By John Helmer, Moscow

Interpol publishes the names of less than a third of the people identified by Red Notices as wanted for arrest. That’s so fugitives can’t know the risks of apprehension they run when they try crossing international borders. The Red Notice for Bekhzod Akhmedov has been published because the authorities in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, want it to appear that Akhmedov is still on the run – that is to say, alive and well, and not in Uzbekistan. If after arguing with Gulnara Karimova last May or June he never made it out of the country, if he has been dead since then, Interpol is helping to cover up the crime of how he died, and who killed him.

Karimova is the senior daughter of Islam Karimov, the President of Uzbekistan since the end of the Soviet Union in 1990. Karimova is the dominant business figure in the country. Her father, just turned 75, is serving out the last of the terms allowed by the Uzbek constitution. The next presidential election, due in December 2014, has been postponed to March 2015. That allows just two years to fix the succession on terms that will suit the Karimov family, but powerful enough to keep a lid on every variety of dissent which has been repressed in the country to date. That’s a tall order – expensive too.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Lars Nyberg (right), chief executive until Friday afternoon of TeliaSonera, the Swedish and Finnish telecommunications group, is something of an expert on the blowback effect. Firearms and forensics experts understand that blowback is what happens after a gunshot, when the vacuum inside the gun barrel draws in blood and tissue from the person who’s just been shot. Even if the corpse cannot be found, the blowback evidence can convict the shooter whose prints are on the gun, of murder. The typical defence in situations like that is no corpus delicti, no evidence of crime.

In the case of TeliaSonera’s payment of more (much more) than $320 million to a one-person company registered in Gibraltar allegedly having nothing to do with Gulnara Karimova (centre), Nyberg claims he is innocent of intending corruptly to advance TeliaSonera’s profits in its Uzbek mobile telephone concession. Karimova is the senior daughter of Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, and the dominant business figure in the country.
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by John Helmer - Monday, February 4th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Do snaps of businessmen playing cards, or dancing the lezginka together, prove they are in a concert-party relationship which is an unauthorized way of making money, according to Rule 9 of the Takeover Code for companies listed on the London Stock Exchange — if they keep it secret from other shareholders?

Zelimkhan Mutsoev (left and centre, upper and lower images), Gavriil Yushvaev (right, right) and Suleiman Kerimov (centre, left) were all born in the Caucasus within a decade of each other. As grown-ups they have taken different career paths, and they have made large sums of money independently. Two of them, Mutsoev and Kerimov, have also acted together to take over Russia’s second potash producer Silvinit, merge it with the leader Uralkali, and create a Russian potash monopoly. The Federal Antimonopoly Service found no infraction of Russian rules in that. But if they are now trying the same thing to acquire Mikhail Prokhorov’s 38% stake in Polyus Gold, Russia’s leading goldminer, and then merge it with Polymetal, the UK rules apply because both Polyus Gold and Polymetal are premium listings on the LSE.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, January 31st, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russia’s state aluminium monopoly, United Company Rusal, has requested the help of the federal US court in Los Angeles in an attempt to delay or prevent the Nigerian courts and Nigerian government returning the country’s sole aluminium smelter to the Nigerian-American company which originally won the privatization auction of the asset in 2004, before losing it to Rusal.

Scheduled for hearing on February 12, the Rusal move may backfire, as similar legal tactics have already gone against Rusal last year in New York. Whether the Los Angeles court rules in favour of or against Rusal, it is likely to trigger parallel applications throughout the US for evidence disclosure orders by the US courts in support of other international lawsuits against Rusal companies, bank accounts, and Oleg Deripaska, the Kremlin’s trustee for the shareholder trust which controls the group.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, January 30th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

You don’t have to be a commercial rival of Ziyavudin Magomedov to notice that the billion-dollar business ventures he promises to deliver often fail to materialize. There was his claim, for example, that with his control stake of the United Grain Company (OZK is the Russian acronym), he intended to bid for control of an Australian grain company GrainCorp. There was the promise of coal and grain terminals on Russia’s fareastern coast. Then there was the fleet of tankers to carry oil between Russia’s northern ports and Rotterdam, powered by the latest liquefied natural gas technology. Not one of those claims has materialized.

What then of Magomedov’s promise to the Rotterdam port authority, reported by Dutch sources, that if he was granted permission to build a new oil terminal, he would fill it with an extra 30,000 tonnes per year (600,000 barrels per day)? The port authority has done what it said it would do – Magomedov has his terminal permit and a deadline of two years in which to start stocking and transhipping oil. But can he deliver? Where will the extra Russian crude supplies come from, especially since the Russian oil majors, like Rosneft, LUKoil, Surgutneftegaz, Gazpromneft, and Bashneft, have their own Rotterdam plans, and no interest in sharing their profit with Magomedov? A leading European oil shipment expert says: “In my understanding, Mr Magomedov is a bubble blower.”
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russia employs a special representative to Africa, Mikhail Margelov (rear window), whose best known statement of the policy he represents is: “Russia has returned to Africa, and Africa to Russia.” Margelov doesn’t answer questions about what this means. He was scarcely more explicit when he was the Russian negotiator for Muammar Qaddafi’s exit from Libya – “the most delicate topic” he called it in June 2011. Four months later Qaddafi was shot dead trying to escape.

Libya had been the largest debtor in Africa owing money to Russia; in 2008 then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (centre window, right) announced that Russia was writing off $4.5 billion, all of the debt accepted by both sides, on condition that the Libyans agreed to offset the write-off with contracts to buy arms, railways, power plants, and gas production ventures worth roughly twice that amount.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, January 27th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russian oil company LUKoil plans to launch commercial production of diamonds at its Grib diamond mine in September, the company confirms. It is the first diamond mine to be opened in Russia since Alrosa, the state diamond miner, commissioned the Nyurba mine in Sakha in 2003. Alrosa’s Lomonosov diamond mine, less than 50 kilometres from the Grib site, has been in development since 2005, and the first stripping for the Botyubinskaya mine in Yakutia commenced last month.

On LUKoil’s and Alrosa’s current estimates, the Grib mine with 98 million carats holds roughly twice the volume of mineable diamonds compared to Lomonosov next door. Grib ranks fourth in size of reserves on the table of Russia’s diamond mines, after Udachny, Jubilee, and Mir, all being worked by Alrosa in Sakha.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, January 24th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Noone at Davos this week owes as much money to as many banks, and has escaped as many default notices, as Oleg Deripaska, the Kremlin’s trustee for the state aluminium monopoly United Company Rusal. No surprise then that as he flew into Zurich enroute for this week’s World Economic Forum, the Sky television network broadcast an interview in which Deripaska attacked the UK Financial Services Authority for being “too conservative”; claimed London-based financial institutions are “not so attractive” as their US counterparts for raising new loans; and advised the British government to “listen better to City [of London] bankers.”

Playing the US government off against the British, Deripaska said he prefers the “great opportunity” in the US, “the cheapest cost of capital”, and an attitude towards him which is “very open”.

Deripaska wasn’t referring to the recent opening in New York of his own secret financial records. The Sky reporter didn’t know to ask about them. Deripaska’s collocutors in Davos ought to be better informed.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, January 24th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Most American geopolitical risk analysts live in a row of northeastern towns far from the tornado belt. So they don’t understand what sowing the wind, reaping the whirlwind means. The Anglo-American strategists who thought it clever strategy to launch a little war in Libya, kill Muammar Qaddafi, and help themselves to the new regime’s oil and gas concessions are slow to follow that the whirlwind there is now blowing south and westward. Last year in Mali, last week in Algeria, soon (again) in Nigeria. Attacks on the wellhead, refinery or pipeline – gas or oil – will soon enough reveal how counter-productive are Francois Hollande’s bombers and paras; and by contrast, how fulsome and stable Russian gas supplies, natural or liquefied, will prove to be, when the whirlwind really starts blowing across the Sahara towards central Africa’s energy exporters.

Business risk analysts do better at wind detection — time to go short on energy companies with west and north African exposure; go long on Gazprom, Novatek, Rosneft. Alexei Miller, Leonid Mikhelson, Gennady Timchenko and Igor Sechin are crying all the way to the bank.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

At your peril, the one thing you must never say to a ranking Israeli intelligence officer, even one in mufti or retirement, is that he is suffering from a superiority complex. For the clinical symptoms of the affliction include conceptual deafness, ideological blindness. These stem from the frontal-lobe idea that the victim earned victory over his adversaries by his own wits; that those wits are unbeatable; and that accordingly he can never be bested or made to look stupid or act the fool.

In strategy, this leads to the first law of Barnum (of American circus fame) – there is a sucker born every minute. The second Barnum law is that the first starts with yourself.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, January 20th, 2013
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