By John Helmer, Moscow

The UK High Court has rejected a lawsuit by Rosneft challenging the legality of sanctions against its oilfield operations and international financing.

The court has ruled that for testing the legality of the sanctions British law and British courts are subordinate to the European Union, and that Rosneft must try its case in the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in Luxembourg. The ruling, which was issued on Monday, contradicts the judgement of the Supreme Court, the UK’s highest court, which decided last March that sanctions against the Iranian bank, Bank Mellat, had violated British law. The new judgement makes no reference to this or any other case decided recently in London on the illegality of UK Government sanctions.

The ruling by Lord Justice Sir Jack Beatson (lead image) and Justice Sir Nicholas Green also flies in the face of the British Government’s promise to preserve the primacy of the British courts over the EU judiciary, and keep London’s market dominance for global litigation. Acknowledging that the issue will be tested in the parliamentary election due in three months’ time, embattled Prime Minister David Cameron has claimed: “We want to make the Supreme Court supreme”. Cameron has promised to introduce a new Act of Parliament to establish the superior status in law of UK courts over the European Court.” That hasn’t happened.
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by Editor - Tuesday, February 10th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Polish figures and former officials who have been leading the campaign for Polish financial and military aid to the Ukrainian Government in Kiev may have been lobbyists for Igor Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank, when he was trying to obtain a Polish banking licence.

Documents sent and received by PrivatBank, just published in Warsaw, reveal that Kolomoisky’s bank engaged a law firm in Warsaw to direct the lobbying campaign. The documents claim the campaign involved Polish academic and finance official, Marek Dabrowski, in an attempt to lobby his friend, Leszek Balcerowicz, when Balcerowicz was President of the National Bank of Poland (NBP). According to sources with direct knowledge of what happened, when the Polish secret services recommended against licensing Kolomoisky’s bank, Dabrowski and Balcerowicz were invited to endorse an indirect plan for Kolomoisky to acquire control of Bud-Bank (Bank Budownictwa Mieszkaniowego), a small, state-owned Polish institution which was already licenced.

The documents released to date suggest that current links between the Polish names and current members of the Ukrainian war party may have started as business links between them a decade ago. Dabrowski categorically denies involvement in, or knowledge of the licence process or of the lobbying campaign. The documents substantiate no wrongdoing by the Poles or Ukrainians engaged in PrivatBank’s bid, which ultimately failed to win Polish approval.
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by Editor - Tuesday, February 10th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The latest release from the Pentagon in the psywar against Russia is a declassified report claiming to have penetrated the brain of President Vladimir Putin, while he was in utero.

The release appears to be from the same research group whose secret exploration of Ronald Reagan’s brain was leaked to Garry Trudeau, author of the Doonesbury comic strip, in October 1980, in the last weeks of the US presidential election when the incumbent Jimmy Carter was defeated by Reagan. The Pentagon reporting also acknowledges as a source of its expertise one of the creators of an American television series which was produced and broadcast by Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox between 2009 and 2011.

A Time Magazine interview of Putin as the “Person of the Year” for 2007 is revealed as the cover for a Pentagon-directed operation using special cameras to record Putin’s micro-muscular movements and verbalizations over several hours. Also exposed in the newly released papers is the covert engagement of Harvard University academic Timothy Colton, who was commissioned by the Pentagon’s top secret operation BODY LEADS to deploy at the annual Valdai Discussion Club between Russian offiicals and international academics and journalists. Colton’s Pentagon assignment at Valdai was to gather and interpret secret body and vocalization data on Putin, as well as on former president Dmitry Medvedev.
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by Editor - Sunday, February 8th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Two-front wars in Europe aren’t good for Germany.

Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolph Hitler don’t need to rise from their graves to make the point to the present German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. But is it her policy to pursue war against Russia in the east, and against Greece in the south, while claiming the conflicts have been forced on her by chekist Russians and chekist Greeks? The German characterization of both enemies as chekist comes from a high-level German figure who is close to the Chancellery and how Merkel thinks. In Berlin’s version of war in Europe, the new Nazis are in Moscow and Athens.

As for one of the leaders of the war party in Kiev, Merkel has privately and publicly endorsed every claim of Yulia Tymoshenko, promoting her release from prison and protecting her campaigns for war against Russia, even though – according to the high-level German source – “they [Chancellery, Foreign Ministry] have known for years that [Tymoshenko] was a crook.”
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by Editor - Thursday, February 5th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A federal US judge has dismissed a 17-year long attempt by Archangel Diamond Corporation (ADC) to recover damages for the alleged theft of its stake in a multibillion-dollar Russian diamond mine by two Russian oligarchs, Alisher Usmanov and Vagit Alekperov (lead image, left), and Alekperov’s company, LUKoil. The legal action protects LUKoil, which has been under US Government sanctions since September 12, from liabilities — if the ADC lawsuit were to succeed — of almost $5 billion.
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by Editor - Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

There are about 450 think-tanks in Europe and the US currently focusing on international relations, war, peace, and economic security. Of these, about one hundred regularly analyse Russian affairs. And of these, less than ten aren’t committed antagonists of Russia. That’s barely two percent of the intellectual materiel which can be counted as non-partisan or neutral in the infowar now underway between the NATO alliance and Russia. In this balance of forces, think-tanks behave like tanks – that’s the weapon, not the cistern.

The Centre for Social and Economic Research (CASE) has been based in Warsaw since 1991. It claims on its website to be “an independent non-profit economic and public policy research institution founded on the idea that evidence-based policy making is vital to the economic welfare of societies.” In its 2013 annual report, declares: “we seek to maintain a strict sense of non-partisanship in all of our research, advisory and educational activities.” Three-quarters of CASE’s annual revenues come from the European Commission; another 9% from American and other international organizations. According to CASE, that’s “an indication of progressive diversification of CASE revenue sources.”

CASE Ukraine is a branch of this Polish think-tank, and at the same time a descendant, it claims, of a Harvard University-funded group which was active between 1996 and 1999. Registered since 1999 as CASE Ukraine, this calls itself “an independent Ukrainian NGO specializing in economic research, macroeconomic policy analysis and forecasting.” According to parent CASE in Warsaw, one of the group’s goals is “promoting cooperation and integration with the neighboring partners of Europe”. This means, not only CASE Ukraine, but CASE Kyrgyzstan, CASE Moldova, CASE Georgia, and in Russia, the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy.
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by Editor - Monday, February 2nd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Greece, with Cyprus, is the only member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to have suffered, and to continue to suffer, military occupation of its territory by another NATO state, Turkey, supported by the rest of the alliance. It is the only alliance member to have suffered from British and American plots to wage civil war on its territory – the British in December 1944, the Americans in April 1967. It is the only NATO state to have its seabed, and the resources which lie there, face seizure and attack by the US and Turkey. It is the only NATO state to have been (to be still) compelled by secret treaty provisions to harbour and to project nuclear and other military threats against neighbours or near-neighbours – the former Yugoslavia, Russia, Egypt, Libya, Syria – which do not threaten Greece. In short, Greece is the only country in Europe to be compelled by the force of its purported allies to act against its own national interest.

And I haven’t begun to mention the role the German friend has played – puppet king in Athens; Operation Mercury, as the catastrophic invasion of 1941 was code-named; imposition of the European Union’s (EU) Economic Adjustment Programme for Greece, destroying the Greek economy for the past five years. In the media of countries which are enemies to Greece, the election of Syriza to the Greek parliament this week, and of the government headed by Alexei Tsipras, is being reported as radical, extreme, some even claim communist.

The reply, which weak and impoverished Greece is about to make, is this: assisted suicide is not Greece’s national choice.
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by Editor - Tuesday, January 27th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Reading a new 789-page history of a Soviet spy, Alexander Orlov, who defected to the US seventy-seven years ago with the equivalent of a million dollars in Cheka cash, and conned the CIA, FBI and several American publishers into giving him a second million, can’t be all work and no fun.

For one thing, the book reveals what a mendacious fool Ernest Hemingway was when he was in the Spanish Civil War composing novels, plays and journalism that made him rich then, famous still. For another, the book suggests that Kim Philby wasn’t half as far-sighted and clever as his British intelligence superiors were blind and stupid. And finally, in Oxford University Press’s (OUP) breakthrough contribution to recent Ukrainian history, the author – in Kiev just days before the February 2014 coup which toppled the president – received estimates of the famine death toll in Ukraine in 1932-33 from “the first non-biased chief of the Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny (SBU)”.
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by Editor - Sunday, January 25th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has told the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that his government cannot raise bilateral financing from the European Union (EU) or the NATO allies, and now requires $50 billion, triple the $17 billion agreed with the IMF last April.

At a meeting on Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland, with an IMF delegation headed by managing director Christine Lagarde (lead image), Poroshenko, his finance minister, Natalie Jaresko (2nd from left) and National Bank of Ukraine Governor Valeriya Gontareva (1st left), also disclosed that Kiev will default on repayment of its sovereign bonds unless there is an immediate agreement from the US-based Franklin Templeton group and other bondholders to accept a moratorium on their coupon payments and postponement of bond maturities for several years.

Lagarde announced that the terms of the current IMF staff mission in Kiev, which arrived on January 8 under former Bulgarian finance official Nikolai Gueorguiev, should now be revised.
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by Editor - Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Roman Abramovich has bought two houses, and is negotiating for at least one more, on East 75th Street in New York for about $70 million. The New York papers are reporting that Abramovich is planning to live there with his family because his wife prefers it for her work. Abramovich’s spokesman insisted yesterday that Abramovich’s “main residence is Moscow”.

So why is the well-known crony of President Vladimir Putin buying American assets which may be sequestered, the transactions reversed, his funds frozen or lost, by US Treasury sanctions and by the US Government’s campaign to oust Putin from office? Has Abramovich been offered a guarantee of asset protection from the Obama Administration if he is buying for the one individual the US Government wants to put in exile there – Putin himself?
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by Editor - Tuesday, January 20th, 2015
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