By John Helmer, Moscow

Blimps long ago lost their value as a means of cargo transportation, military reconnaissance, or anti-aircraft defence; whilst the helium that fills them – more safely than the combustible hydrogen gas which brought down the Hindenburg in 1937 – is sharply increasing its value in other applications. But the US, which is currently producing most of the world’s helium, is short of fresh supplies and low on stocks. This is because the government-set price is rising too slowly to cover the combination of rising demand, delivery and distribution costs, and spot-price speculation. To fix this in the short term, the US Congress is considering a new bill, the Helium Stewardship Act of 2012, but no vote is likely on that until next year. Much of the recent reporting of a helium shortage, and threat to helium-supplied operation of medical scanning machines, has been stimulated by lobbying for the enactment of this bill by the commercial interests; naturally, they want to see the US government lid on helium prices lifted.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, December 5th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The state-owned tanker company Sovcomflot is to avoid the London Stock Exchange (LSE) for its initial public offering (IPO). Instead, it is reviving a decade-old plan of former chief executive Dmitry Skarga and will attempt to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). A source in a position to know said the NYSE choice had been made a couple of months ago. The move to New York by Sovcomflot follows High Court rulings in London which have judged Sovocomflot’s management to have acted dishonestly in its pursuit of fraud and bribery litigation against Skarga, another former chief executive, and a former chartering partner.

The proposed move also comes after the Fitch ratings agency has issued a downgrade for Sovcomflot, claiming the failure of the company to sell shares — deferred until next year after several earlier postponements — is weakening its ability to cover its debts, as revenues remain under pressure from poor freight rates. Last week Sovcomflot reported it was loss-making in the September quarter – the first loss the company has reported since it began issuing audited reports according to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

There is a famous old anecdote in which Zmei Gorinich, the three-headed Russian dragon, sits hungrily down to table, and proceeds to stuff each of his mouths with food presented to him by villagers too terrified to do otherwise. At night, however, the dragon’s stomach rumbles, then swells, and finally explodes. With his death, the villagers celebrate their liberation. The moral of the story: don’t eat through three mouths if you’ve got only one arse.

So far as is known, Oleg Deripaska has only one arse. But a recent investigation of the feeding and digestion habits of United Company Rusal, the aluminium monopoly which Deripaska controls, was intended to count the dozens of throats through which sale revenues of the company’s production units are passed, before the earnings disappear abroad.
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by John Helmer - Friday, November 30th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Alrosa, the Russian diamond miner, signed an agreement on Wednesday [November 28] to supply selected rough diamonds to Tiffany of New York. Signing with Alrosa chief executive Fyodor Andreyev was Andrew Hart, president of Laurelton Diamonds, a Belgian subsidiary of Tiffany, as well as executive vice president of Tiffany Corporation in New York. The Alrosa press release reports that there had been single-lot supply deals on spot market terms between the two in the past, but this is the first long-term agreement between them. According to Andreyev, it “will make our partnership permanent and serve to increase the supply of diamonds to Tiffany.”

This is the second time in a month when Alrosa has publicized diamond supply contracts. On November 13 Alrosa announced it had signed a two-year contract with Conroy Cheng, executive director of Chow Tai Fook, the Chinese diamond-cutter and jewellery manufacturer of China.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, November 29th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Reporters can hardly call themselves investigative journalists if their object is to report the obvious in plain sight — that people keep their purposes and their assets to themselves. But when reporters hide their own purposes and fortunes as assiduously as those they investigate, the purpose of the chase has been compromised, and the outcome isn’t so much an exposé as a cliché.

For the Guardian newspaper of London, there may be no cliché about Russia that isn’t worth repeating and reporting again, and again. But when the paper’s team of investigative reporters discovered this week that according to the headline, “Russians profit from Britain’s offshore secrecy”, was this an investigation of the wealthiest Russians living and working in London – Roman Abramovich and Oleg Deripaska? Was it an expose of how Alisher Usmanov managed to sell almost $1.7 billion worth of shares in his Megafon company on the London Stock Exchange before the price plummeted? Not at all.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, November 29th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Not even the two people usually familiar with the matter were able to convince Bloomberg that there has been genuine demand in the London market for Megafon shares at Alisher Usmanov’s asking price. Instead, as the company and its underwriters tried to sign buyers before the subscription book closed this afternoon, brokerage sources claimed the initial public offering (IPO) was anchored by an order for $170 million. That’s 10% of the shares on offer – if the company is following its undertaking to sell 15% at a base valuation of $11 billion.

While speculation of the identity of the “anchor investor” focused on major investment funds, a source really familiar with the matter claimed that she “wouldn’t be surprised if it is ‘friends and family’. That seems to be the tactic these days.”
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The International Trade Administration (ITA) of the US Department of Commerce has revealed that the new reference prices it set early this month for imports to the US of Russian-made rolled steel products will rise by 47% over the prevailing regime. However, the US evidence suggests the impact on Russian exporters will be slight.

According to Mara Lee, a spokesman for ITA, through September 30 just 257,445 tonnes of Russian hot-rolled steel subject to the reference pricing were imported, at a value of $168 million. That represents an average landed price of $652.55 per tonne. The spokesman said her agency will not speculate on what impact the hike in the reference prices will have on the volume of Russian shipments after the new price controls take effect on November 15. But depending on the category of the steel product and the US demand, there remains enough margin in the new pricing to allow some Russian exports to squeak through. At the same time, most of the surge of Russian steel sales to the US over the past two years has come in the form of semi-finished products, and they aren’t affected at all by the price controls.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

For a country of Russia’s physical size, trains are an obvious strategic necessity. So it’s peculiar that there is a monopoly for pulling and pushing those trains from place to place, and that this monopoly for building locomotives should be held by a single man, who, with Kremlin approval, has buried his interest in a secretive private company in The Netherlands. That company is called Breakers Investments. The man who controls it is Iskander Makhmudov (image), otherwise known as the heir to Mikhail Chernoy’s (Cherney) copper and coal businesses.

Through the procurement of locomotives by state-owned Russian Railways (RZhD), money is moved from state-regulated transport tariffs collected by the rail operating units and from the state-subsidized RZhD investment budget through the Transmash group of companies; then in the form of dividends from Transmash’s profits it is paid into Breakers Investments. What remains a mystery is how the large profits declared by Transmash disappear when the balance-sheets of Breakers Investments show a loss.
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by John Helmer - Monday, November 26th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Corruption is a global problem.

That’s one of the opening lines in the US Department of Justice’s guide to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law enacted in Washington in 1977 to prohibit US individuals and companies from offering inducements of value to the officials of foreign governments. “Corruption impedes economic growth,” says the guide, “by diverting public resources from important priorities such as health, education, and infrastructure. It undermines democratic values and public accountability and weakens the rule of law… International corruption also undercuts good governance and impedes U.S. efforts to promote freedom and democracy, end poverty, and combat crime and terrorism across the globe. Corruption is also bad for business.”

When the US Congress was defining the corruption the statute was meant to prevent, it sought “to make clear that the offer, payment, promise, or gift, must be intended to induce the recipient to misuse his official position; for example, wrongfully to direct business to the payor or his client, to obtain preferential legislation or regulations, or to induce a foreign official to fail to perform an official function.”
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by John Helmer - Thursday, November 22nd, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The deadline for Canadian shareholders to accept or reject Alexei Mordashov’s takeover terms for High River Gold (HRG) is fixed for next Tuesday, November 27. The latest count to be released to the market suggests he will fail because the holdout shareholders are convinced the offer price is too low. The price point isn’t news. The shareholder count may be.

According to Chris Charlwood, one of the coordinators of the HRG minorities, “we have collected confirmations from shareholders with approximately 90.2 million shares (10.73% of total HRG shares and 43% of the minorities rremaining) that they will not tender to Nord Gold’s offer. This includes shares owned in funds managed by Eric Sprott (HRG’s largest minority shareholder). Nord Gold would have needed 90% of minority to tender to the current offer in order to squeeze the rest out. With 43% of the minority indicating they will not tender, this should prevent this from happening on the Nov. 27th expiry date.”
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
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