By John Helmer, Moscow

Mikhail Abyzov (centre) is the man in charge of keeping the Russian government transparent, accountable and so far as the name of his ministerial commission can be stretched through 235 government press releases since his appointment in May 2012, open. But the Minister for Open Government has a secret he keeps closed.

Abyzov is now fighting for political survival, as President Vladimir Putin is being urged by his advisors to replace the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, and purge Medvedev’s allies, especially those with substantial or hidden links to the United States. Abyzov is a target, the sources claim, because he is alleged to be one of the fund-raisers for Medvedev’s political campaigning; and because he keeps a large part of his wealth in the US. For Putin partisans, Abyzov’s personal ties to the US make his Russian loyalties vulnerable.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, September 11th, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Boris Titov (centre) has proposed the revival of Crimean winemaking with at least $20 million in state budget funds each year for the next five. If everything goes according to his plan, the outcome by the end of 2019 will be a state winemaking corporation, ripe for privatization, with 140,000 hectares of vines producing a bumper harvest not seen since the Soviet Union. Even that is less than half the area of vineyards required to support the growing Russian consumption of wine, particularly of the champagne type.

Titov, whose official post in the Russian government is Presidential Commissioner for Entrepreneurs’ Rights, is the owner of Abrau-Durso through Abrau Durso Group Limited of Cyprus, and Solvalub Trading Ltd., a company registered on the Channel Island of Jersey. Abrau-Durso is one of Russia’s leading winemakers, producing premium-priced sparkling and still white wines and reds. For the archive on Abrau-Durso, read this.
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by John Helmer - Monday, September 8th, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow

After the steady rise of enthusiasm for war in Ukraine voter polls through the summer, Ukrainian politicians in favour of the military campaign against Donetsk, Lugansk, and Russia, have suffered a dramatic loss of support across the country.

This was reported in Kiev on September 3. In the first countrywide poll taken since the Ukrainian Army took heavy casualties and retreated from the Donbass at the end of August, voters who had supported the pro-war Radical Party, led by Oleg Lyashko (image-2), have dropped from 22.2% to 13.1%. Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk’s (3) bloc, Patriots of Ukraine, which includes the police and national guard minister, Arsen Avakov (4), has collapsed from more than 9% to 3.7%. Yulia Timoshenko’s (6) Fatherland party has fallen below her former proteges to 3.5%. The Svoboda (“Freedom”) party of Oleg Tyagnibok (1), the candidate of the US Embassy in Kiev and the State Department, and Pravy Sektor (“Right Sector”), the party behind the national guard formations fighting in the east, have lost virtually all their support outside the far western regions of the country; across the Ukraine they are now polling just 2.5% and 1%.
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by John Helmer - Friday, September 5th, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Bank robbers of the manual, stick-up type have a reputation for a sense of a humour. That may be a comfort to them, because they usually get caught. Bank robbers of the International Monetary Fund type lack even a sense of irony, because they expect not to be caught, and never are. In the bank- robbing profession also, the driver of the get-away car is usually the least talented, the witless one who doesn’t see the gag, especially not when he or she is the butt of jokes from the rest of the gang.

This week, when Alexander Shlapak, the Ukrainian Minister of Finance, helped himself to $1.39 billion, the second tranche of the IMF’s Ukraine Stand-By Agreement of $17.1 billion, he illustrated the ministry’s Facebook announcement in Kiev with a picture showing an anonymous figure carrying a cheap briefcase away from the IMF headquarters as the Fund’s front-door sign is partially covered up by the Ukrainian flag. Counting the first tranche of $3.1 billion Shlapak took away on May 5, the cover-up is currently blowing at $4.5 billion. Another $1.39 billion had been scheduled for the taking in October. But that has been delayed and doubled to $2.8 billion for payout by December 15.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 3rd, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Russian government commenced its counter-sanctions programme a month ago, on August 7. This extended what had been a quarter-billion dollar loss for Australian meat exporters, beginning on March 31, to more than $7 billion in losses for the European Union plus Canada and Norway. In a briefing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev implied that the sanctions were a sorry tit-for-tat for the sanctions already imposed on Russia. “This retaliation wasn’t easy for us. We were forced into it, but even under these conditions, we’re sure we’ll be able to turn things to our benefit.”

That explains why Poland is at the top, along with Australia, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, even Denmark, home of the noisiest anti-Russian outside Ukraine, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, ex-prime minister of Denmark and outgoing secretary-general of NATO. The story of what the Australians did to deserve the counterpunch can be read here. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski (lead image) and his wife, Anne Applebaum, have been echoing Rasmussen’s claims from NATO headquarters, hoping to land themselves in his job, and or the European Union’s foreign ministry. The story of how they failed, leaving Poland’s apple-growers and other exporters with the bill, can be read here.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014
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by John Helmer - Sunday, August 31st, 2014
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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 John Helmer - Sunday, August 24th, 2014
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The Nile crocodile and some species of hedgehog and tortoise take a break and sleep through the peak of the summer season. It’s usually called aestivation, and this bear is taking a leaf out of the other animals’ book.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, July 31st, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It’s in the nature of arbitrage transactions that if you are buying an asset cheap, you try to avoid the risk of failing to find someone to buy dear. Naturally, noone really enjoys gambling if the risk can be avoided. The knack of Russian arbitrage is to cover that risk by arranging for a state bank loan to finance your buyer, and for you, your asset buyer, and your banker to rig the valuation and share the spread. Arranging with a friend at a state enterprise to do the buying with budget money comes to the same thing. Nice hedge; a trifle wrong.

Political arbitrage is much rarer because it’s riskier, and it’s harder to rig the spread in advance. It happens when a politician leaves one job before he’s sure he will be elected (or appointed) to a more powerful one. When a politician suddenly announces to his voters that he’s resigning, but doesn’t tell them why, it’s regarded as a case of disloyalty, at least in democracies. Also, it’s usually not supposed that the resigning politician would run the risk of unemployment — unless something worse than that was in the offing for him.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, July 31st, 2014
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The sanctions programme adopted against Russia to date aims, according to this week’s declaration by US President Barack Obama, at curtailing the capabilities of the Russian government to field men and arms on or across Russian borders; and to penalize individuals and corporations for sustaining the Russian economy while the war in eastern Ukraine continues.

For the first time, US officials have declared that every sector of the Russian economy, including investment and financing for industry, urban development, farm production and food supply, are targets.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, July 30th, 2014
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