By John Helmer, Moscow
If you want to understand Russian politics, watch the tomato talk to power.
President Vladimir Putin rolled out the red carpet for Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, last month, and it was announced that the Russian ban on Turkish food imports will soon be dropped. But the Russian tomato trade doesn’t agree. It says Turkish tomatoes will remain excluded from the Russian market.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
The Russian state shipping company Sovcomflot and its chief executive Sergei Frank (lead image, right) have been ordered to pay “tens of millions of dollars” in punitive compensation to exiled shipowner, Yury Nikitin (left). A UK High Court judgement late last month concluded a record 11-year litigation by condemning Frank’s dishonesty in fabricating evidence in the case, and freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of Nikitin’s funds. Frank and his Sovcomflot subordinates were judged to have been more culpable than the court’s findings that Nikitin had been dishonest in paying bribes to win new vessel and tanker charter business.
The High Court judgement, which has gone almost unreported in Moscow, was issued on August 26. The 40-page ruling by Justice Sir Stephen Males flatly contradicts international bond and share sale prospectuses which Sovcomflot has been circulating in international markets. The judgement may blackball Frank as unfit to manage or direct an internationally listed company in future.
“The potentially devastating consequences of a freezing order have often been recognised,” ruled Justice Males. “It is only just that those who obtain such orders to which they are not entitled, a fortiori when they are guilty of serious failures to disclose material facts and have pursued claims described by the trial judge as ‘obviously unsustainable’, should be ordered to provide appropriate compensation for losses suffered.”
“If the Kremlin still hopes to privatize Sovcomflot with the sale of shares to international investors,” commented a London investment banker, “it will have to replace Frank, and purge the company and the board of everyone responsible for the London case.”
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By John Helmer, Moscow
When Hillary Clinton (lead, left) was US Secretary of State in 2009, she proved she could lie to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel; keep secret her hostility towards Russia even in her secret staff emails; and take money in her back pocket for an $8 billion deal between the US, Germany and Russia recommended by her subordinates. The record, recently revealed in US investigations of Clinton’s emails and donations to the Clinton Foundation, shows why the Kremlin assessment of Clinton is hostile and blunt – Clinton invites and takes bribes, but can’t be relied on to keep her bargains.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
This is the season for bears to be good to the bushes. When bears eat berry seeds, they pass straight through and on to the forest floor, where, packaged in a warm pile of manure, they can germinate. Where I’m going, summer is for berry-eating, so you’ll have plenty of manure, er germination, to observe in September.
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Chris Cook with John Helmer, Victoria, B.C., Canada
Gorilla Radio is broadcast weekly by Chris Cook on CFUV 101.9 FM from the University of Victoria, British Columbia. The radio station can be heard here. The Gorilla Radio transcripts are also published by the Pacific Free Press. For Chris Cook’s broadcast archive, click to open.
By John Helmer, Moscow
All law students in England, meeting the law of torts for the first time, used to study Scott v Shepherd. That was a case decided in 1773 in which a man in a marketplace was struck in the face by a lit firework that put out his eye. The legal rule was — if you toss fireworks, you are liable for blinding a man, even if you didn’t mean to.
In the preliminaries to this week’s meeting in St. Petersburg, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been playing games with fireworks. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, wasn’t closing his eyes. At the conclusion of their meeting in St. Petersburg on Tuesday afternoon, Putin’s eyes revealed more than his mouth about Erdogan’s incendiaries.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
With just days before lawsuit deadlines expired last month, a Sydney, Australia, law firm has filed a new compensation claim on behalf of a victim of the Malaysian Airline MH17 crash of July 17, 2014. The new case, filed in the Australian Federal Court on July 5, targets the airline on behalf of a single Australian applicant. It also makes a pitch for relatives of all 298 passengers and crew who lost their lives on the flight, to join the gravy train, whatever their nationality and wherever they live. How much money the lawyers are seeking, they refuse to say.
The new case has been brought by a Sydney law firm called Leitch Hasson & Dent (LHD). The firm has already lodged a parallel case against the airline in the New South Wales (NSW) state court. The same lawyers, led by an American, Jerry Skinner (lead image), have also filed a case in the European Court of Human Rights; that claims compensation from the Russian government for allegedly masterminding the destruction of the aircraft and supplying the weapon used. A parallel claim in the European Court, lodged for some of the same MH17 victims by a German lawyer, Elmar Giemulla, charges the Ukraine Government with negligence in allowing airspace over a war zone to remain open , and with liability to compensate those killed.
One plaintiff, Tim Lauschet of Sydney, is pursuing his interest with Skinner and Giemulla in all four lawsuits; his mother, Gabrielle Lauschet, was a passenger on MH17. It is unclear how closely the lawyers in these cases are cooperating with one another to boost the number of targets in order to increase the payout, and the lawyers’ take. By suing in the Australian court last month, and inviting all other victims’ families to share in the proceeds, legal experts believe the evidence and argument for liability in the new case may undermine the claims against Ukraine and Russia in the European Court. On July 5, the day the federal court case commenced in Sydney, the European Court issued a notice to the lawyers to explain why their claims should not be dismissed.
By John Helmer, Moscow
Coming soon to a Moscow office building, shopping mall, or warehouse near you, nothing and noone at all.
According to a new report on Russian real estate market conditions through March 31 by the Moscow office of Cushman & Wakefield, the current vacancy rate for Class-A offices is almost 29%; for two-year old shopping centres, 30%; for shopping centres in planning or construction, 40%; and for warehouses, 10%. Every fifth square-metre of existing office space is now vacant – a first in Russian office-building history – and this isn’t expected to change, Cushman & Wakefield are forecasting, for another two to three years.
Everywhere rents are falling, and for the first time ever, landlords desperate for money will accept lease agreements in roubles. New construction is dropping like a stone – so far this year, zero Class-A offices, zero upmarket malls, and almost zero warehouses. The main construction companies are increasingly overdue at the bank – one dollar in five of the loans which real estate developers have borrowed to construct their projects is overdue for repayment. New investment in real estate is thus improbable — unlikely to recover to $4 billion per annum, the level of 2010, for another two years. “No bad news is the best news,” Cushman & Wakefield conclude
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By John Helmer, Moscow
The Financial Times of London has replied in defence of its reporting on Sergei Pugachev (lead image, foreground), a Russian businessman on the run from a UK High Court conviction and two-year prison sentence.
In the Moscow evening, following yesterday’s publication on the Pugachev case, two emails were despatched, a long and a short one.
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