Picture-1 – see how the price of aluminium metal is rising on the US exchanges
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
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By John Helmer in Moscow

In the junior goldmining business, hope springs eternal. So naturally it did, when GV Gold, the Irkutsk-based junior goldminer controlled by Sergei Dokuchayev, went before a recent Moscow miners’ beauty contest to announce a new share issue bid. Maxim Gorlachev, head of corporate development, told the Adam Smith Institute metals conference in Moscow that “an IPO is one of the options we are considering in order to fund growth.” The target for fund raising is $300 million, he said, in order to lift the volume of current gold produced from 111,000 troy ounces to four times that amount, 438,000 oz., in another four years. The shares might be listed and sold in Hong Kong, London, Moscow or Toronto, Gorlachev is also reported to have said.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Negotiations under way between Russian gas exporter Gazprom and Romania may result in a dramatic shift in the routing of the South Stream gas pipeline under the Black Sea, and in current relations between the Russian and Bulgarian governments, Bulgarian officials have told Fairplay.
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by John Helmer - Monday, March 1st, 2010
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Before modernization

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by John Helmer - Thursday, February 25th, 2010
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By John Helmer in Moscow

In the long history of collapsing empires, there is a golden rule. If and when the outflow of wealth to the foreign concessions or colonies exceeds the wealth that flows back to Empire HQ, the empire is on its last legs.

There is one modification of this rule; it’s for empires which export armies and war-making machines. These empires can go on losing wars abroad almost indefinitely, so long as the generals and the captains can finance their campaigns from their conquests, and don’t think of returning to replace those in charge at home. These are the warlord empires. They export the wherewithal for the establishment of new warlords in novel places almost constantly. Losing wars can be just as profitable for them as winning them, so long as they keep alive and keep moving; and their targets stay in fear and trembling.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, February 25th, 2010
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By John Helmer in Moscow

When the Kremlin decides to privatize strategic resource assets, it makes a habit of quietly arranging the buyers in advance. Although such privatizations are always announced as serving the requirement of the state treasury to maximize the asset value and take in the largest amount of cash possible for the newly issued shares, this usually doesn’t happen. The loans-for-shares schemes, which delivered Russia’s most important oil and mining companies into half a dozen oligarch hands in the mid-1990s, is a notorious example. More recent attempts by the Kremlin at genuine auctions of mineral resources have embarrassingly caused the asset prices to go higher than the winning buyers, oligarch-sized though they may be, can afford to pay for, and then develop. Since the crash of 2008 this has produced another round of government financial bailouts for the resource-holding oligarchs, although this time the instruments — state purchases of bonds, state bank loans and share purchases, guarantees, tax relief — have looked less corrupt.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Negotiations are close to a deal announcement for the takeover of the Donetsk Electrometallurgical Works (DEMZ) by Russia’s Mechel group, controlled by Igor Zyuzin (right figure).

A report today from George Buzhenitsa, steel analyst at Unicredit Securities, discloses that Mechel is “in the final stages of completing the acquisition”. He noted that Mechel has already been active in taking over operating rights of several other steelmills which, like DEMZ, had been owned by Vadim Varshavsky (left figure) until last year. Then he lost them in regional court bankruptcy actions, after he defaulted on about $3 billion worth of loan obligations – considerably more than the steelmills he mortgaged were worth. The four Varshavsky steelmills transferred to Mechel so far are Nytva, Zlatoust, Rostov, and Gurievsk: http://johnhelmer.net/?p=1772 and http://johnhelmer.net/?p=1501
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
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Before Mmm-Modernization (more…)

by John Helmer - Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Evraz, Russia’s largest steelmaking and mining group, owned by three Russian oligarchs, continues to wage commercial war against a single Ukrainian oligarch on a Dniepropetrovsk railway track, and through the Evraz group’s Moscow press office. The contest is on home ground for Igor Kolomoisky (bottom image), who went to school in the region; it is going less well for the three Russians – Roman Abramovich and Eugene Shvidler, who live in London, and Alexander Abramov, currently chairman of the Evraz board of directors (top 3 images).
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by John Helmer - Friday, February 19th, 2010
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Crew Gold, the Toronto and Oslo-listed junior miner whose gold reserves and mining operations are mostly in the West African republic of Guinea, is facing a legal challenge from Guinea’s mining minister, Mahmoud Thiam.

The bad news from Guinea has landed immediately after Crew Gold’s controlling shareholder, Norwegian Jens Ulltveit-Moe (right image), agreed to share his loss-making mining company with Alexei Mordashov (left image), the Russian oligarch who runs steelmills in Russia, Italy, and the US; and whose Severstal Resources owns Canadian-listed High River Gold, as well as an iron-ore mine in Liberia.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, February 18th, 2010
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