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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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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