By John Helmer, Moscow

The Supreme Court, the UK’s highest court of appeal, has dismissed an application from Sovcomflot, the state-owned Russian shipping group, to appeal against earlier judgements in favour of former chief executive, Dmitry Skarga (right). A three-judge panel issued its ruling on October 29, saying Sovcomflot’s application “does not raise an arguable point of law of general public importance…bearing in mind that the case has already been the subject of judicial decision and reviewed on appeal.”
(more…)

by John Helmer - Thursday, October 31st, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The Greenland government is about to open court proceedings against Greenpeace for attempts to occupy an offshore oil rig two years ago, the chief police prosecutor in Nuuk, Morten Nielsen, has disclosed. Russian sources say that Gazpromneft or parent Gazprom may be considering a similar move. These legal actions are targeted at Greenpeace as an organization. Until now, only individual members of Greenpeace have been prosecuted – in 2010 and 2011 cases in Greenland, when altogether 24 individuals were arrested, jailed, convicted and fined; and in proceedings now under way in Murmansk for 30 Greenpeace members; they are currently in prison awaiting trial on Russian charges for an attempt to board the Gazpromneft oil platform Prirazlomnaya, in the Pechora Sea, on September 18.

Their vessel, the 38-year old motor yacht Arctic Sunrise, registered in The Netherlands, is under arrest in Murmansk port. For details of its position, see here.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 30th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Private letters from foreign governments to President Vladimir Putin usually go into the Secret box. Applications by foreign governments for large-value arms deals from the Russian state exporter, Rosoboronexport, usually go to the Security Council of the Russian Federation for review, and there they are kept in the Top Secret box. The Council, chaired by Putin, includes his chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov; the heads of the intelligence and security agencies; the Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and others. Nikolai Patrushev has been the secretary of the Council since 2008; before that he headed the Federal Security Service. The Council has a website and office address, but no press spokesman, no email address, and no telephone number.

Exactly why such a silent, professionally cautious group should be so careless as to advertise publicly that they are negotiating a large arms sale to Libya to help the government in Tripoli put down the local opposition is inexplicable – unless they were testing the Libyans to prove they can deliver what the Kremlin wants from that benighted place. Did they fail to anticipate the outcome might be an armed attack on the Russian Embassy in Tripoli, and the forced evacuation of the embassy staff? Read on.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

“Greenpeace has broken the safety zone. Greenpeace activists have forced their entry into the drilling rig. This constitutes an obvious illegal act that disregards the democratic rules. It furthermore constitutes a severe violation of the safety regulations put in place to protect human lives and the environment. The Greenpeace action [is] a very grave and illegal attack on constitutional rights. It is highly disturbing that Greenpeace in its chase for media attention with all measures breaks the safety regulations put in place to protect people and the environment.”

If that sounds like a statement issued by the Murmansk prosecutor, the Investigative Committee of the General Prosecutor, Gazpromneft, or the Kremlin, you’d be mistaken. In fact it’s a statement by Kuupik Kleist, premier of Greenland, after his police had arrested a Greenpeace group which had attempted to occupy an oil drilling rig off the coast of Greenland. The date was more than three years ago, on August 31, 2010. The Greenland prosecutor also arrested a helicopter Greenpeace had hired to drop its members on to the rig, which was operated by Cairn Energy.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Thursday, October 24th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Once in a blue moon it is crystal clear – McChrystal clear, for reason shortly to be explained — why Anglo-American warmaking is bound to fail, and why Russian resistance to it – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Chechnya, Georgia, Libya, Syria – is the model the rest of the world should be following. As if dropped from the sky, spilled from the satchel of the Supreme Allied Commander, or hacked from the computers of the NSA and GCHQ, a book of warmaking advice has appeared, saluted by allied commanders as a work of genius in the Clausewitz mould. (That’s as if Germans, living or dead, have the right to teach the methods of aggressive war without earning another round of defeats on the battlefield and in the war crimes tribunal.)

Emile Simpson was in the British Army’s Royal Gurka Rifles from 2006 to 2012 where he was a platoon commander, spoke Nepalese, and served three combat tours in Afghanistan. Over the past two years he was paid to swap his sword for pen, writing a book called War from the Ground Up; this is sponsored by an outfit at Cambridge University called the Centre for Rising Powers, and published by Hurst & Company, a small London publisher which has turned out four books on Russia over 45 years, none too bad.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

A mystery company in London, doing millions of dollars’ worth of mystery business for United Company Rusal, has reappeared after being struck off the UK Companies Register in June for failure to report its annual accounts. Except that now the company auditor says he can’t explain the revenue and cost claims, debts, loans, investment outlay and losses, and administrative expenses of $2.4 million for a company with zero employees and two empty shell companies as “members”. The auditor, a one-man, three-year old business with no telephone number, has also pulled a fast one, telling UK Companies House he has lodged accounts for the years to October 31, 2011, and the following year 2012; in fact there is just one set of accounts for 2012, filed twice, while the file for 2011 is missing.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 22nd, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Oligarchy versus democracy is a very old game, and so are the seven deadly sins. Why exactly men like Vladimir Potanin, Mikhail Prokhorov, Alisher Usmanov, Andrei Melnichenko et al. should calculate that advertising their standard of living should help them keep it is difficult to say. Maybe their pockets are under better control than their appetites. Maybe they believe that advertising profligacy will boost the accounting of their net worth and stave off margin calls.

That’s the point the ancient Athenians grasped with conviction. It’s the point of many of Plato’s and Socrates’s dialogues; of the comedies of Aristophanes; and of the records of the Athens law courts which have come down to us. To those Greeks, if a man displayed an excess of money, or what he did with it – by eating, drinking, betting, having sex, bejewelling his body, house, slaves, children, wives — he was by that very fact to be suspected of a crime against the democracy. The Athenian judgement was both retrospective and prospective: spending money intemperately was evidence that it had been too easily (dishonestly) earned. It was also evidence that state policy (investment, tax, war) would be corruptly influenced to serve such oligarchs’ material and personal interests, to the loss of everyone else.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Sunday, October 20th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The conflict between state pipeline company Transneft and Summa Capital over which of them will control the Novorossiysk Seaport Company is almost over, and the winner is — the Russian state. But wait – who is at the sharp end of the state, and who has got hold of the handle?

Transneft now owns the 10% shareholding which had been bought from the free-floating pool of shares in the market during September by Moscow-based Uralsib Bank, Transneft sources have revealed in Moscow this week. Transneft chief executive Nikolai Tokarev had said on October 1 that the size of the shareholding bought by Uralsib Bank had been 9%, not 5%, as had been reported publicly in September. But Tokarev didn’t say at the time whom Uralsib had been acting for.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Friday, October 18th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Struggling with a rising debt burden of more than $8.2 billion, the Evraz group, owned by Roman Abramovich (left), Alexander Abramov (centre) and Alexander Frolov (right), has suspended production at its Claymont steelmill in Delaware. The production halt is indefinite. A company announcement from Moscow on Monday says that “due to subdued market demand and the high volume of imports, it will suspend operations at its steel mill in Claymont, Delaware. Over the next two months, about 375 employees will complete processing and shipping of existing products and prepare the mill for idling. EVRAZ will consider restarting the operations as soon as the market conditions improve. Evraz doesn’t expect any adverse financial effect on its operations in North America as a result of this action, and customers of the Claymont mill will be served by other EVRAZ facilities in Portland, Oregon, and Regina, Saskatchewan.”

Dated October 14, this was a big surprise. If what Evraz says now is believable, why did the company say publicly on August 29 that it was planning to increase production at Claymont Steel? Less than seven weeks ago, in the Evraz half-yearly financial report this is what the company claimed: “The key focus of the flat product group, in the period, was enhancing capacity utilisation. To this end, EVRAZ North America is currently finalising works to increase the rolling speed at EVRAZ Claymont which should improve productivity and provide capacity for higher output levels when the order book is strong.” (page 17).
(more…)

by John Helmer - Thursday, October 17th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Last week, on October 7, United Company Rusal – the state aluminium monoply managed by Oleg Deripaska (right) — was due in the Nigerian High Court at Abuja to start trial on the claim by a Nigerian-American group, BFIG, for the handover of the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria (Alscon). BFIG has been in the Nigerian courts since a ruling by a US federal judge eight years ago that the jurisdiction for its claims is in Nigeria, not in the US. In July of last year Nigeria’s highest court ruled that the government’s Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) had unlawfully privatized the smelter in Rusal’s favour, rigging the share sale and the price corruptly for Rusal’s benefit.

The American government had already agreed. A US Embassy cable from Abuja, dated August 2004 and published by Wikileaks in 2011, told the State Department the Nigerian government’s action towards Rusal had reflected “a lack of transparency in the bidding process, and perhaps some corruption as well.” BFIG’s lawsuit claims $2.8 billion from Rusal in lost or unrealized profits, damages, and costs.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 15th, 2013
No Comments »