By John Helmer, Moscow

The text of the Guinean Government’s agreement with United Company Rusal for the prolongation of its Dian-Dian concession – one of the largest unmined bauxite deposits in the world – reveals an escape clause to enable Rusal to avoid the obligations the Guineans have been trying to enforce since the concession was first signed twelve years ago.

The new document, titled Annex No. 11 to the original July 21, 2001, Dian-Dian convention was signed on December 28, 2012. Signing for the government was the Guinean Minister of Mines and Geology, Mohammed Lamine Fofana; for Rusal, Vladislav Soloviev, first deputy chief executive. Three days later Rusal issued its summary of what had been agreed, revealing that it has extended the time required to meet its original obligations until 2019, and longer. The terms of the deal apparently ended threats by the government of President Alpha Conde, and predecessor governments over several years, to cancel the Dian-Dian concession because of Rusal’s failure to honour the original terms, invest and build a new bauxite mine, along with a refinery to convert the bauxite ore into alumina for smelting into aluminium.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, March 31st, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Sergei Kirienko has a reputation which survives no matter how selfish his aims, destructive his methods, ruinous his results. He was small enough to be looked down upon by President Boris Yeltsin; he hasn’t grown under President Vladimir Putin. As prime minister in 1998 – the smallest, shortest PM in Russian history — he presided over the government’s bond default and collapse of domestic savings, only to disappear abroad, some allege (falsely) with a fortune. Since Kirienko doesn’t answer unscripted questions from the press, he never admits making mistakes. Not even the most costly one in Russia’s recent history.

Russia managed to survive that one. It is less certain that Kamchatka would survive the one Kirienko as head of the State Atomic Energy Corporation (Rosatom) has been planning. That is the installation of the floating nuclear reactor vessel, Academician Lomonosov (right image), a 21,500-tonne barge being completed in St. Petersburg, and scheduled to be swtiched on at the Vilyuchinsk Naval Base in Avacha Bay, less than 20 kilometers from the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 28th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska, the chief executive of the state aluminium monopoly Rusal, believes in an ethical code in which there’s little room for recreation, let alone holidays. He says: “I simply enjoy working. Work just happens to be something I have always enjoyed doing ever since I was a child. With the sort of opportunities I now have I can influence the work of a lot of companies. That is a lot of responsibility. As long as I can do what I am good at, managing businesses, I am going to continue doing it.”

His work ethic goes back a long way. “I was eleven when I received my first pay check working at a reduction plant. I was an electrician’s apprentice, in other words, I was a real worker and even had my own locker.”
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Oligarch ownership hasn’t given Russian goldmines a good name, or at least not a stable one. So if you take the 5-year view and judge that the gold price has peaked, while the cost of developing new mines is going up, the grades going down, you don’t need to be an oligarch with a short attention span like Mikhail Prokhorov, to figure out that the prudent investment direction is the exit.

When Prokhorov sold his 37.78% stake in Polyus Gold last month for $3.6 billion, his Onexim holding announced: “in light of …our view of the balance between the company’s achievements and its potential, we made the decision that the time had come for Onexim Group to sell and realize its profit.” On the 5-year view there have value peaks on paper, but ultimately no profit. Prokhorov has also failed to find an international goldminer willing to buy the assets. As Russian dealmaking goes, selling to Suleiman Kerimov, or to his stand-ins, as Prokhorov has announced, is a nothing more than a state bank bailout.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 26th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

President Vladimir Putin will raise with African leaders this week the case of the Myre Seadiver and its 15-man Russian crew, who were arrested and imprisoned in Nigeria last October. The story so far. Putin will be in Durban, South Africa, on March 26 and 27.

The Myre Seadiver crew have been accused by the Nigerian Navy of arms smuggling, charges the Russians say were fabricated by the Navy after a month of authorized portcall anchored in the harbour of Port Lagos. The Navy has de facto control of Nigerian coastal and maritime border enforcement, after blocking the establishment of an organizationally separate coast guard. A government attempt announced earlier this month to give the Nigerian police superior authority through a new maritime command covering ports, territorial waters and inland waterways, is expected to suffer the same fate.
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by John Helmer - Monday, March 25th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

If seated in the dark at the Bolshoi Theatre, even a man of consuming narcissism as Boris Yeltsin was could tell the tights from the tutus. But Yeltsin saw himself as the prima donna, battementing and glissading into the old tsar’s box, Dress Circle centre front. At the Bolshoi, Stalin preferred the stage-side box, screened from the audience by drapery, with the secret door set into the wall of the buffet; that way he got a close-up of the good bits, and could come and go as he chose. Stalin’s taste in music was also superior to Yeltsin’s: he could tell the difference between harmony and noise, and – drunk or sober – Stalin could dance.

There is nothing particularly Russian about the habit tsars, dukes, and their hangers-on had of patronising companies of nubile young men and women; trying them out in skimpy or bulgy costumes on stage; and then trying them on in bed. The imperial ballet theatres of Russia – the Bolshoi in Moscow, the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg – were sex farms, harems without the cost of squabbles over inheritance. To the Russian court then they were what seminaries and convents are to the Catholic priesthood today, or Her Britannic Majesty’s stables to her Guardsmen. The imperial Japanese had special terms for it, acknowledging the use-by period for bedmates, er artists, lasted for no more than ten years before replacements were auditioned; if homosexuality and paedophilia aren’t likely to offend, look up 男色 (nanshoku) and 若衆 (wakashu).
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by John Helmer - Sunday, March 24th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

When Nathaniel Rothschild sued for libel in the UK High Court in 2011, he was claiming that a report in the Daily Mail, published by Associated Newspapers on May 22, 2010, had libelled him for reporting that he had taken Peter Mandelson on a private jet-plane trip to Moscow to eat with Oleg Deripaska, then a banya with same, plus more eating, talking, and sight-seeing in the Siberian smelter town of Abakan. The reported events had occurred in January of 2005. The circumstances suggested a conflict of interest on Mandelson’s part, the newspaper angled. Rothschild went to court to prove that he would never do such a thing to a friend (Mandelson), and that it was defamation of his character to suggest he might. That was the first sting.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 21st, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The US, Germany, Turkey and the NATO allies think they have almost all the ordnance required to produce regime change in Syria, as they had in Libya. But they don’t appear to have the €5 billion required to do the trick in Cyprus, after the regime change the Cypriots themselves had voted into power a month ago. Saturday’s gambit, to seize this money from Russian and other depositors in Cyprus banks, appeared a safe bet in Brussels because apparently influential Russians – First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov – had signalled their willingness to go along.

But Shuvalov and Siluanov are clerks, no-counts politically. The one Russian who counts has now been presented by the western alliance with an opportunity to effect a strategic power shift in the Mediterranean at minimal cost upfront and little forward risk. It’s an object lesson in the greater value of money over arms in grand strategy.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The share price of United Company Rusal, the Russian aluminium monopoly, has dropped into the three Hong Kong-dollar range for the first time. In three years of its stock market history, the company’s chief executive, Oleg Deripaska, has let slip about $13 billion in value, two-thirds of Rusal’s original worth. At a current market capitalization of $7.9 billion, Rusal’s equity is now a fraction of its $10.8 billion net debt. Its debt to equity ratio is almost 10x; that is the worst ratio of any Russian oligarch, far ahead of second-placed Igor Zyuzin of Mechel at 7.6x.

How can such a record be made to appear other than it is?

You don’t have to know much about dynastic history – the process by which one greedy thug kills another, and then orders his public relations agents to depict the outcome as God’s will, and his lawyers to sue anyone who says otherwise. Look at the top two faces – it’s obvious, isn’t it, which of them won the English kingship in battle in 1485, killing the other, and sticking a dagger in his buttocks on the corpse’s way to an unmarked grave?
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by John Helmer - Monday, March 18th, 2013
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Starting sometime this morning and ending by lunch hour, President Vladimir Putin called an urgent meeting of government ministers and advisors responsible for the economy. Reporters were not allowed at the scene; no list of those attending has been released by the Kremlin; no official photographs have been published. The Kremlin website discloses no other meetings on the President’s morning agenda. The announcement of what happened at the meeting is tagged 12:30. “Vladimir Putin,” the official announcement says, “met with the officials of the Presidential Executive Office and the presidential aides and advisers responsible for economic matters to discuss the economic situation in the Eurozone, in particular in Cyprus. The President said that the decision to impose an additional tax on bank deposits in Cyprus, if it goes ahead, would be an unfair, unprofessional and dangerous step.”
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by John Helmer - Monday, March 18th, 2013
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