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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By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska’s sole defence against having to pay Mikhail Chernoy (Michael Cherney) the dividends, assets, interest, and the corpus of his patron’s stake in United Company Rusal is that Cherney extorted the money by presenting him with a trust agreement and contract, and threatening to break his bones if he didn’t sign it. This is the gangster defence. It has already been curtailed by several preliminary UK High Court rulings; Justice Christopher Clarke, who presided in the trial of the jurisdiction issues in the case, ruled that he didn’t believe it.

But there is one respect in which it is almost certainly true that someone tough has been forcing Deripaska to run Rusal the way he has. That man, the control shareholder of Deripaska’s nominal 47.41% shareholding, is Boris Yeltsin.
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by John Helmer - Monday, July 9th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

An 8-year long case charging Oleg Deripaska and his Russian Aluminium (Rusal) group with fraud and corruption in acquiring aluminium assets, gas and electricity supply and port outlet in a rigged privatization scheme has ended in Deripaska’s defeat and the loss of his assets. The court ruling was issued on Friday, July 6. In Nigeria.

On the eve of the start of Mikhail Chernoy’s (Michael Cherney) trial for recovery of his 13% shareholding in Rusal, to commence in the UK High Court today, the Nigerian Supreme Court judgement by a unanimous 5-judge panel is automatically endorsed by the US federal court, which had ceded jurisdiction over Rusal for the claim, on condition Deripaska submitted to the Nigerian courts. The ruling cannot be appealed; and for an asset which cost $3.8 billion to build, it is the most costly defeat Deripaska has suffered in the international courts to date.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, July 8th, 2012
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