cartoon on Canadian policy is Russia. Canadian special forces are fighting Russia on both the Ukraine and Syria war fronts. Canada has given Kiev C$400 million (US$305 million) to pay the Ukrainian army, backed by most Canadian non-government organizations (NGOs) insisting they are on Do-Right’s side. One in particular, Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, leads the charge against diamonds, gold and other mineral developers, many of them Russian, who compete or threaten Canadian mining interests. PAC, it turns out, is a weapon of commercial and economic warfare. Financially, it belongs to the US State Department and US investors, George Soros and Pierre Omidyar.
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by Editor - Monday, October 17th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Kremlin has dropped a fish and meat bomb on New Zealand. The casualties are reported to be women, children and the elderly forced to eat food formerly sold to Russia; together with fishermen and farmers whose annual income of US$100 million from exports to Russia has been lost since the start of the Ukraine war.

After the New Zealand Prime Minister, John Key, attacked Russian policy in Syria and on September 26 issued a public insult to President Vladimir Putin, Moscow reacted with the announcement, nine days later, that New Zealand (NZ) exports of meat and fish may be banned from the Russian market. The NZ media have broadcast the prime minister’s attack on Putin; they are not revealing the Russian reaction. NZ government organs, including the NZ Ambassador to Moscow, Ian Hill, refuse to acknowledge the threatened food ban, or to discuss what is happening.
(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, October 13th, 2016
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