First there was Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, then Qaddafi the Leader’s Little Green Book, and now, from the witness box of the UK High Court, in testimony given over four days, October 5-8, 2009, comes…
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Chinese checkers may be the closest Russia’s metal oligarchs, Igor Zyuzin (right) and Vladimir Lisin (left), have come to understanding Chinese strategy. The problem is that the game is neither Chinese, nor checkers. It’s actually an American invention, dating from the 1880s. It is based on the simple tactic of jumping your pieces further and faster into your opponent’s goal, before he can do the same to yours. As developed 15 years ago, Russian asset raiding tactics in the metal and mining sector are not more sophisticated.

Wei Chi, on the other hand — also known as Go, in Japan — is said to have been created by the Emperor Shun around 2200 BC, to train the brains of his son and heir. The game has evolved such complex strategy over the board space that a novice cannot readily understand how his space has been surrounded without apparent capture; and in the champion games, who has won and how.
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by John Helmer - Monday, October 12th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Vanity corrupts; pathological vanity corrupts pathologically. That’s when you cannot believe that others are capable of disbelieving you. An American president who is at that stage will contrive anything, including war, for his personal benefit.

For Obama to feel, as he said, “deeply humbled” when awakened by the Nobel Peace Prize telephone-call on Friday morning, you have to think that he and his intelligence agencies failed to know he was a candidate for the award, and did nothing to lobby the Norwegs against the two hundred or so other candidates. If true, he should have announced he was deeply blind-sided, deeply stupid. Then you have to accept that Obama believed from the start of the process that he deserved the award. If true, you can clinically measure the crack in the cerebellum between reality and judgement. And finally, you have to realize that Obama calculated the prize would be better for his polls than not. Given what is already known about Obama’s readiness to escalate at least one of the two losing wars he has yet to withdraw from, that last one is a piece of such cynicism he will put all of his warmongering predecessors in the shade. One-term predecessors, it might be added.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Sovcomflot chief executive Sergey Frank (left, centre figure) testified in the UK High Court last week that as Russia’s Minister of Transport he opposed the privatisation and IPO sale of Sovcomflot shares, despite company board and other ministry approvals starting in 2002. Under cross-examination by counsel for former CEO Dmitry Skarga (right, left figure) and questioning by Justice Andrew Smith, Frank dismissed the share sale plan, which was intended to raise $300 million to buy new ice-class oil and LNG tankers to service the Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 oil and gasfields. Implying this plan lacked “the proper price received and value”, he testified the government preferred to “sack the management and…find a better team to run the company.”

Frank denied that after losing his own ministry post, he fought against several ministers and Kremlin advisors backing the privatisation, until he was appointed CEO of the shipping company in Skarga’s place in late 2004. Asked if his takeover had been arranged by Igor Sechin (now deputy prime minister) and the oil trader Gennady Timchenko, who wanted to merge Sovcomflot with Novoship before selling shares, Frank said: “basically, my level of education giving me enough comfort to express my own vision of any issue, and that doesn’t need any support of people to say that.”
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by John Helmer - Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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by John Helmer - Friday, October 9th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

The board of Vnesheconombank (VEB), the state bailout bank chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, agreed yesterday to extend for a year a $1.8 billion loan to the Evraz group, controlled by Roman Abramovich’s Millhouse holding.

The loan was first issued in mid-November 2008, and is the largest single government financing for the Russian steel sector since the global crisis began a year ago. It was sought to enable Evraz to repay foreign bank loans, which had been raised to pay for Evraz’s expansion abroad, primarily for purchase of steelmills in North America. At the time of last year’s VEB rescue, Evraz was the third most heavily indebted Russian company, with a total of $9.9 billion in net foreign debt outstanding. Only the two state-owned energy companies, Rosneft and Gazprom, were more heavily indebted abroad than Evraz.

Its short-term (6-12 month) debt at the time of the VEB loan was $4.2 billion; $2.1 billion was due and payable by December 31. Although it is a state institution funded by public money, VEB does not issue transaction or audited financial reports, not even in open form to the Russian parliament. Nor has VEB disclosed the terms by which it has secured loans to borrowers.
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by John Helmer - Friday, October 9th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Sergey Frank, the chief executive of state owned Sovcomflot (SCF), one of the top-5 tanker companies in the world, is now into his fourth straight day of cross-examination in the UK High Court for what is turning out to be an unexpectedly dramatic examination of the way high Kremlin officials have fought each other over the management of Russia’s oil shipping concession.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, October 8th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

It took several shots over a thousand years before people who scribble for a living could get the jingle about their business quite right. Euripides tried it with: “The tongue is mightier than the blade”. To the modern ear that sounds a little on the sado-erotic side. Shakespeare had the phallic inspiration: “many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills”. The great Nap got into the right ballpark, but struck out with: “four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”

Then along came Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who arranged in 1839 for the lead in his play about Cardinal Richelieu to say: “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Even more forgotten than Bulwer-Lytton, though, is what the stageboard Richelieu says next: “Behold the arch-enchanters wand – itself a nothing! – but taking sorcery from the master-hand to paralyse the Caesars”.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Alrosa appears to be selling all of its rough diamond production this year to the state stockpile agency, Gokhran, exceeding earlier estimates of the state budget funds previously allocated to sustain the state-owned company’s mining operations. Both Alrosa and Gokhran are under the control of Russia’s Finance Minister, Alexei Kudrin (pictured right).

According to a report by Interfax, in September Alrosa has sold Gokhran rough worth an estimated Rb20.4 billion ($669 million). For the 9-month period just ending, Interfax reports that Alrosa has sold a total of Rb32.5 billion ($1.1 billion) worth of diamonds to the state repository. Alrosa’s chief executive, Fyodor Andreyev (pictured left), and his spokesman, Alexei Polyakov, were unavailable to confirm the numbers, but a Gokhran source has confirmed their accuracy. Alrosa is not clarifying either its production target for the year, or its sales target.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
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By John Helmer

On July 31, the UK Court of Appeal upheld the ruling of High Court Justice Christopher Clarke that the administration of law in Russia is liable to be manipulated by powerful Russian businessmen and politically influential individuals pursuing vendettas for their financial gain. “Improper interference by State actors” was the phrase accepted by the three appeal court judges to refer to the behaviour of the Russian prosecutor-general, ministries of Interior and Justice, police, and courts.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
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