By John Helmer, Moscow

It seems that this August Suleiman Kerimov will be holidaying with his Mother, as in Motherland.

A recent yachting news bulletin from the port of Bergen, Norway, reports that Kerimov’s motor yacht is “docked next to Bryggen, in walking distance to most of the attractions in the center of Bergen. The yacht ICE is registered in the Cayman Islands and was previously owned by Russian billionaire Suleyman Kerimov.” Kerimov had put the boat up for sale last year, when his New York lawyer, Eliot Lauer, claimed it wasn’t really his. Here’s the yacht-for-sale story, and here’s Kerimov’s response through his lawyer. But that was last autumn, when the going price for M/Y was €200 million.
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by John Helmer - Friday, July 27th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Once upon a time, Oleg Deripaska was the protégé of Mikhail Chernoy (Michael Cherney). In that relationship, Cherney, the older, taller one, called Deripaska, the younger, shorter one, Zaichik (“hare”). When he grew up, Cherney made him his business partner.

In the year 2000, the man who is today Deripaska’s principal Russian lawyer, strategist of all his litigation, advisor to the initial public offering of Rusal in 2010, and current member of the Rusal board, knew that Deripaska and Cherney were business partners. That is because he said so in filings to the federal US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The man’s name is Dmitry Afanasiev. In December 2000, he was one of the lawyers who filed this case:
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by John Helmer - Friday, July 27th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Tall stories told by newspapers and their reporters generally don’t start wars. But they do justify them in advance. Afterwards they protect the officials who start them from being prosecuted for war crimes.

On August 5, 1964, there was no truth in President Lyndon Johnson’s claim – reported by every major US newspaper – that there had been “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America” by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin. That’s because the US Navy destroyer Maddux had been inside North Vietnam’s territorial waters to pinpoint shore targets, after US and South Vietnamese naval vessels had opened fire on North Vietnamese islands in the area several days earlier. The August 4 reports of a gunboat attack on the Maddux “appear very doubtful”, according to a secret cable sent by the Maddux commander to his headquarters at the time. In retrospect, all the available evidence indicates that no attack took place. What is certain, however, is that the fiction was good enough for Johnson to get the US Congress to enact the August 7, 1964, resolution giving the US administration the warrant to start a full-scale invasion of Vietnam by US ground forces. The outcome is well-known. The US was defeated in that war. About 50,000 US soldiers returned in body bags, and about 3.8 million Vietnamese (10% of the population) went prematurely into the ground.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, July 26th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

You don’t have to be Mr Plod to suspect that Noddy isn’t playing fair.

More than half the Canadians who hold shares in High River Gold (HRG:CN), and who have resisted Alexei Mordashov’s buyout offers in the past, think he’s low-balling them again. Having driven up the share price to C$1.43, three cents over Mordashov’s latest offer price for his takeover of HRG, the sentiment in the share market is against Mordashov. Or is it?

On July 18 Nordgold (NORD:LI), which already owns about 75% of HRG, announced that it wants to buy the rest. Nordgold is listed on the London Stock Exchange; HRG on the Toronto Exchange. The former has a market capitalization of US$1.71 billion after listing in Moscow and London between December 2011 and January 2012. Since then it has lost more than 60% of its value.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, July 24th, 2012
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by John Helmer - Monday, July 23rd, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Iskander Makhmudov (right image) is cultured, charming, gracious, hospitable, polite, discreet – he has more of these qualities than his oligarch peers.

But for Oleg Deripaska, his junior in the division of the Russian metals businesses that took place between 1995 and 2000, before the formation of Russian Aluminium (Rusal), here’s what Mark Howard said in the UK High Court last week: “[Makhmudov’s] role in these proceedings we suggest raises serious difficulties for Mr Deripaska’s case on a fundamental level. Indeed, we suggest he is very much the elephant in the room.”
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A year is a long time in Russian politics, and Vladimir Putin isn’t the same man he was a year ago.

Then — on July 15, 2011 — he visited Magnitogorsk, presided at the official commissioning of the new automotive steel production line known as Mill-2000, and spent three hours answering questions from the workers of Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (MMK). This Monday, July 16, Putin was back at MMK, pressing the button alongside MMK owner Victor Rashnikov to inaugurate two sub-sections of a sub-production line. The Kremlin has (so far) released no record of what was discussed with the steelworkers.

Rashnikov is also a changed man. In between the two Putin visits, Rashnikov attempted to invest half a billion dollars of MMK’s cash, and $1.5 billion in borrowed money, some of it from a state-controlled Russian bank, in an Australian iron-ore mining project known as Flinders Mines twelve thousand kilometres away. Then in late March Rashnikov suffered an abrupt loss of will and change of mind. Twelve weeks later, at the start of July, he formally withdrew from the entire scheme. Not once did Rashnikov explain what he was doing.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Look carefully at who is in the driving seat.

The records of RTI Limited (formerly Rusal International Trading), the next to highest control entity in the corporate organization of United Company Rusal, show that it was registered on October 27, 2006, one day after the parent company was registered. At the time, the parent’s capital consisted of 10,000 nominal shares, and according to Point 6 of its memorandum of association, each Rusal share was worth one US dollar. A few weeks later, the parent’s annual return declared its shares were now worth one English pound, and that just two of them had been paid up. The owner of these two was EN+, not identified then as a personal holding company of Oleg Deripaska’s. By February 28, 2008, in Rusal’s next annual return, the shares were again denominated in US dollars, and all 10,000 were paid up. We’ll come shortly to who owned them.

According to the printed notes of the Jersey companies form, “the Annual Returns cannot be accepted until they meet the requirements of the Companies (Jersey) Law 1991, as ammended [sic].” There’s a lot the Jersey authorities don’t do in conformity with accepted practice – spelling is just one of them.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, July 15th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Norilsk Nickel has declared war on Alexander Popov (image centre), a 57-year old veteran of the oil industry and the new head of the Federal Agency for Subsoil Use, Rosnedra. In the circumstances this can mean only one thing — Vladimir Potanin (right), the dominant shareholder of Norilsk Nickel, has decided on a duel with Igor Sechin (left), former deputy prime minister and now chief executive of Rosneft. This is because Popov’s job for the past eighteen months has been as an assistant to Sechin; when Sechin left his government office in May, he put Popov in charge of Rosnedra’s key function – awarding licences for oil, gas and hard-rock mining. Sechin is also believed to have been behind Popov’s predecessor, Anatoly Ledovskikh, who decided last October not to allow Norilsk Nickel to extend its mining rights in the Norilsk-1 area on the ground that, though it is already mining in the area, it was the sole bidder for the adjacent mining rights.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, July 12th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Fifteen years ago, the American Journal of Psychiatry reported research that not all obsessive-compulsive disorders are alike. Two individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the scientific evidence showed, may have totally different and non-overlapping symptom patterns. For example, the obsession with counting, hoarding, arranging and collecting doesn’t usually accompany the compulsion for hand-washing, religious ritualism, sexual aggression, or vice versa.

At yesterday’s opening presentations in the UK High Court in the case of Michael Cherney v Oleg Deripaska, the evidence of Deripaska’s meticulously recorded and coded account books was revealed for the first time. No major Russian business figure has ever been obliged to reveal such intimate financial data in a public forum. “The balance sheets,” according to Cherney’s advocate Mark Howard QC, “are documents of the utmost importance in the case.”
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, July 10th, 2012
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