by John Helmer - Thursday, March 7th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The UK Court of Appeal yesterday cut short Russian tanker company Sovcomflot’s 7-year lawsuit, ruling that two earlier High Court judgements exonerating the conduct of former chief executive of Sovcomflot, Dmitry Skarga, must stand. The dismissal by the High Court of most of Sovcomflot’s claims against former chartering partner, Yury Nikitin, has also been endorsed in the judgement issued by a 3-judge panel on March 6. At least $8 million in an award to Skarga by the High Court must now be paid by Sovcomflot. In addition, Skarga will seek further compensation from Sovcomflot of at least $1 million for the costs of the failed appeal.

Sovcomflot has yet to issue a statement on the outcome of one of the bitterest cases of maritime litigation ever waged by a Russian state company in an international court, directed by the current chief executive Sergei Frank (title image) against his predecessor. According to Sovcomflot’s last financial report, “On 2 November 2011 the London’s Court of Appeal (Civil Division) granted the Group leave to appeal against certain important elements of the previous Judgement handed down on 10 December 2010. The Claimants’ appeal will be heard by the Court of Appeal in London starting on 4 March 2013.” Sovcomflot is reporting that from its pending appeal litigation in the UK, it stands to gain “in the region of $172.0 million plus interest.”
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 7th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Severstal, the Russian steelmaker owned by Alexei Mordashov (image, far left, far right) reported today that in the final quarter of 2012 the company suffered a loss of $150 million after revenues fell to $3.12 billion, down 13.2% from the third quarter; earnings (Ebitda) contracted 36.4% to $347 million; and operating profit plunged 63.1% to $136 million. These results were significantly worse than Moscow steel industry analysts had been forecasting.

This is not the biggest quarterly loss at Severstal which Mordashov has run up in recent years. In 2009, for example, the first-quarter loss came to $303.3 million; that was topped in the second quarter by a loss of $685.5 million. The third-quarter bottom-line was barely above break-even, but in the fourth quarter of that year, the loss came to $97.3 million. Then Mordashov achieved his worst-ever quarterly loss — $777.9 million in the first quarter of 2010.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 6th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Andrei Borodin claims that the case against him for fraud and grand larceny from the Bank of Moscow is politically motivated, and that he is the target of persecution by the Russian law enforcement authorities, acting on the orders of senior officials. He alleges that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is the official giving the orders.

The British Government has considered Borodin’s claims in secret proceedings in which Borodin’s lawyers appeared; the Russian Prosecutor-General and the Bank of Moscow did not. There is no public record of the evidence which was presented; no public record of the judge; no public record of the judgement. Borodin was represented by a law firm which includes the former chief counsel of GCHQ, the espionage agency. He isn’t saying what he did for his client. The Home Office, the cabinet-level ministry in London equivalent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow, refuses to say if Borodin has been authorized to remain in the country. It refuses to say if its minister, the Home Secretary, issued Borodin with a residency permit on the basis of a court order, or on the basis of the regulation allowing the minister to grant “discretionary leave”. If Theresa May, the Home Secretary, took such a decision, the one certainty is that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, authorized it.
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by John Helmer - Monday, March 4th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

New records of the Myre Seadiver’s ill-fated stay at Lagos, Nigeria, have been made available, showing the Lagos port authorities and the Nigerian Navy gave permission for the Russian security vessel to enter the port with a stock of small arms, and that these remained on board at an anchorage in the Lagos roadstead for four weeks, before the 15-man crew and the vessel were arrested by the Nigerian Navy.

The documents also reveal that the Lagos shipping agent for the vessel had applied for and received the required authorizations. “There’ll be no issues”, he wrote to the vessel owner, Moran Security Group in Moscow on September 19.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, February 28th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The relatively new President of France is visiting Russia today for the first time since Francois Hollande’s election nine months ago. At the personal and policy levels relations between Hollande and President Vladimir Putin couldn’t be much worse. They disagree over which regimes they should support, and which they should topple. Hollande, his apparat announced through a Sunday newspaper, will be meeting Russians aiming to topple Putin.

The last time the two met – in Paris in June – they disagreed vocally over Hollande’s intervention in Syria on the side of the rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Hollande said of Putin at the time: “We have disagreements over who is responsible for the violence and over the need for Assad to leave. The actions of the Syrian regime are intolerable. Any solution to the crisis requires the departure of Assad.” Putin said Russia is opposed to foreign armed intervention for regime change. “We are not for Assad, neither for his opponents. We want to achieve the situation where the violence ends and there won’t be large-scale civil war. What is happening in Libya, in Iraq? Did they become safer? Where are they heading? Nobody has an answer.”
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by John Helmer - Thursday, February 28th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russian government relations with Nigeria have collapsed after negotiations have failed to free from five months of detention the Russian fleet tender vessel, Myre Seadiver, and its 15-man Russian crew. They have been charged with arms smuggling. The case is now viewed in Moscow as a repeat of the African Pride case, when the Russian crew of a small Greek-owned oil tanker were jailed in Nigeria between 2003 and 2005 over charges of oil smuggling. In both cases, according to Moscow sources, corrupt officers of the Nigerian Navy manipulated local court-ordered arrests of Russian crewmen to extract bribes and other concessions from the Kremlin.

In the Myre Seadiver case, sources close to the affair claim Nigerian Navy officers operate a lucrative protection scheme for oil tankers and other vessels loading at Nigerian ports or transiting through Nigerian coastal waters. Myre Seadiver, owned and operated by the Moscow-based ship security group called Moran Security, has been targeted, the sources say, because Nigerian Navy officers view it as an interloper in their sideline business. Apparently more powerful than Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs and Justice Ministries, with which the Russian Ambassador and Foreign Ministry have been negotiating, the Navy officers are said to want maximum publicity for the case, and thus protracted detention of the crew, as a way of warning other security companies out of the area. Plus compensation for the law violations, port and prison services rendered.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, February 26th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Rusal has lost another round in its international litigation against Andrei Raikov, the former head of bauxite and alumina supplies for Rusal’s smelters, as a New York judge ordered last week more disclosures of secret Rusal bank payments by the Bank of New York.

Raikov, a 20-year friend of Oleg Deripaska, Rusal’s chief executive, has been accused by Rusal lawyers in Moscow and Cyprus of having arranged over-market freight charges and kickbacks on shipping contracts fixed by several shipping companies – Natica Shipping, Aldi Marine, Mercury Shipping and Trading — and their owner, Dmitry Osipov. The shipments took place between 2003 and 2006. In November of 2007 Rusal signed an agreement in London releasing Osipov and the shipping companies “in respect of all claims including fraud”. In 2008 in Moscow a Russian police investigation of the Rusal allegations was terminated with a formal rejection of the allegations for lack of proof.
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by John Helmer - Monday, February 25th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

If you believe what the Washington and London think-tanks want you to believe, Russia’s days as the world’s dominant oil and gas exporter, blackmailer of Ukrainian independence, extortionist of the hypothermic Germans are numbered. Gazprom is on the rocks! Igor Sechin will shortly be yesterday’s man!! For those who believe, the saviour of the free gas-consuming world and the deus ex machina in this particular line of business is SGR — the shale gas revolution.

“The relative fortunes of the United States, Russia, and China — and their ability to exert influence in the world — are tied in no small measure to global gas developments,” a report from Harvard University’s Belfer Center and Rice University’s Baker Institute claimed last July.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, February 21st, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander — the English proverb is not about birds or cooking, but about equal treatment. When it comes to operating tanker fleets in and out of Russia’s ports, foreign-owned vessels have been enjoying equality of access for some time. That may be about to change, at least in Arctic waters.

Russia’s Sovcomflot, the state-owned oil and gas fleet operator, has proposed to form a consortium with gas producer Novatek to build and operate a fleet of new gas carriers for the Northern Sea Route. Details were disclosed last week by Dmitry Rusanov, an executive in Sovcomflot’s gas fleet division. In interviews with reporters in Moscow, Rusanov said that competing fleet operators would be ineffective and should not be selected by Novatek. “If everyone would keep their own technical management, the effectiveness of the project as a whole will decline. Shipowners will fight among themselves for trained crews, race each other for salaries. In the end it will not benefit anyone, especially Novatek. and therefore a single operator is needed.”
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by John Helmer - Thursday, February 21st, 2013
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