By John Helmer, Moscow

From small seeds, big truths can be cultivated, pressed, packaged, and retailed profitably. Lies, too.

The elder daughter of Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, Gulnara Karimova, was so named because in the Uzbek language Gulnara signifies the flower of the pomegranate. The Persians say the same thing.

Last week, after months of negotiation with newspapers worldwide, Karimova issued two press interviews in Switzerland, where she is Uzbekistan’s representative to the Geneva branch of the United Nations. Her effort has been arranged before prosecutors in Switzerland and Sweden file public indictments against Uzbek, Swiss and Swedish company officials for corruption offences, including bribery and money-laundering. They acknowledge they are cooperating with each other; they may be cooperating secretly with the Prosecutor-General of Russia. The deadline for the opening of the Swedish criminal dossier in the Stockholm District Court is July 25.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 12th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The UK High Court and the Court of Appeal have now ruled three times to dismiss almost eight years of legal claims by state shipping company Sovcomflot, adding up (with interest and costs) to about one billion dollars. On top, Sovcomflot’s chief executive Sergei Frank (image left, left, tree) has been judged by the British justices to have been personally dishonest; to have procured dishonest or perjured testimony; and last week in the Court of Appeal, to have pursued vindictive claims.

There are two ways for Sovcomflot to avoid the ignominy. The first is to keep appealing, and yesterday (March 11), the Sovcomflot subsidiary Novorossiysk Shipping Company (Novoship) did just that. The second is to persuade the maritime media internationally, and the Russian business media in Moscow, that nothing has happened. For the time being, the media being more susceptible than the judges, the news blackout is proving to be more successful.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Monday, March 11th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

For the second time in its short history, United Company Rusal, the loss-making aluminium monopoly run by Oleg Deripaska, has been ordered out of an international court with the ruling that it has acted unlawfully to seize confidential data of its critics. On March 1, by order of the District Court of Nicosia, Cyprus, Rusal has been ordered to destroy all of the information it had illegally taken. By a second order, Rusal has been required to pay all of the costs of the proceeding to date.

The award of costs against Rusal this time is especially significant. Those who have been the targets of Rusal litigation in the past — they include Russian and Tajik smelter operators, international aluminium traders, and Deripaska’s patron, Michael Cherney (Chernoy) — charge that Deripaska pursues personal feuds employing the company’s lawyers and shareholder resources. By multiplying cases in several international jurisdictions simultaneously, former Rusal lawyers say, he is attempting to crush his targets with legal fees, while exposing the company, not himself, to the costs, losses, and damages.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Saturday, March 9th, 2013
No Comments »

by John Helmer - Thursday, March 7th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The UK Court of Appeal yesterday cut short Russian tanker company Sovcomflot’s 7-year lawsuit, ruling that two earlier High Court judgements exonerating the conduct of former chief executive of Sovcomflot, Dmitry Skarga, must stand. The dismissal by the High Court of most of Sovcomflot’s claims against former chartering partner, Yury Nikitin, has also been endorsed in the judgement issued by a 3-judge panel on March 6. At least $8 million in an award to Skarga by the High Court must now be paid by Sovcomflot. In addition, Skarga will seek further compensation from Sovcomflot of at least $1 million for the costs of the failed appeal.

Sovcomflot has yet to issue a statement on the outcome of one of the bitterest cases of maritime litigation ever waged by a Russian state company in an international court, directed by the current chief executive Sergei Frank (title image) against his predecessor. According to Sovcomflot’s last financial report, “On 2 November 2011 the London’s Court of Appeal (Civil Division) granted the Group leave to appeal against certain important elements of the previous Judgement handed down on 10 December 2010. The Claimants’ appeal will be heard by the Court of Appeal in London starting on 4 March 2013.” Sovcomflot is reporting that from its pending appeal litigation in the UK, it stands to gain “in the region of $172.0 million plus interest.”
(more…)

by John Helmer - Thursday, March 7th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Severstal, the Russian steelmaker owned by Alexei Mordashov (image, far left, far right) reported today that in the final quarter of 2012 the company suffered a loss of $150 million after revenues fell to $3.12 billion, down 13.2% from the third quarter; earnings (Ebitda) contracted 36.4% to $347 million; and operating profit plunged 63.1% to $136 million. These results were significantly worse than Moscow steel industry analysts had been forecasting.

This is not the biggest quarterly loss at Severstal which Mordashov has run up in recent years. In 2009, for example, the first-quarter loss came to $303.3 million; that was topped in the second quarter by a loss of $685.5 million. The third-quarter bottom-line was barely above break-even, but in the fourth quarter of that year, the loss came to $97.3 million. Then Mordashov achieved his worst-ever quarterly loss — $777.9 million in the first quarter of 2010.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 6th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Andrei Borodin claims that the case against him for fraud and grand larceny from the Bank of Moscow is politically motivated, and that he is the target of persecution by the Russian law enforcement authorities, acting on the orders of senior officials. He alleges that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is the official giving the orders.

The British Government has considered Borodin’s claims in secret proceedings in which Borodin’s lawyers appeared; the Russian Prosecutor-General and the Bank of Moscow did not. There is no public record of the evidence which was presented; no public record of the judge; no public record of the judgement. Borodin was represented by a law firm which includes the former chief counsel of GCHQ, the espionage agency. He isn’t saying what he did for his client. The Home Office, the cabinet-level ministry in London equivalent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow, refuses to say if Borodin has been authorized to remain in the country. It refuses to say if its minister, the Home Secretary, issued Borodin with a residency permit on the basis of a court order, or on the basis of the regulation allowing the minister to grant “discretionary leave”. If Theresa May, the Home Secretary, took such a decision, the one certainty is that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, authorized it.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Monday, March 4th, 2013
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

New records of the Myre Seadiver’s ill-fated stay at Lagos, Nigeria, have been made available, showing the Lagos port authorities and the Nigerian Navy gave permission for the Russian security vessel to enter the port with a stock of small arms, and that these remained on board at an anchorage in the Lagos roadstead for four weeks, before the 15-man crew and the vessel were arrested by the Nigerian Navy.

The documents also reveal that the Lagos shipping agent for the vessel had applied for and received the required authorizations. “There’ll be no issues”, he wrote to the vessel owner, Moran Security Group in Moscow on September 19.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Thursday, February 28th, 2013
No Comments »

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.”
(more…)

by John Helmer - Thursday, February 28th, 2013
No Comments »

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.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Tuesday, February 26th, 2013
No Comments »