By John Helmer, Moscow

On October 12, 2004, Sergei Frank, a former federal Minister of Transport, was appointed chief executive of Sovcomflot, Russia’s largest oil tanker company and one of the top five in the world. Frank confirmed, said the company on its website, “that the Company’s management will take all necessary steps to enhance the Company’s business by ensuring accurate fulfillment of its earlier made obligations and plans. At its best effort the Company will continue to provide the customer-focused quality service.”

A month later, on November 17, 2004, Igor Shuvalov, then an assistant to President Vladimir Putin, was appointed chairman of the Sovcomflot board of directors. He said at the time, according to the company announcement, that “Sovcomflot should get involved more actively in developing “energy dialogue” co-operation between Russia and EU, Russia and the USA covering as well as other countries aimed at meeting the demands of the Russian growing foreign trade. It is also important to achieve increase of capitalization of the company and further improvement of its managing structure.”
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Rupert Murdoch has produced this week an item for the clinical casebook on the brain-challenged.

The criminal investigations now under way against him, his son James, his senior executives at News Corporation, company lawyers, and hired hands in the UK, the US and Australia are, he tweeted, nothing more than “every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels. So bad, easy to hit back hard, which preparing.”
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by John Helmer - Sunday, April 1st, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (MMK), a publicly listed shareholding company controlled by Victor Rashnikov, says that in the first two months of this year, it has not cut back on production of steel. “Everything is fine and we now have growth,” Yelena Evstigneyeva, MMK’s spokesman told CRU Steel News.

She was responding to a report of monthly production and market data, issued on March 26 by the federal Ministry of Economic Development (MED) in Moscow. The report says that in January and February, MMK turned out 1.804 million tonnes of finished steel; this was down by 6.2% from the same period of 2011.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 29th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska’s courtroom defence against the multi-billion dollar claim by his former patron and business partner, Mikhail Chernoy (Michael Cherney) collapsed into lawyer malfeasance and retraction of charges in federal US district court in New York last week.

A leak to the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, published on March 26, has also triggered pending action for contempt of court. This relates to peddling on Deripaska’s part, publication on the Post’s part, of false allegations contained in a court filing which Deripaska was obliged to withdraw, and which was then placed under US court seal.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Now we move on from the lesson of how to be victorious over big people and bullies when still small —that’s for getting through the daytimes with ВЛАДИМИР ВИЗАНТИЙСКИЙ – to the lesson of how to write a short sentence and say everything that must be said at the same time. That’s for getting through the terrors of the night.

In the department of small sentences, Mikhail Zoshchenko (centre image) is the greatest Russian exponent. For the English, Shakespeare and Dickens don’t make the grade, because they were best at writing long, contorted ones. In French, Flaubert beats Proust to a pulp. In American, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler leave Henry James and Saul Bellow biting the dust.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

If Russia’s Agriculture Minister, Elena Skrynnik, went to the trouble last week of decrying adulteration of Russia’s milk, then one thing is certain – the Franco-American syndicate which sells most of Russia’s milk and dominates the market is having trouble pricing down or buying up milk producers in the regions where they claim adulteration is “unfair competition”. That’s because “unfair competition” is what Danone of France and Pepsico of the US have been hoping would be more effective in the Russian milk market than it is proving to be. Naturally, what is unfair depends on who controls the milk production chain, and who doesn’t.

According to the milk sops in the Moscow media, Skrynnik recently sent a letter to the governors of regions specializing in milk production, urging them to halt sales of sub-standard milk. The adulterators are being accused of adding cheap palm oil imported from Southeast Asia instead of the more costly butterfat required by Russia’s product standards. “The use of tropical oils is unacceptable. The ministry will regularly monitor the situation,” Skrynnik is reported to have said.
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by John Helmer - Monday, March 26th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Valued correspondent (aka Boris Bear) has written in to point out an odd typo which crept into the texts of two recent stories involving Victor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik.

They are the two shareholding partners of United Company Rusal, with a 15.8% stake between them, who appear to have uncovered cooking of the books by Oleg Deripaska in relation to the value of Rusal’s 25% bloc of Norilsk Nickel shares. Deripaska amended the company’s financial report. Vekselberg went public.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, March 25th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Commanders of empires like the French, British, American and Russian suffer from an identical blind spot.

They all believe their power (arms, cash) is or should be great enough to destroy their adversaries decisively, totally, so that they can’t get up to fight again. The Americans lost the Vietnam war, as they are losing the Iraq, Afghan and in time, the Libyan and Syrian wars, because their enemies can and do get up to fight again. Not even B-52 carpet bombers, Tomahawk cruise missiles, or assassin drones can kill enough of them, nor the firepower prevent the empire’s casualties reaching breakpoint.
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by John Helmer - Friday, March 23rd, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

BC Iron is a small but promising iron-ore miner from Western Australia, which is China’s mineral supply province and rival of Russian suppliers to China. The company is now testing the share price at which it was the target of an abortive takeover attempt a year ago. The bidder at that time, Regent Pacific, a Hong Kong-listed promoter of a junior mining stocks, is part-owned and part-chaired by Stephen Dattels, an impresario of stock market wagers. On the latest available financial reports, Regent Pacific is losing money at the mining game.

Regent Pacific is also the operator of a fixed-odds financial betting scheme which, according to the company website, is “the market leader in its [wagering] industry.” Gambling can be profitable; it seems Regent Markets Holdings Ltd, the betting affiliated unit of the group, is turning over far more money than the mining holding, and at last report generated a 6-month profit of US$1.07 million, compared with US$1.8 million loss for the mining business.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Alrosa has announced that the privatization plan for sale of its shares on the open market should be restricted in order to preserve government control of the company. The announcement was released Friday after a meeting of the Supervisory Board, Alrosa’s board of directors.

Now why exactly would this group of government officials representing the principal and controlling shares in the Russian diamond mining monopoly go to all the trouble of declaring the obvious? Who doesn’t already know and accept this policy?
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
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