By John Helmer, Moscow
Calliforida, the common blow-fly, has an exceptional talent – it has the ability to smell a corpse at a distance of up to 16 kilometres. Forensic investigators use the blow-fly’s eggs deposited in the flesh as a measure of how much time has elapsed since death, more reliable than the dead flesh itself.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Oleg Deripaska demanded, and received from Roman Abramovich, a warranty that in his takeover of Rusal shares, he wasn’t buying stolen goods. Testimony by Deripaska’s London lawyer, Paul Hauser, followed in the UK High Court last week with details which Deripaska himself claimed in his testimony he couldn’t remember at all.
The testimony ought to revise, dramatically, the history of the so-called Russian aluminium wars. Until now, it has been accepted that those who ended up with the goods bravely fought off gangs of primitive thieves and homicidal thugs acting on their own initiative.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
In May, when not a single head of a government holding a seat on the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) dared say what he thought about the criminal case against managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said: “it really is hard to believe that everything is as it was initially presented. I just can’t believe that – it is beyond me to understand it.”
It’s a safe bet at this point in time, looking back, that Putin was pretty sure there was a plot against DSK; and that he believed that French and American government officials were in on it. But note — it’s easier to speculate the French were; easier to prove the Americans were.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Early this morning, November 25, Flinders Mines announced that Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (MMK), owned by Victor Rashnikov, has signed a full takeover offer, proposing to buy all 1.8 billion Flinders Mines shares (including options) on issue at 30 Australian cents. This values the company at A$546.3 million (US$530 million) — a premium of 82% to the share price and market capitalization of the company on November 22, before the offer was announced; and at double the value of Flinders Mines three months ago. The MMK offer will also provide $10 million for the share options claimed by Flinders Mines managers who commissioned the Citi banking group in September to look for candidates to buy them out.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
If you could make more money turning bananas into ballet, it’s likely that you couldn’t do it in places where the supply of bananas is plentiful and the price cheap, but the demand for ballet non-existent. But what if in places where the supply of ballet dancers is large and their unit price low, you can use banana sales revenue to kick start a business, where the profit target is a brand-name like the Bolshoi Theatre?
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By John Helmer, Moscow
To gauge the future welfare of Russia and the Russians, nothing is more telling than the Cat Test.
Michel de Montaigne (left) originated it in one of his 16th century essays, when he wrote: “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.” The name of Montaigne’s cat isn’t known. In any event, what he meant didn’t refer to a real-life cat. A hypothetical one would have done just as well, as Montaigne was making his point, not about cats, but about men. His point was: what if what we think about ourselves is insignificant, compared to what others think of us? In short, the Cat Test is a measurement of our capacity to think reciprocally.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
The junior Australian iron-ore miner, Flinders Mines, announced a halt to trading in its shares today amid market speculation that Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (MMK), the Russian steelmaker owned by Victor Rashnikov (image, right), is preparing a bid to buy part or all of the Flinders Mines shares, adding up to a billion dollars to MMK’s debt.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently conceded that the oligarchs who were running Russia behind the shaking hand and raddled brain of Boris Yeltsin had caused such chaos, Putin was obliged to use what he called “manual control” to recover the country. The evidence given last week in the UK High Court trial of Berezovsky v Abramovich reveals what Abramovich got up to outside Russia, when he thought he was safe from Kremlin supervision – holidays, airplane rides, limousine and helicopter trips between seaside villas and ski chalets, lots of them. That is according to Christian Sponring, the Austrian cook who became Abramovich’s major domo, and after fourteen years, still is.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
The share price of OM Holdings (OMH:U), one of the few pure manganese miners in the world to be listed on an international stock exchange, fell 9% the day after the Australian and US governments signed a new military pact, inviting 2,500 US Marines to a base in Darwin, and threatening China with as yet undisclosed new military measures. OMH’s manganese is mined in Australia, and that’s where its share is listed also. But its control shareholders are Chinese, who have employed Singapore-based nominees to run the Australian source of manganese – an alloy to strengthen steel — and protect Chinese steelmills from having the manganese price dictated by the real government in Australia, BHP Billiton, one of the world’s largest manganese producers. BHP’s share price fell 2% on the same day.
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Oleg Deripaska has made his debut in the witness-box of the UK High Court, testifying for almost three hours on Friday afternoon, after being called as a witness by Roman Abramovich against the claims of Boris Berezovsky.
So precise and painstaking were Deripaska’s responses to some of the questions asked by the High Court Justice Dame Elizabeth Gloster and Laurence Rabinowitz, counsel for Berezovsky, that the near-total collapse of another of Deripaska’s cognitive functions, his memory, stunned the courtroom in London. At one point, the presiding judge told Rabinowitz that she permitted him to continue a line of questioning to probe Deripaska’s claim for forgetfulness after Rabinowitz said he had done as much as he could.
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