By John Helmer, Moscow

Russia’s grain traders have applied to Mother Nature (image centre) for help in deciding whether Russia’s weather this spring and summer will be so mild, sunny and also wet as to produce a bumper harvest , allowing exports to resume and Russia to retake its place as the third largest grain exporter in the world. That is to say, at least one of the powerful domestic traders — Aston Corporation of Rostov-on-Don, headed by Vadim Vikulov (image right )– believes it knows Mother Nature’s answer well enough to publicly accuse the Russian Grain Union, headed by Arkady Zlochensky (image left), of failing to lobby hard enough for the Kremlin’s export ban to be lifted before the due date of July 1.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 17th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russians have always appreciated a good strong watch, and until the collapse of the Soviet Union the domestic watch industry competed effectively against most foreign brands. But the past two decades have almost destroyed the value Russians themselves attribute to such domestic watch brand-names as Polyot and Vostok. The conspicuous display of foreign watch brand-names as an indicator of Russian power, success and wealth hasn’t helped.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The disclosure that Alisher Usmanov has recently made a secret agreement with Oleg Deripaska to achieve improved corporate governance at Norilsk Nickel is more revealing than Usmanov intends to let out – but that additional revelation isn’t difficult to guess.
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by John Helmer - Monday, March 14th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Russia’s largest coking coal producer independent of the major steel groups is for sale, as the two controlling shareholder groups — Gennady Kosovoy and Alexander Vagin, who run the management, and the Evraz group — have engaged investment banks to find a buyer for their combined 80% stake in the company. At least, this is the appearance of the story, after Kosovoy and Vagin announced their intention to sell just a few days after Evraz beat them to it, and following the former owner-managers’ declaration of their unwavering intention to remain precisely where they are.
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by John Helmer - Friday, March 11th, 2011
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

United Company Rusal has triggered three recent pollution crises in Ukraine, Russia and Guinea, and in the latest one, frozen red dust from alumina refining operations at the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev coated a five square kilometre area last week, making it look to residents like a Martian landscape.
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by John Helmer - Friday, March 4th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Data: The latest report from Emerging Portfolio Fund Research (EPFR) of Boston shows that funds investing in Russian listed stocks reported net inflows for the week ending March 2. The total invested was $139 million. The last time I reported on the funds flow was a fortnight ago, when the Financial Times was misrepresenting the market sentiment towards the country and misreporting the financial performance of the oligarchs. While the latest inflow result is the smallest net inflow since the first week of January, it is still much better than the position in other emerging market (EM) country funds, all of which saw the negative outflows indicated in this tabulation prepared by Uralsib Bank today:
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by John Helmer - Friday, March 4th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

LUKoil, Russia’s second oil producer and exporter, has been running an illegal cash smuggling scheme out of front companies in the US, and diverting millions of dollars into a slush fund through an Israeli front company, according to court papers filed in the US yesterday. The mastermind, the US documents allege, is Sergei Kukura, LUKoil’s chief financial officer (image).
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
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Reuters 2/3/11

CONAKRY – Guinea’s President Alpha Conde on Tuesday enlisted the help of billionaire investor George Soros to review the resource-rich West African nation’s mining code and fight corruption in the sector.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

This is the tale of how one Russian’s ambition to be the biggest of his kind in the world, and create a safe haven for his wealth in another country, ended up costing public shareholders billions of dollars in equity and dividend losses; enriched a syndicate of international banks; and lost the Russian state treasury billions of dollars in tax deductions. Russian oligarchs don’t make mistakes — they simply pass on their costs.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
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