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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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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