By John Helmer, Moscow

The state-owned Russian tanker company Sovcomflot revealed this week that its profits are sinking, and that despite months of effort Morgan Stanley, Sovcomflot’s banker and broker, has been unable to attract market demand for its shares. As the much delayed privatization and initial public offering (IPO) of Sovcomflot shares fail once more, the company board chairman, Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin, remains at his post. This is despite the decree signed on April 2 by President Dmitry Medvedev requiring senior state officials to vacate their seats on state company boards.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, September 15th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

There is no negotiation under way and no agreement between Alrosa and India’s state-owned Minerals and Metals Trading Company, MMTC, for a private placement of Alrosa shares in Indian hands, Russian sources, including a high Alrosa official, told PolishedPrices.com today.

They were responding to a string of recent press reports from Mumbai claiming MMTC has been discussing a share buy with Alrosa worth an estimated $2 billion. The last valuation of the state-owned Russian diamond miner, whch was made public by its chief executive Fyodor Andreyev in March, indicated a target range of between $6 billion and $12 billion.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The big difference between the penny dreadful and the novels of the great crime writers is not the characters who wind up dead, nor who did it to them, nor how; but rather what truth the tale reveals about the society in which the crime takes place and the humankind responsible for the dirty deeds.

Originally, in the mid-19th century, the penny dreadful was a type of mass-market syndication of stories that would cost their readers only a penny to read in weekly serializations. That was at the time in England when Charles Dickens’s value-added serializations cost one shilling, twelve times the price. The lower the cover, the simpler the tale, the cheaper the paper, and the more lurid the details. In other words, maximum sex and violence, minimum sociology, politics, and moral philosophy.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Intelligence quotient tests are not required for visas to enter Russia temporarily, especially not if you are running another country.

The last certified fool to be received by the Kremlin at the head of government level was Ronald Reagan. In retrospect, it is now clear that he was in an early stage of clinical brain damage. But in the case of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the symptoms appear to have been evidence when he was just 19 years of age.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In case you’ve been missing the action this summer: the Russian wheat harvest is proving to be so abundant, Moscow experts and grain traders are forecasting that exports will reach up to 23.5 million tonnes in the trading season which runs until June 30, next year.

Alexander Korbut, spokesman for the Russian Grain Union, representing the exporters, said the target of 23.5 million tonnes is “realistic, because Russia has plenty of grain, and it is absolutely necessary to export this volume to empty the storages. The market environment is also favourable.”
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by John Helmer - Sunday, September 11th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The last time Russia’s leadership assembled to listen to a piece of classical music was seventy-five years ago. It was on January 26, 1936, that Josef Stalin and the entire Politburo were at the Bolshoi Theatre to hear Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin was seen not to like the atonal harmonies or the loudness of the percussion and brass lines; he also laughed at one of the erotic scenes.

Look carefully at the lower box on the left-side of the Bolshoi stage and on the right-side of the ground-floor buffet (before reconstruction), and you will have been able to spot the special doors through which Soviet leaders could come and go to the music with least distraction for the audience. It was through that passage that they exited when they didn’t like what they heard. How courteous of them, you might think in retrospect
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by John Helmer - Friday, September 9th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Victor Rashnikov, owner of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (MMK), appears to have done it to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin one more time.

The latest financial report, issued last week by the company, reveals a whopping 93% plunge in net income – second quarter compared to first quarter — despite a 9% gain in sales revenues. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the company forecast for the third and fourth quarters suggests that Rashnikov is aiming to limit production and cut costs in Russia, and transfer his profit-taking to Turkey.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, September 8th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow
 

“Conversations with senior representatives of ALCOA indicate that SUAL was not Deripaska’s first or only choice for this merger (which is one possible reason why it has taken more than five years for the two parties to come together). Deripaska approached ALCOA in the first half of this year, but the talks broke down when the asset valuation gap could not be closed to Deripaska’s satisfaction.”

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by John Helmer - Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The US State Department has been torturing Russian oligarchs into making admissions by seating them in the special chair devised by the Spanish Inquisition in September 1970.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

This time it seems to be clear that Transneft, Russia state-owned oil pipeline company, has had quite enough of both the Bulgarians and the Turks, and has told them it won’t build its planned pipelines across the territory of either of them. This puts an end, a temporary end probably, to the three-cornered political games the governments have been playing for more than a year now.
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by John Helmer - Monday, September 5th, 2011
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