By John Helmer, Moscow
Rupert Murdoch has produced this week an item for the clinical casebook on the brain-challenged.
The criminal investigations now under way against him, his son James, his senior executives at News Corporation, company lawyers, and hired hands in the UK, the US and Australia are, he tweeted, nothing more than “every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels. So bad, easy to hit back hard, which preparing.”
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (MMK), a publicly listed shareholding company controlled by Victor Rashnikov, says that in the first two months of this year, it has not cut back on production of steel. “Everything is fine and we now have growth,” Yelena Evstigneyeva, MMK’s spokesman told CRU Steel News.
She was responding to a report of monthly production and market data, issued on March 26 by the federal Ministry of Economic Development (MED) in Moscow. The report says that in January and February, MMK turned out 1.804 million tonnes of finished steel; this was down by 6.2% from the same period of 2011.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Oleg Deripaska’s courtroom defence against the multi-billion dollar claim by his former patron and business partner, Mikhail Chernoy (Michael Cherney) collapsed into lawyer malfeasance and retraction of charges in federal US district court in New York last week.
A leak to the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, published on March 26, has also triggered pending action for contempt of court. This relates to peddling on Deripaska’s part, publication on the Post’s part, of false allegations contained in a court filing which Deripaska was obliged to withdraw, and which was then placed under US court seal.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Now we move on from the lesson of how to be victorious over big people and bullies when still small —that’s for getting through the daytimes with ВЛАДИМИР ВИЗАНТИЙСКИЙ – to the lesson of how to write a short sentence and say everything that must be said at the same time. That’s for getting through the terrors of the night.
In the department of small sentences, Mikhail Zoshchenko (centre image) is the greatest Russian exponent. For the English, Shakespeare and Dickens don’t make the grade, because they were best at writing long, contorted ones. In French, Flaubert beats Proust to a pulp. In American, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler leave Henry James and Saul Bellow biting the dust.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
If Russia’s Agriculture Minister, Elena Skrynnik, went to the trouble last week of decrying adulteration of Russia’s milk, then one thing is certain – the Franco-American syndicate which sells most of Russia’s milk and dominates the market is having trouble pricing down or buying up milk producers in the regions where they claim adulteration is “unfair competition”. That’s because “unfair competition” is what Danone of France and Pepsico of the US have been hoping would be more effective in the Russian milk market than it is proving to be. Naturally, what is unfair depends on who controls the milk production chain, and who doesn’t.
According to the milk sops in the Moscow media, Skrynnik recently sent a letter to the governors of regions specializing in milk production, urging them to halt sales of sub-standard milk. The adulterators are being accused of adding cheap palm oil imported from Southeast Asia instead of the more costly butterfat required by Russia’s product standards. “The use of tropical oils is unacceptable. The ministry will regularly monitor the situation,” Skrynnik is reported to have said.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Valued correspondent (aka Boris Bear) has written in to point out an odd typo which crept into the texts of two recent stories involving Victor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik.
They are the two shareholding partners of United Company Rusal, with a 15.8% stake between them, who appear to have uncovered cooking of the books by Oleg Deripaska in relation to the value of Rusal’s 25% bloc of Norilsk Nickel shares. Deripaska amended the company’s financial report. Vekselberg went public.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Commanders of empires like the French, British, American and Russian suffer from an identical blind spot.
They all believe their power (arms, cash) is or should be great enough to destroy their adversaries decisively, totally, so that they can’t get up to fight again. The Americans lost the Vietnam war, as they are losing the Iraq, Afghan and in time, the Libyan and Syrian wars, because their enemies can and do get up to fight again. Not even B-52 carpet bombers, Tomahawk cruise missiles, or assassin drones can kill enough of them, nor the firepower prevent the empire’s casualties reaching breakpoint.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
BC Iron is a small but promising iron-ore miner from Western Australia, which is China’s mineral supply province and rival of Russian suppliers to China. The company is now testing the share price at which it was the target of an abortive takeover attempt a year ago. The bidder at that time, Regent Pacific, a Hong Kong-listed promoter of a junior mining stocks, is part-owned and part-chaired by Stephen Dattels, an impresario of stock market wagers. On the latest available financial reports, Regent Pacific is losing money at the mining game.
Regent Pacific is also the operator of a fixed-odds financial betting scheme which, according to the company website, is “the market leader in its [wagering] industry.” Gambling can be profitable; it seems Regent Markets Holdings Ltd, the betting affiliated unit of the group, is turning over far more money than the mining holding, and at last report generated a 6-month profit of US$1.07 million, compared with US$1.8 million loss for the mining business.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Alrosa has announced that the privatization plan for sale of its shares on the open market should be restricted in order to preserve government control of the company. The announcement was released Friday after a meeting of the Supervisory Board, Alrosa’s board of directors.
Now why exactly would this group of government officials representing the principal and controlling shares in the Russian diamond mining monopoly go to all the trouble of declaring the obvious? Who doesn’t already know and accept this policy?
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Ahead of the March 16 election of a new board chairman for United Company Rusal, President-elect Vladimir Putin did something that isn’t widely known; has never happened before; and has not been disclosed by Rusal.
The story of what happened in the run-up to the board vote can be read here. The qualifications of the new chairman, Barry Cheung, are here.
According to the Rusal press release of March 18, “Barry Cheung’s election as a Chairman was supported by a majority vote of the Board, including the independent directors. This proves that his candidacy meets the interests of all shareholders, including minorities. His appointment was also met by a marked rise in the Company’s share price, which had been declining over the past few days under pressure from the emotional and groundless statements made by SUAL Partners [Victor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik].”
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