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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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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