By John Helmer, Moscow
There is every reason to read and reread the Tintin books by Hergé, and even more for boycotting the film just released by Steven Spielberg. The essay by Tom McCarthy is one of a hattrick by the London Guardian to rubbish what Spielberg has done.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Arkady (right image) and Boris Rotenberg are under investigation by the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) for running a cartel and price-rigging to cheat Gazprom, their longstanding business partner and patron.
This is unusual for several reasons. One of them is that the Rotenbergs neither produce the goods in trade targeted by FAS, nor are they the end-buyer and end-user, Gazprom. So how can the go-between between buyer and seller be capable, let alone culpable of running a multi-billion dollar cartel? Igor Artemyev, head of FAS (left image), has announced that he’s going to the mat to find out.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Oleg Deripaska, denied regular visa entry into the US for many years on US evidence of his business practices, has claimed in a Moscow press announcement this week that the barrier has been lifted. It hasn’t. Instead, he’s being escorted through a trapdoor.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
The latest announcement by Kommersant newspaper of a deal in which the Government of Guinea relieves United Company Rusal of the billion-dollar liabilities it was facing for its bauxite exporting and alumina smelting activities in the African republic isn’t what it’s meant to look.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
And now for a Classical breather.
According to the Greek myth, Orion was a giant hunter who could walk across the Mediterranean. One evening he pulled one of those drunken turns that give dinner parties a bad name – he tried to make a dessert out of the daughter of his host, Oenepion. So Oenepion stuck the cheese-knife into Orion’s eyes, chucking him out of the dining-room and off his island. At that point, Hephaestus, the god of high technology (blacksmithing at the time), took pity on the big boy, and gave him a small one, Kedalion, to stand on his shoulders and guide him eastwards, where eventually, the sun healed Orion’s eyesight. He then re-marched westward for revenge against Oenepion.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
A leading shipbroker confirms that Suleiman Kerimov’s 90-metre motor yacht Ice is for sale at €200 million. “It is quietly on the market, but it is not being actively marketed,” the source revealed on Monday, days after the sale notice went up for Kerimov’s French beach house at €20 million.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
A website property sales agency, calling itself “specialized in urgent and forced sales of Luxury Properties, Super Cars & Yachts”, is offering Suleiman Kerimov’s holiday residence at Medy Roc, at Cap d’Antibes on the French coast. The sale notice is dated October 20, last week. A number of notable Russian-owned properties on the Cote d’Azur have been sold since the crash of 2008, but this is the first oligarch-sized disposal.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Alrosa revealed this week that it has suffered a setback in the management’s plan to sell up to 20% of the company’s state-owned shares in an initial public offering (IPO).
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By John Helmer, Moscow
A Canadian Supreme Court judge has ruled that Alexei Mordashov rode roughshod over the rights of minority shareholders in Crew Gold, when Mordashov’s gold group completed its takeover of Crew Gold, and paid $4.65 per share to buy up minority shareholders.
Justice Ronald Veale, the senior judge of the Supreme Court of Yukon, the Canadian province where Nord Gold, the Canadian vehicle used to absorb Crew Gold is registered, issued a judgement on October 14. He ruled that a group of Norwegian minority shareholders, led by Jostein Matre, had been unfairly and improperly deprived of their rights to dissent from the buy-out offer.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
In the long history of English justice, it has happened before that candidates for the seats of the highest court in land have been obliged to rehearse their talents and qualifications before the monarch on his throne (aka the Crown). And not only their qualifications, technical and professional, but also their willingness to do the monarch’s bidding. If not for that, Crown courtiers have been known to intimate, the seat on offer might be pulled and presented to another arse.
In time of invasion threats, wars of religion, wars between king and barons, civil war between king and parliament, and conflicts between the lower house of parliament and upper, ambitious Englishmen who hoped to be high judges understood how to comport themselves in front of those more powerful than them, and on whom they depended.
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