By John Helmer, Moscow

The London Paralympics aren’t over for BP’s chief executive, Bob Dudley. Even if he wins gold, he’s finishing with fewer limbs than he started with.

According to the Financial Times version of the negotiation to date between Rosnft, BP, TNK-BP, and between Igor Sechin, Bob Dudley, and Mikhail Fridman, a deal in which Rosneft buys out the 50% Russian shareholding in TNK-BP, and then buys out the equally sized BP stake for a total of about $56 billion, “ would mark a victory for Bob Dudley, BP’s chief executive, extricating the UK oil major from a partnership with a group of Soviet-born billionaires that has been plagued by often tempestuous shareholder conflicts. The deal would give BP $15bn-$20bn in cash plus a stake of 10-20 per cent in Rosneft, one person close to the situation said.”
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by John Helmer - Thursday, October 18th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The disclosure of the costs Roman Abramovich incurred in defending against and defeating Boris Berezovsky’s claims — confirmed by an order of Justice Dame Elizabeth Gloster on October 12 — have turned out to be less for Berezovsky to pay than had been speculated in the press. But that’s because he had a contingency fee agreement (CFA) with his law firm, Addleshaw Goddard, which in turn carried an insurance policy. Berezovsky’s obligation to pay his lawyers depending on his winning. If he lost, as he did, Addleshaws’ insurer paid. The details of a “partial CFA deal with the client” have been reported in the London lawyer media.

What the order for Berezovsky to pay Abramovich £35 million ($56 million) also means is that Michael Cherney’s (Chernoy) legal bill for his similarly long, comparably complex and costly case against Oleg Deripaska was probably about the same amount. Consequently, it is possible to deduce how much Deripaska agreed to pay Cherney for the settlement they announced on September 27 – and how Deripaska financed the pay-out.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 16th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Vladimir Ashurkov was advertising his principles last week in the Moscow Times. He is currently executive director of the Foundation for Fighting Corruption, one of the organs of the political opposition led by Alexei Navalny. Ashurkov is described by the newspaper as the principal fund-raiser for Navalny, and himself a candidate for election to the coordination council of the opposition movements.

He has identified his last employer from 2006 to 2012 as Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group. Before that, between 2004 and 2006, Ashurkov confirms he was vice president for strategic development of Sergei Generalov’s holding, Industrial Investors. Those were the years when one of Generalov’s strategic developments was a deal to acquire the Georgian mining company called Madneuli; borrow heavily from Deutsche Bank against its future gold production; and spend the money acquiring goldmining companies in Armenia and elsewhere in the name of GeoProMining, a Caribbean island-registered entity.
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by John Helmer - Monday, October 15th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A case that has been going through the courts in London for months, and will be argued afresh in November before the Supreme Court, Britain’s highest tribunal, reveals not only how easy it was for a group of alleged fraudsters to borrow $225 million from state-controlled VTB Bank. Also revealed is how VTB bank officials in Moscow ignored risk and security warnings against the loan from their subordinates in London, and channelled bank fees and commissions amounting to at least 10% of the loan through a fake consultant. That, the British courts have concluded, was an offshore entity intended to avoid Russian tax. More likely it was a kickback scheme to enrich the VTB bankers in Moscow making the loan approval. VTB’s misrepresentations on this and other scores have been judged to be so serious, the High Court has tossed out several claims by VTB, and charged the bank with “deliberate material non-disclosure” (aka lying, deceit).

Why VTB intends to reveal so much about its own banking practices in London without prosecuting the ripoff in Moscow is difficult to understand because VTB refuses to answer a single question about the case. The intimation is that VTB is afraid of launching a criminal or civil fraud case in Moscow for fear that prosecutors will turn up evidence that VTB bankers were in cahoots with the alleged fraudsters to share more than $20 million of the loan proceeds between them.
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by John Helmer - Monday, October 15th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Never was a Russian design more nobly intended for the edification of London’s upper class since Karl Marx scribbled away at the British Museum Library. Never were the fetish of the object and the alienation of labor more artfully combined. Had Mr Bean done it, the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London, maybe a naked prince and duchess too, would have fallen over each other to be photographed shaking the artful dodger’s hand.

And how modest the graffito: “Vladimir Umanets 12 A Potential Piece of Yellowism”. Imagine if Karl had scribbled “you have nothing to lose but your potential chains”. Who would have united for that? Would we be bitterly complaining the Romanovs alive and still on their thrones?
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 10th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It’s no surprise that when Alisher Usmanov (left) proposed an initial public offering (IPO) of Megafon, a mobile telephone company he controls, he decided to keep all his shares to himself, and to oblige new sharebuyers to bid for stock being sold from the treasury of Megafon, and from minority stockholder, Sweden’s TeliaSonera. That makes the IPO less a wager on the profitability of Russian telephones, more a referendum on who wants to be Usmanov’s minority shareholding partner.

It is also unsurprising that Goldman Sachs, one of the two co-managers engaged in June to manage the IPO, refused to do so, resigning days ago, just before Megafon completed its prospectus. Goldman Sachs didn’t have such a problem being co-manager of the listing of Yandex, the Russian search engine company, in April of 2011. In December of 2011, Goldman Sachs didn’t walk away from its role as co-manager in a $500 million loan syndicate for Vimpelcom, one of Megafon’s domestic competitors.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 10th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Very occasionally it happens that the lie a man tells, or his lawyer, comes back to haunt him.

Here is the judgement in the case of Michael Cherney (Chernoy) v Oleg Deripaska, issued by the UK Court of Appeal on October 3. Not a word of it has appeared yet in the press in London or Moscow.

Deripaska had appealed to the higher court after the trial judge in the High Court, Justice Andrew Smith, ruled in July against his applications for witness protection orders.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, October 7th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The two 20-year veteran coalminers who have directed Raspadskaya, one of Russia’s leading coking coal producers, have unexpectedly sold out their stake in the company. According to the terms of the deal announced in Moscow yesterday, Evraz, the vertically integrated steel and mining group controlled by Roman Abramovich (left image), will pay Gennady Kosovoy, currently CEO, and Alexander Vagin, board chairman, $202 million in cash, plus an 11.06% share of Evraz’s equity.

Kosovoy is the coalmine boss; Vagin runs political interference at the regional level and protection wherever required. They haven’t enjoyed being the co-control shareholders, with Abramovich, of the publicly listed company. Even less, they haven’t cared for Abramovich’s pressure to pay him dividends from Raspadskaya’s profit — and that was when the mining company was making a profit, and when the two veterans wanted to reinvest the proceeds in the mine itself. Because Raspadskaya was the only half-way independent coal supplier to the steel industry in Russia, its takeover by Evraz significantly reduces competition in the Russian market.
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by John Helmer - Friday, October 5th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Canadian valuer hired to provide an independent valuation of High River Gold (HRG) for Nord Gold’s takeover offer appears to be recommending a higher price than Alexei Mordashov, owner of Nord Gold and 75% shareholder of HRG, wants to pay, leaving the takeover in limbo.

Paradigm Capital’s research department, headed by Daniel Kim of Toronto, has been working on the valuation since July, when Nord Gold announced a share swap or cash purchase equivalent to C$1.40 per share of HRG. That valued HRG at C$1.18 billion. To consolidate the minority shareholders, and absorb HRG entirely into Nord Gold – with the aim of lifting the latter’s struggling share price and worsening financial performance– Mordashov with 75% of the HRG shares in hand needs to have his bid accepted by another 15%. If he can reach or cross the 90% stake threshold, under Canadian takeover rules the remaining shareholders can be squeezed out by a mandatory buyout. As told in this sequence, the opposition to Mordashov has been successful so far in denying him the prize.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It takes a Russian to know how to build a Potemkin village, and hide behind it. It takes Alexei Mordashov to answer questions through a telephone number that rings in Amsterdam only to be relayed to a Moscow office, where the person in charge hangs up the receiver. That’s a false front that doesn’t deserve Count Potemkin’s name tag.

Mordashov is the owner of Nord Gold, the struggling goldminer spun out of the Severstal steel group. Since July 18, Nord Gold has been tabling an offer to buy out the minority shareholders of Toronto-listed High River Gold (HRG), the richest of the assets in the Nord Gold portfolio. Tabling isn’t quite what has happened. That’s because there won’t be an official offer to buy the remaining HRG shares until a purportedly independent valuation of HRG is completed and the share price offer put into a circular. That is a paper which Mordashov is promising to despatch to the hold-out HRG shareholders sometime soon. For the July 18 proposal, and the reaction of the market, read this.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012
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