By John Helmer in Moscow
It has become the biggest tussle over a shipyard contract ever fought out in public in Russia.
Roman Trotsenko, chief executive of the state-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), told Fairplay today that negotiations are under way for USC to buy the designs, shipboard technology, and production licences for the building of Russia’s first amphibious landing and helicopter carrier in Russian shipyards.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
There are some memorable accounts of returns and arrivals in Russia. Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory (1951), for example, remembers his return from university in England, when, as he wrote, the sound of the snow and ice crystals crackled under his feet as he stepped off the train at St. Petersburg.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
When US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presided at the original button ceremony in Geneva on March 6, 2009, on the button she presented Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was written the word, in Latin letters, PEREGRUZKA. In Russian, that doesn’t mean RESET, as much of the subsequent reporting of the button has suggested. What the button originally meant was OVERLOAD.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
In the history of Russia it has never happened before that the oligarchs would take on the military establishment in a tug of war over billion-dollar assets.
This couldn’t have happened in the past, because asset power and military strength were the same thing — boyars were warlords. Or else the Communist Party commissars kept officers and troops on a very short leash, and Stalin shot those he didn’t like. Russia has come a way since then.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
Fyodor Andreyev was appointed chief executive of Alrosa, the state-owned Russian diamond monopoly and world’s second diamond miner after De Beers, a year ago, after the Kremlin decided to change the diamond concession. Ousted were the chief executive Sergei Vybornov and Otar Marganya, mediator and fixer between the company, the Sakha government, the federal treasury, and the Minister of Finance, Alexei Kudrin, who doubles as Alrosa’s board chairman. The Sakha president Vyacheslav Shtirov asked to go at the time, but was told to wait. He departed at the end of May this year.
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By John Helmer in Moscow
If this wasn’t Russia, the amount of negative scrutiny the Evraz steel group, owned by Roman Abramovich and Alexander Abramov, is getting lately from the federal government would signal that the owners are in trouble with the rulers.
Also, if this wasn’t Russia, assurances from stock brokerages calling on investors to bid up and buy Evraz shares would sound so counter-intuitive and self-serving as not to be worth the credibility risk of publishing. But this is Russia: if Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his deputy, Igor Sechin, are beginning a shakeup of oligarch concessions in the mining and metals industries, there isn’t a steel analyst or an investment banker in Moscow who believes they are serious. More shakedown than shakeup is how the brokers and bankers think of it.
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The Levellers – John Wildman, John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Richard Overton et al., 1645-49
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By John Helmer in Moscow
On July 6, Sergei Generalov, chief executive and controlling shareholder of Far Eastern Shipping Company (Fesco) announced plans to hold a private placement of newly issued shares.
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