By John Helmer, Moscow

Ziyavudin Magomedov’s hold on the ports of Novorossiysk and Primorsk, and the oil which flows into and out of them, deteriorated suddenly and publicly this week. This has triggered new concern in The Netherlands that Magomedov’s Summa Group will be unable to find the money to break ground, as scheduled next month, at their new oil terminal project at Rotterdam. There is also concern among Rotterdam traders that if Magomedov cannot get the Russian crude oil he needs to fill his new tanks, he may substitute it with a flood of ship (bunker) fuel that will push down on the price of Rotterdam bunkers. Magomedov’s troubles in Moscow are thus causing a negative domino impact on his Dutch business allies.

The story of how Magomedov won a Rotterdam competition in 2010 for Tank Terminal Europort West (TEW), with a promise to deliver 600,000 barrels a day of Russian crude, can be read here. Last week, the state crude oil pipeline company Transneft went public in a direct attack on Magomedov and his Summa group, hinting that there will no Russian crude oil for the Rotterdam project, at least not from Primorsk port, whose pipelines Transneft controls, but whose management Magomedov runs through the Novorossiysk Commercial Seaport Company (NCSP). Recent disclosures from oil companies working with Magomedov’s oil trading subsidiaries, such as Souz Petrolium (not a spelling mistake), suggest that Magomedov is switching to trade of large volumes of Bunker C, the ship fuel with the highest sulphur content.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, February 19th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Yury Borisovich Rogov was such a long, close and faithful friend of Oleg Deripaska’s that he was invited to stand on Deripaska’s right at his wedding in 2001. To the left of Deripaska’s wife, Polina Yumasheva, are her parents, Valentin Yumashev and Tatiana Dyachenko — the former aide to ex-President Boris Yeltsin and Yeltsin’s second daughter. Rogov was also identified last year as a documentary witness with crucial evidence about Deripaska’s business dealings, assets, borrowings, and partnership with Michael Cherney (Chernoy). According to a UK High Court submission by Cherney’s lawyers, presented on July 9, 2012, “these documents will repay careful study, and will undoubtedly be the subject of significant focus at trial. Taken together, they constitute a substantial body of evidence in support of Mr Cherney‘s case, confirming that Radom held a number of entities which owned aluminium assets, including Sibal when that was incorporated in July 1999, and that Mr Cherney was in partnership with Mr Deripaska.” Rogov’s involvement is identified in footnote 386.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, February 19th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Last week Mother Nature delivered a once-in-a-billion-geological-year event — one of the largest natural diamonds ever found in Russia, at Alrosa’s Yubileynaya (Jubilee) mine in fareastern Sakha (Yakutia) (image right). The American diamonds found to date have been peanuts by comparison.

Then ПРИРОДА МАТЬ despatched a meteorite at 54,000 kilometres per hour to burn, bang, break up, and drop over Chelyabinsk city in the central Urals (image left). Not since the Tunguska event of 1908 has such a thing happened in Russia. The US reports three times more meteorite falls than Russia; but at an estimated 10 tonnes by the time it was over Chelyabinsk, the latest meteorite was bigger than most of its American counterparts. It killed noone, but flying glass and blast effects injured about 1,100. Early the same week, a combination of Mother Nature’s blizzards and tornadoes in the US killed at least 9, and inflicted far more valuable damage.
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by John Helmer - Monday, February 18th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week took a tour of Africa – Algeria, Mozambique, South Africa, and Guinea — in part because President Vladimir Putin told him to, ahead of Putin’s own visit to Africa in March. In part, Lavrov went to the Republic of Guinea at the bidding of Oleg Deripaska to settle a billion-dollar dispute Deripaska failed to fix when he and the Guinean President, Alpha Conde, were to meet in Davos, Switzerland, early this month. Lavrov does Deripaska’s bidding in Washington, too. He is generally more successful executing Putin’s requirements than Deripaska’s.

The stop in Algeria was strategic since the Libyan war began spilling American and British-armed Islamic guerrillas in every direction, threatening in particular gas and oil exporters like Algeria, Niger, Congo-Brazzaville, and Nigeria. Lavrov was discrete in saying ‘We told you so’. He said instead: “If we wish to avoid double standards, we need to stop guiding ourselves by them. I think that the recent events related to the development of the consequences of the so called Arab spring, will serve as a lesson to those who recently guided themselves by double standards.”
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by John Helmer - Sunday, February 17th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It is now clear, let’s say clearer, what business has been keeping the elected Russian official in charge of foreign affairs in the upper house of parliament, and in representing Russia in the affairs of Africa so active that he has been unable to respond to questions. According to his spokesman, Senator Mikhail Margelov has been just too busy. What this means, the spokesman adds, is “the very intensive agenda of his visits.”

Since December 2008 Mikhail Margelov, a senator of the Federation Council representing Pskov oblast, has been designated as a special representative of the President for different aspects of African affairs. At the start, he was troubleshooter for the Sudan. His mandate was then expanded geographically to cover pirates onshore and off the coast of Somalia. But when then-President Dmitry Medvedev made his first official visit to Egypt, Nigeria, and Namibia in June 2010, Margelov wasn’t in the delegation. Someone else, not Margelov, was then officially titled Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for the Relations with African Leaders, popping up to negotiate for Oleg Deripaska and United Company Rusal in the west African republic of Guinea. He was ineffective, and in March 2011, a Kremlin decree reassigned the Special Representative title to Margelov, relieving Alexei Vasiliev, an academic, of his duties.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, February 14th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In a hearing in federal US District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Rusal, the Russian aluminium monopoly, was challenged by Judge Carla Woehrle to substantiate its court claims in London and elsewhere against the Nigerian government and a Nigerian-American company, BFI Group (BFIG). Through its US attorney, Jamie Bartlett, Rusal claimed it did not know what, if anything, is happening in the claim it has lodged in the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA). Bartlett also told the judge that Rusal has launched no other court claims in Nigeria or the US.

At stake is the future of Nigeria’s only aluminium plant, the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria (ALSCON), which Rusal took from BFIG amid charges of favouritism and corruption. Click here for the full story. Rusal’s court moves are intended to discredit BFIG, which won Nigerian court approval last July for restoration of its acquisition of the plant by privatization tender in 2004.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 13th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russian pork farmers and producers told Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last week that government action is stripping them of profitability, as the squeeze between the rising price of feed grain and the falling price of pork is killing the industry’s plan to expand domestic production and replace imports. In anticipation of worsening profit reports, the London stock market has sliced the share prices of the only two listed pork producers in the top-5, RusAgro and Cherkizovo, by 56% and 46% respectively, trimming their market capitalization to the $800 million level.

A hearing on February 6 at the State Duma’s Agriculture Committee heard testimony that the pork sector was hit with the biggest concessions of any of the farm and foodstuff markets when Russian trade negotiators finalized the accession agreement with the World Trade Organization (WTO) last year.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, February 12th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Long after the great siege generals – Alexander, Napoleon – enunciated the principle of concentrating fire against the weakest points of an enemy’s walls – the Red Army devised the application combining the most explosives for the cheapest outlay in a saturation pattern which didn’t need to be accurate. It was the BM-13 until the secret was out. Then it was called the Katyusha. Nikolai Tokarev (upper right), chief executive of Transneft, launched an unprecedented fusillade of that this morning against Ziyavudin Magomedov (lower right). Transneft against Summa Group. President Putin’s man against Prime Minister Medvedev’s.

Transneft, Russia’s state-controlled oil pipeline company, has disclosed it wants to replace the current board chairman and chief executive of Novorossiysk Commercial Seaport Company (NCSP; other acronyms in use are NCSC and NMTP), the largest of Russia’s publicly listed port companies. In an announcement this morning, Tokarev accused Magomedov’s Summa Group of working against Transneft’s interests at the port, even though the two groups share a 50% shareholding on parity basis since they made a combined takeover of the former shareholders of the port company in 2010.
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by John Helmer - Monday, February 11th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In Russian, it’s called шило в жопе; literally, a bootmaker’s awl in the arse. In New York Yiddish, it’s shpilkes in tukhas, which is a bit gentler because the sharp instrument in the posterior is a needle. The meaning, in general and in the Japanese case, is a case of self-induced agitation from which acts of aggressive and misguided frustration are likely to follow.

Yesterday, the Japanese Foreign Ministry issued this announcement to the BBC: “Today, around 03:00 (06:00 GMT), military fighters belonging to Russian Federation breached our nation’s airspace above territorial waters off Rishiri island in Hokkaido.” There has been no comparable public announcement of an alleged Russian airspace penetration since 2008. This one comes a few days in advance of the visit to Washington of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe. Forty-eight hours earlier, Japan’s Defence Minister, Itsunori Onodera, announced that on January 30 “something like fire-control radar was directed at a Japan Self-Defence Maritime escort ship in the East China Sea.” He claimed the reason for the delay between the radar signal and the public disclosure was the time required to determine that a Chinese fire-control radar had indeed locked on the Japanese vessel, and that Japanese officials, US advisors and others judged that publicity would be a good thing.
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by John Helmer - Friday, February 8th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

If you are a dog, then you know that 99.96% of your genes are shared with the wild grey wolf; and that both of you evolved from Papa Canid. This doesn’t mean that if you meet each other in the wilds, you’ll not turn on your fire-control mechanism, like our Chinese friends are doing to the Japanese, much to the disapproval of sentimentalists in the Anglo-American press. These also share much of their genetic material with Papa Canid, though their evolution has been retarded.

Fire-control mechanisms behave er, mechanically – click, press, scan, fire. Last month Yegor Borisov, prime minister of the Sakha republic, in Russia’s fareast, issued an order permitting the killing of up to 3,000 wolves, and paying a bounty of Rb35,000 for each kill. Rb10,000 will come from the budgets of the five uluses (municipal districts) most populated at the moment with wolves. Another Rb25,000 will be paid by the Sakha Ministry of Agriculture. They will recoup some of the outlays when the wolf skins are turned by Yakutian manufactories into wolf hats, wolf coats, and souvenirs for sale. Advance orders can be telephoned this month to Sakhabult, the store for the National Consortium for Support of Professional Hunters, 25 Lenin Avenue, Yakutsk, telephone +7(4112) 45 32 27.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 6th, 2013
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