By John Helmer in Moscow

According to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Nemone, Queen of the City of Gold, was one of those notorious Hollywood types – too beautiful, not enough brains, and a perverse streak that enjoyed making people suffer. Tarzan gets help from his pet lion, and together they despatch the worst Nemone sends after them. Nemone is a sore loser, and seeing no purpose in life without getting her own way, she kills herself.

Alexei Mordashov is smarter than Nemone, but he is a sore loser nonetheless. After confronting the combined forces of the minority shareholders in High River Gold (ticker HRG:CN) for six months, and losing, he’s despatched in the space of a single week the chief executive of the company, the head of investor relations, and a member of the HRG board.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, September 27th, 2009
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Key: Rear left, Congressman Bill Pascrell, Democrat, New Jersey
Rear right, NBA Commissioner David Stern
Centre, Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Intelligence
Rack: Mikhail Prokhorov
Front left, Senator Paul Sarbanes, author of financial accountability statute
Front right, Daniel Goelzer, Chairman of Public Company Accounting Oversight Board

For Immediate Release
September 23, 2009

For Information Contact
Paul Brubaker (973) 523-5152

CONGRESSMAN PASCRELL REQUESTS NBA COMISSIONER
DAVID STERN TO INVESTIGATE NEW JERSEY NETS SALE

WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-8) today sent a letter to NBA Commissioner David Stern urging him to thoroughly investigate former nickel mining baron Mikhail Prokhorov, who reached an agreement today to buy the New Jersey Nets.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, September 27th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

A secret meeting in the middle of the night in the presidential palace in the Guinean capital of Conakry, requested by the Russian aluminium oligarch Oleg Deripaska, has triggered a Guinean court ruling and a tax investigation of claims amounting to $700 million. The claims catapult the Guinean government and its leader, Army Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, to the head of the table of international creditors seeking more than $8 billion from the insolvent Russian aluminium monopoly, United Company Rusal.

Guinean government officials say that Deripaska, who is chief executive and controlling shareholder of Rusal, made the arrangement to meet Camara through an intermediary, Raoul Delaware. A British passport-holder from Mauritius, he is well-known in Conakry from his involvement in international business deals during the 25-year rule of President Lansana Conte. Conte died last December. He has been replaced by the Guinean Army.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, September 24th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Mahmoud Thiam, the US-trained banker turned resource policymaker for the Guinean government (pictured right), says that the nine-month review he has initiated of the country’s major mineral and mining concessions is not intended to reopen or renege on every deal done with foreign miners during the 25-year rule of Lansana Conte, Guinea’s president until last year. When Conte died suddenly in December, he was replaced by the Guinean Army, led by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara. Thiam, who was educated in France and the US, and worked at Merrill Lynch and UBS, was appointed Minister of Mining, Energy, and Hydraulics last January.

“We view concessions as legally binding,” Thiam told Minesite.com, and “we intend to respect them.” Distinguishing his approach from mine licence and privatization investigations under way elsewhere in Africa, Thiam said: “we have tried to avoid a blanket questioning , which can be time-consuming and expensive. Freezing everything and putting everything in question is not the right approach. We didn’t come to renege.”
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by John Helmer - Thursday, September 24th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

The state-owned tanker company Sovcomflot will try to sell up to 20% of its shares in a public offering, the former board chairman Igor Shuvalov (pictured right) said yesterday. But the timing may be delayed if a UK High Court trial, focusing on the company’s internal affairs, goes against the management; this is now supervised by Sergei Naryshkin, the Kremlin chief of staff, who has replaced Shuvalov as chairman of the Sovcomflot board.

Shuvalov, a deputy prime minister in the Russian government, told a Bloomberg television interviewer yesterday that to claw back cash to offset the government’s deficit spending, a programme of privatization sales is being considered. Sovcomflot CEO Sergey Frank (pictured left) had proposed the share sale, and postponed it more than once before last year’s financial crash intervened. Before Frank took over the company, CEO Dmitry Skarga commissioned JP Morgan to advise on the placement of a 10% stake. According to Shuvalov, he would like to run the IPO before the end of this year.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, was last elected in December 2007. The outcome was the following distribution of seats: United Russia, 315; Communist Party, 57; Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, 40; and Fair Russia, 38.

Vadim Varshavsky, 49, was elected to the Duma in 2005 on the United Russia slate, and reelected in 2007. He represents the Kamensky district of the Rostov region, where he owns a steelmill. Varshavsky is also a member of the Duma Committee on Industry. After defaulting on debts estimated to total between $3 billion and $4 billion, Varshavsky has decamped. A bank creditor says it has received telephone-calls from him, but does not know where he is calling from.

Varshavsky has also disappeared from his deputy’s seat. Representatives of the parliamentary parties and the Duma committee of which Varshavsky is a member, have responded with the following statements:
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Mikhail Prokhorov is an accomplished athlete, whose sports include skiing, basketball, kickboxing, and waterskiing. He is also an upstanding Russian patriot, dedicated to the introduction of high-technology skills to Russians who have been crippled in their ball-handling skills by seventy years of Marxism-Leninism.

In response to the reports appearing here on his business plans for American basketball and Italian football, Igor Petrov, Prokhorov’s spokesman, has invited readers to take note of the following announcement, issued on September 22, of Prokhorov’s intentions to raise an international bank loan of $700 million, secured by his personal guarantee, for the advancement of Russian basketball, and a place to watch the game in the middle of Brooklyn.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Dying of laughter isn’t the worst way to go.

In the ancient world, it befell to the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos to be contemplating one day the relationship between altruism and heroism. Into his viewfinder two donkeys appeared. It isn’t clear whether they started drinking wine from a cup Chrysippos had absent-mindedly left behind. Or whether he deliberately fed them with the drink. What happened next has been famous for 2,216 years. After imbibing, the donkeys started nibbling on a basket of figs Chrysippos had ordered for lunch. But at that sight, Chrysippos started to laugh; he couldn’t stop; and he died of the joke. To be sure, Chrysippos’s ticker was past 70 years old, and he may already have accelerated it fatally by beating his asses to the brew. But of one thing noone is in doubt – the wine, the donkeys, and the figs made a hilarious and fatal combination.

The history of Rome also has something to do with figs, for it was a fig-tree on the banks of the River Tiber that snared the basket containing the twins Romulus and Remus, who were floating away from their homicidal uncle; he was disposing of them, he thought, to save his inheritance. They were suckled by a she-wolf, according to legend. Then Romulus grew up to murder Remus, also for inheritance purposes.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

In the original game of basketball, invented by Dr James Naismith in 1892, there were 13 rules. Rule 5 was the disqualifier. In the playbook of Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, there is just one rule – and that’s the disqualifier. Mikhail Prokhorov’s decision to buy into the American National Basketball Association is his signal he’s out of the Russian game.

Prokhorov has been acutely sensitive to the coverage he has been getting in the American media for some time, and according to a source in his circle, that is because he does not want to be seen by the Kremlin as getting too close to the US Government. Taking ski vacations in Aspen, Colorado, is one thing; shaking hands with the President of the United States is another (in a crowded room).
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by John Helmer - Friday, September 18th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev has presented two bears to Switzerland, with the warning that if any harm comes to them, or to Victor Vekselberg, a Russian oil and aluminium oligarch, all the Russian money that goes into, or is presently sitting in Switzerland, may vanish.

The Swiss Foreign Ministry says that no Russian head of state has ever visited Switzerland. But the Kremlin’s memory is a little longer. It reports that Tsar Alexander 1 (pictured) was there in 1819. In fact, for many years before, there had been a mutual soft-spot between the tsar and the Swiss. This had produced Alexander’s veto of a Prussian and Austrian military scheme to invade Switzerland on the way to attacking Napoleon. But the Swiss found their own way round that, and on January 14, 1813, following an army of Austrians and Bavarians, Alexander celebrated the Russian New Year in Basel. As Swiss schoolchildren used to be taught, the anti-Napoleonic alliance had rescued the Swiss from the French, turning them out of Geneva, Valais and Neuchatel, and creating thereby the confederation of Swiss cantons with something close to its modern political geography. The neutrality of the new state was from the beginning a pro-German, pro-Russian, anti-French idea.
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by John Helmer - Friday, September 18th, 2009
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