By John Helmer in Moscow

Shares of uranium mining companies, like other energy sources, generally follow the commodity price, so when oil and the others collapsed a year ago, the Russian uranium miner, Priargunsk Chemical and Mining Company (ticker PNGO:RU), went down with them. From a historical peak of $800 per share struck in April of 2007, it drifted down, despite the upward movement of spot uranium prices, to the 2008 peak of $585 on May 22, 2008. Then in July, the share price started diving, and hit bottom of $100 on February 16. How then to explain the 140% takeoff from then to this week’s price of $240?

Part of the answer is that the glow of the share is coming from tiny trades of 300 or less shares. Just 18% of the company’s share issue is potentially open to trading; 82% is closely held by the state-owned uranium mine holding called Atomredmetzoloto; ARMZ for short. The other part of the answer is the upward pull of the Russian stock market (RTS) index as a whole, driven primarily by the rising spot price of crude oil.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, September 17th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Hard on the heels of a Russian Foreign Ministry warning to Canada against denying an entry visa to Senator Mikhail Margelov last week, a veteran of Volgotanker, once Russia’s largest oil transportation fleet, announced today that he is challenging Interpol for encouraging the arrest of travellers on charges trumped up in Moscow.

Ilya Katsnelson (pictured top), the Copenhagen-based US executive associated with the now bankrupt Volgotanker group in Russia, is challenging Interpol for continuing to issue a red (arrest) notice on the instruction of the Russian prosecutor-general. The US, Germany, and Denmark have all rejected the Russian claims against Katsnelson. On July 29, the Danish Ministry of Justice formally issued its rejection of a Russian extradition request for him. Katsnelson told Fairplay he is charging Interpol with multiple violations of the UN and European Conventions on Human Rights for maintaining the red notice on its database.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
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On December 14, 2008, as then President George Bush was speaking at a press conference in Baghdad, Mountazer al-Zaidi rose abruptly from about twelve feet away, lifted his right arm, and tossed a shoe at the president’s head while shouting in Arabic: “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” Bush ducked and the shoe narrowly missed him. A few seconds later, the journalist tossed his other shoe, this time shouting, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!”

Watch again what happened: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/12/14/multimedia/1194835546483/bush-makes-final-visit-to-iraq.html

This morning in Baghdad, Al-Zaidi was released from prison after nine months.

The game website Sock and Awe records that, as of this morning, a total of 98,542,514 shoes have been flung through the internet at Bush, in solidarity with Al-Zaidi.

by John Helmer - Monday, September 14th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Canada has refused an entry visa for Mikhail Margelov, the Kremlin’s special representative to Africa. The reason, according to Canadian sources, is Margelov’s past connexions to the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency.

While officially, the Canadian Embassy in Moscow and government in Ottawa refuse to comment publicly on individual visa issues, a Moscow newspaper has published Margelov’s account in which he says “my conclusion is that they rejected me because of something in my biography… Since I got visas in 2005 and 2006…in my biography three things have changed: a young son was born; I have grown thinner by 10 kilograms; and in December 2008 the President appointed me the special representative for Sudan.” Margelov makes no secret of his family and career ties with the KGB. He has told Business Day he studied Arabic under intelligence agency auspices, and then taught the subject at an agency school in the 1980s.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, September 13th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

A Republic of Guinea tribunal ruled this week in Conakry that United Company Rusal, one of the largest bauxite, alumina and aluminum producers in the world, unlawfully acquired its shareholding control of the Friguia alumina refinery in the country in 2006, and should make restitution.

The judgement comes before the federal court in Nigeria rules on a parallel case, challenging Rusal’s takeover of the Aluminium Smelter Company of Nigeria (Alscon) in the same year. But before the Nigerian court decides, a report from the National Committee on Privatisation has already gone to Nigeria’s President Umaru Yar’ Adua (pictured top centre), concluding that violations of the privatisation rules and subsequent investment conditions for Alscon should lead to the revocation of Rusal’s concession in that country.

The West African decisions have come despite recent visits to both countries by Deripaska himself. He was in Nigeria in June, where he had, according to his company website, “a series of consultations with Nigerian government authorities and businessmen”. Nigerian sources claim he sought a meeting with Yar’ Adua, but was turned down. Six weeks later in early August, Deripaska was in Guinea. This time the company says he “had a series of meetings with the management of the company’s operations in Guinea and representatives of local communities.”
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by John Helmer - Friday, September 11th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

In the sharpest warning issued to date by an international ratings agency about a major Russian steelmaker, Standard & Poors (S&P) said yesterday there is “significant doubt about the group’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

Evraz is Russia’s largest steel and mining group. It is controlled by the Millhouse holding of Roman Abramovich and Eugene Shvidler (pictured left to right, respectively) , plus the last of the founding shareholders, Alexander Abramov, and his protege Alexander Frolov. Until recently, these men have been considered among the most bankable of Russian metal magnates, and Abramovich the most secure of Russian oligarchs.

The S&P report, authored by analysts Alex Herbert and Andrey Nikolaev, downgrades Evraz’s corporate credit and unsecured debt ratings from BB- to B+. The move, according to S&P, reflects “our opinion that there is heightened uncertainty about the willingness of banks to agree to waive or amend financial covenants, and the ability of Evraz to address its currently very weak liquidity. This follows the announcement by Evraz of operating results for the six months to June 30, 2009, that were even weaker than we had previously anticipated. Evraz faces a difficult combination of very low cash flow generation caused by the severe steel industry downturn and substantial adjusted debt from previous debt-financed acquisitions. In addition, the group has persistently high short-term debt and faces potential financial covenant breaches, which may be more difficult to address than management expects.”
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by John Helmer - Friday, September 11th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Port logs for the MV Arctic Sea — the small Turkish-built, Russian-owned vessel recently reported at the centre of an alleged piracy and extortion attempt — reveal that the timber-carrier has been making regular voyages between Finnish ports and either Algerian or French Mediterranean ports for the past three years. However, the disappearance reported to have occurred between July 24 and August 24, triggering a spate of feverish speculation in Tel Aviv and London about secret missile smuggling, appears not to be the first time the Arctic Sea has disappeared; or at least gone missing from the maritime record known as the international Automatic Identification System (AIS).

Each year recently, according to AIS records, the vessel appears to be missing from the logs in the Mediterranean for up to 20 days at a time. In April of this year, the Arctic Sea is missing from AIS port-call records between April 1, when it transited the Gibraltar Straits, moving east, and April 11, when it returned through the straits, moving west. A similar gap in the log records appeared a year earlier, between February 13, 2008, when the Arctic Sea sailed east past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, and 20 days later, on March 4, when it transited the Gibraltar Straits moving westwards. In 2007, the gap in the logs appears between April 26, when the vessel entered the Mediterranean, and May 14, when it exited. In all cases, the vessel appears to have taken on cargo at Loviisa and Kotka (Finland), and Tallinn (Estonia).
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Two weeks ago, without fanfare, the US Government decided it will not allow General Motors (GM), in which the government owns the controlling 60% stake, to sell its European automobile division to a Russian combination of the state savings bank Sberbank, Oleg Deripaska’s GAZ auto plant, and Deripaska’s Canadian partner, Frank Stronach’s Magna. Compared to the refusal of the US to grant Deripaska a visa to enter the country, this was a more powerful, definitive, and public message.

Deripaska conceded this week in an interview with a Moscow newspaper that his attempt to go international with the acquisition of Opel of Germany (as well as the UK’s Vauxhall and Sweden’s Saab units) has failed, because of the US government’s veto. Asked if the “attitude towards Russian business abroad is still ambiguous”, Deripaska replied: “Unfortunately, yes. But in the Opel case, the US Department of State’s prejudices are also a problem.”
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

No sooner had De Beers and Archangel Diamond Corporation (ADC) revived last Friday, September 4, their US litigation plan of attack against LUKoil and its senior management, headed by Vagit Alekperov, than Alekperov issued an unprecedented statement saying he is thinking of selling out of diamonds altogether.

Until now,Alekperov has insisted, both privately and publicly, that he would never sell the mining rights to the deposit at Verkhotina, in the Russian northwestern region of Arkhangelsk. According to US court documents, Alekperov, together with his one-time friend and business partner, Alisher Usmanov, was responsible for the takeover of the mining licence in 1998, two years after its discovery, through Arkhangelskgeoldobycha (AGD), a regional state geology organization, which was privatized and ultimately taken over by LUKoil.
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by John Helmer - Monday, September 7th, 2009
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By John Helmer in Moscow

The Russian wine market has been drying up, though it’s on account of falling incomes, not because of recent exhortations by mental health specialists and President Dmitry Medvedev to curb drinking.

“The average statistical man in our country is a drunkard,” according to Alexander Nemtsov, a department head at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry. That’s because Russians drink about 15 litres of pure alcohol a year, 80% of it in high-proof form.

Medvedev has responded with a recent appeal to “stop the growing consumption of alcohol among young people. The habit of drinking with and without a reason may lead to heavy alcohol addiction in a rather short time. According to the data we have, one-third of young men and almost 20% of young women use such drinks daily or every other day…The sale of alcohol to people under the age of 18 is banned in Russia now as it has always been. It’s no secret that this requirement is often ignored, which it was not in Soviet times.”
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by John Helmer - Friday, September 4th, 2009
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