By John Helmer, Moscow

Is Vladimir Kekhman going to lose his bananas because the Joint Fruit Company (JFC) he owns, Russia’s banana trade leader, cannot, or will not, pay $16.2 million in commercial damages awarded since August by the UK High Court in London?

Kekhman, who doubles as director of the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, was recently named Man of the Year in the Theatre Producer category by Russia’s GQ Magazine. In March, he won the Izvestia Celebrity of the Year award in the Culture category (Good Deed was the other category). The year after next, Kekhman said at the March award ceremony, he plans bicentennial celebrations for Wagner and Verdi. Until then, it’s a case of la forza del destino – though not the one commissioned from Verdi by the old Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St. Petersburg.
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by John Helmer - Friday, November 11th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

An unusual moment occurred on Wednesday this week in Roman Abramovich’s testimony in the UK High Court when he refers to the seigneurial right – that historically doubtful power a feudal lord claimed for first sex with young virgins on his estates, who were, by feudal law, his property.

Abramovich says: “Well, it’s the thing which is called the right of the first night”. In the Russian and the English, Abramovich is referring to the Latin jus primae noctis – properly translated, that’s the law of the first night. The feudal law textbooks claim the rape could be bought off if the girl gave the lord part or all of her dowry. Either way, she would become used property and unmarriageable.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, November 10th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Let’s hear it for Polymetal’s control shareholders – they have devised a scheme that appears to have fooled much of the Moscow market, but few in the London market. By moving Polymetal to the main board of the London Stock Exchange (LSE), they have camouflaged a free floating share bloc which isn’t, in order to create a better share-price platform to sell out. And that is what is known in the toy balloon business as a prick.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Charlie Drake’s hit song has been celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in London, where it was created and first recorded, not far from the law courts on the Strand. Play it before you read another word, and listen carefully to the lyrics.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

There are two ironies in Sergei Frank’s latest outing in the London courts on November 4. One is that Frank, chief executive of Sovcomflot, is not lodging an appeal against rulings last December and March by High Court Justice Andrew Smith, judging Frank himself to have been dishonest. Nor is he claiming that most of the rulings, which have vindicated the three men he has targeted for almost six years– tanker charterer Yury Nikitin, and former chief executives Dmitry Skarga and Tagir Izmaylov – are faulty.
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by John Helmer - Monday, November 7th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

One of Russia’s richest men, and by some accounts one of the cleverest, claims he has no idea whether the principal source of his income is taxed. The admission came just a few minutes after three in the afternoon in London last Friday. Roman Abramovich may have been tired, having been on the witness stand in the High Court since 10 that morning, and for the fifth gruelling day in row.
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by John Helmer - Monday, November 7th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

There’s not much of a market in used testicles.

When Jonathan Oppenheimer (right image) was obliged to sell his last week, ending the Oppenheimer family’s century-old diamond business, those closest to the affair in Johannesburg sniffed that Jonathan Oppenheimer’s wife Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer had so gravely damaged the value of the De Beers brand, her father-in-law, Nicholas Oppenheimer, was obliged to accept a discount buyout from Anglo American Corporation.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, November 6th, 2011
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For readers who have been experiencing interruptions of internet connexion and seeing instead notices of 404 error, the explanation is a series of denial-of-service (DOS) attacks launched against this website in an attempt to stop publication. Technical evidence reveals that the attacker began bombarding the website server about 20 minutes after a story was published last Thursday, October 27, regarding Oleg Deripaska’s latest attempts to overturn the ban on his entry to the US. Here’s the story again.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, November 6th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Carbonated water was an 18th century invention in England, associated with the brewing of beer. Fizz came in just over a hundred years later in New Orleans, when carbonated water was added to a cocktail of gin, lemon, lime, egg white and sugar, stirred. After years of trying fizzy drinks from the US, the Russian drinker appears finally to have decided enough is enough, at least for bubbles. Coca-Cola is discovering that its growth in Russia now depends on its Russian branded juice beverages, while sales demand for Coca-Cola-branded products appears to be declining.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

You need to know that a conflict of interest is the first step on the road to corruption. If you don’t; and if you also think that unzipping your fly in public isn’t indecent exposure, so long as you think the onlookers will be impressed by what you’re showing off, there’s no invite for you at this party.

This one is for the last print journalists in the world for whom the trade of digging up and publishing conflicts of interest, recording that the emperor’s fly is open (without clothes, dripping money, etc.), is fast dying out, but who keep sending their invoices for the truth.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, October 30th, 2011
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