By John Helmer in Moscow
A news agency report from Cairo yesterday, claiming the Egyptian health authorities have quarantined a new Russian grain shipment in port, has been disputed by the Russian inspection agency, and by grain shippers in Moscow, who are not sure whether the action signals a resumption of last year’s weevil wars for market share in Egypt’s lucrative wheat market.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
President Dmitry Medvedev is lying when he claims that his modernization slogan, under which he is running for re-appointment by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, means free and fair competition; security for foreign investment; and private ownership in place of state control. I mean lying, as in lying on the fakir’s bed of nails. Medvedev knows that this location is a sensitive one. If he moves unpredictably, he risks Putin’s wrath, and the pain of many other pricks.
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The Harmonics Vuvuzela for the season’s purest noise goes to Maxim Fedotov, who led the Moscow City Symphony Orchestra on June 16 in performances that included Ravel’s Bolero. Fedotov placed a snare drum at the front of the stage, and assigned the drummer the virtuoso noise-making part, obliging the rest of the sound-makers gathered behind him to compete to see who could be loudest. This display was sponsored by the embassies of Spain and the European Union.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
Alrosa’s chief executive Fyodor Andreyev (right image) briefed Moscow investment banks last week on the company’s strategy in an attempt to raise demand for a domestic bond issue, to be followed by a eurobond issue in November. Alrosa’s target for the two issues is $1.84 billion.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
In the milk business, sanctimoniousness can induce more nausea than salmonella.
President Dmitry Medvedev big-noted his re-election campaign with a speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday with this seeming call for competition to stimulate economic growth. “No matter how many state-owned enterprises we might have,” Medvedev said, “modernisation will above all be achieved through the efforts of private business, and only in a competitive environment. The state’s job is to ensure a good business climate for Russian and foreign entrepreneurs, and a fair and honest competitive environment.”
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By John Helmer in Moscow
Roughly one rouble in every three spent from the Russian state budget goes out the treasury door in the form of a procurement contract.
According to the statute which regulates this process – Federal Law No. 94-FZ, “On Procurement of Goods, Works and Services for State and Municipal Needs”, enacted in 2006 – the process may take the form of tenders, auctions, or open requests for quotations. What the last of these means in practice is that the procuring government agency sends requests for a price quote to selected contractors. According to the law, this method is restricted to procurements of relatively low value. A report by the Ministry of Economic Development in April of 2009 on the first years of the operation of the procurement law called it “one of the most radical reforms in the second half of the 2000s, which affected many government and private economic agents.”
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By John Helmer in Moscow
It’s tough being the greatest legal reformer ever to occupy the Kremlin because none of the tsars who preceded Dmitry Medvedev had a university degree in jurisprudence. Mikhail Gorbachev might be considered a close runner, because he received his law degree from Moscow State University in 1955. But then Medvedev wouldn’t be the only one among Gorbachev’s successors to deny him the laurel, for fear of attracting the electoral doom he would share with Gorbachev, if he were more generous.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
The dispute that has haunted Evraz’s operation of the Czech steelmill at Vitkovice since 2005 when the Russian group won a disputed privatization tender for the plant, has escalated this week into a threat of closure. It is the second time the Evraz management in Moscow has issued a closure warning in disputes this year outside Russia. The first was in the Ukraine over rivalry for railroad access between Evraz’s Sukha Balka iron-ore mine and Igor Kolomoisky’s Krivoi Rog Iron-Ore Combine (KZhRK) (see http://johnhelmer.net/?p=2680).
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Moscow, 15 June 2010 – UC RUSAL (SEHK: 486, EuroNext: RUSAL/RUAL), the world’s largest aluminium producer, announces the visit of a UC RUSAL delegation headed by Oleg Deripaska, CEO of UC RUSAL, to Guinea. Within the framework of the visit the company and the government of the country reached several agreements.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
Russia’s deputy prime minister in charge of ports and shipping, Igor Sechin (image of Paris, centre), told Fairplay today he believes the best replacement for the storm-damaged Sochi cargo port is Kavkaz, on the Kerch Strait. Sechin confirmed that last week in Turkey he had spoken in favour of a new cargo hub to service the Sochi Winter Olympics construction, which is planned to require a 6-million tonne annual volume through the port until 2014, when the Games will be held. Through a spokesman Sechin also told Fairplay he believes Sochi should continue to be developed as a passenger port, and that after the Olympics, the cargo facilities should be converted to a marina for luxury vessels.
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