by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

If the price of crude oil is stable or rising, the money spent on Russian art works at the semi-annual sales of the London art auction houses usually follows suit.

In June, when the last Russian Art Week was held, the price of oil was experiencing a seesaw between $71 and $63 per barrel.  Last week the oil price was moving up from $59 to $65. Allowing a lag in the time art buyers need to count the cash flowing into their bank accounts, the latest round of bidding should have come close to the June result. The actual outcome is that last week’s grand total came to £35.36 million; this compares to £35.93 million in June, and to £35.02 million in November of 2018.

US sanctions don’t have a direct impact because the biggest Russian art buyers in the London market aren’t the individuals targeted by the US Treasury. Instead, some are grand larcenists who launder the money they have stolen from their Russian banks and businesses, and who have been given safe haven to decorate their walls, girlfriends, and gardens by the British Government.  Click to follow their story.  

The domestic Russian art market is also showing resistance to Russia hating abroad. The latest measurement, based on reporting from Russian art dealers, shows the indexes for paintings and graphics bottomed out last year, and have been slowly improving this year.   

Diversification of genres for sale is also drawing fresh demand because of the low base effect — the prices are starting in the bargain basement. William MacDougall, co-director of the third-ranked London house, observes: “Our contemporary Russian Art Auction (over $1.3 million) on Monday was the first specialist auction for that sector in a decade (June 2008 was also ours). Its success has raised hopes that that area of the market is finally reviving. In this auction round the middle was stronger than the top.  We have also been seeing stronger demand for Contemporary in the last two auctions, albeit from a low base, hence our specialist auction.”

by Editor - Sunday, December 1st, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Nobody learned to write a simple narrative better than Georges Simenon, with the result that over a lifetime of 86 years he drew 550 million paid-up readers, not counting millions more of library and other loaners. He rewarded himself with a well-known fortune banked in Switzerland, and carefully counted numbers of orgasms with thousands of willing women. It’s unclear whether the latter were also Simenon’s readers. He admits he preferred to pay the women in cash for the five minutes he says he averaged spending himself on them. 

Simenon was also much too busy to develop convictions himself about the wars, judicial and extra-judicial killings, and politics through which he and his readers lived. They don’t even serve as backdrops, soundtracks, or motivations for his characters or their stories. “I’m not interested in politics,” he wrote in his diary in 1960 when he was fifty-seven. “But still I’m intrigued by a problem posed by politics: that of sincerity and insincerity.” Simenon’s uniqueness was to narrate the investigation and pursuit of killing and killers with almost no judgement implied by himself, or his policeman for that matter, of the truth. Truth, Simenon’s works illustrate, doesn’t have the same sale value as sincerity, at least not in the book market. Noone quite as insincere and deceptive as Simenon has been quite as readable.

In the real world that’s called false consciousness; in government operations it goes by other names – propaganda, active measures, disinformation. It’s what official narratives lacking in truth are full of. Like the one the US Government and its media tell every day about the killing and lying crimes Russians allegedly commit. On Simenon’s anniversary, it’s worth pausing to contemplate the method for selling such narratives successfully, over and over.

by Editor - Thursday, November 28th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Every year for fifteen years now, Bruce Misamore, David Godfrey, and Steven Theede have been paid millions of dollars in lawyer and manager salaries, bonuses, and travel expenses by the men who weren’t in Russian jail with Mikhail Khodorkovsky (lead image, left);  and then when he got out, by Khodorkovsky too. The objective of them all was to sue the Russian Government for the convictions and penalties for tax evasion, fraud, asset stripping, money laundering, corruption  and thuggery on which the Yukos oil company thrived until Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003 and the oil company subsequently bankrupted, nationalized, and then reprivatized as Rosneft.

After years of court cases in the US and Europe, the original Yukos group won a compensation award of $50 billion for loss of their oil assets, foregone oil income and interest. This was a record amount, but it’s a figment — an amount that will never be paid by the Russian Government nor collected by Khodorkovsky and his men. Their attempts to seize Russian state assets in France, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe and hold them hostage for the money have also come to nought.

At the same time, the Yukos group have been aiming to dig up the real money they figured they had a better chance of taking and spending. This was almost $2 billion Khodorkovsky had concealed abroad behind trusts and front companies in The Netherlands, Isle of Man, Cyprus, Gibraltar, and other hiding places. After more than thirty court cases over almost fifteen years, Khodorkovsky has now taken as much of the readies as he can, along with his comrades Mikhail Brudno and Leonid Nevzlin in Israel. Altogether, about $1.2 billion.  

That has left Misamore, Godfrey and Theede in California, Texas, and Hawaii feeling short-changed. So Godfrey and Theede decided to take what they could from Misamore.

Last month, just six days after Godfrey was judged in a London court to be a liar and a dishonest schemer, Misamore launched a lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court. He’s now accusing Godfrey and Theede, and two of their lawyer friends, of helping themselves to what he thinks of as his share of the Yukos loot. The amount Misamore is trying to recover is $13.5 million.

For that amount, and at the risk of spending a third of it on legal fees, Misamore is signalling not only Godfrey and Theede, but also Khodorkovsky himself, that he’s willing to tell all he knows. This is the first time in a court of law outside Russia that the truth about Khodorkovsky may be revealed by one of his most trusted Americans.  

by Editor - Tuesday, November 26th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Slaughtering sheep, goats and chickens with the idea of checking their innards to tell the fortunes of human beings started with the ancient Babylonians, peaked in ancient Rome, and despite the best efforts of the Catholic popes, it was still going strong in medieval England. The killing was called casting the haruspices.  

Foie gras and chopped liver are still fashionable in London and New York where Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the guilty Russian oil robber, spends his money trying to improve his reputation and fortune, and run as the Anglo-American candidate for the succession to President Vladimir Putin.  Journalists believe Khodorkovsky’s haruspices; the Royal Courts of Justice don’t.  Positively liverish is what becomes of the Khodorkovsky narrative when exposed to cross-examination, the truth test, and the penalty for perjury.  

by Editor - Sunday, November 24th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The operational chief of the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) in Ukraine of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is a British officer whose combat role in Syria between 2016 and 2018 the OSCE is attempting to conceal.

Mark Etherington, a British Army paratrooper, was “working on Syria”, according to the OSCE’s appointment notice a year ago. In May of this year Etherington told the Kyiv Post he was “in Syria.”

The OSCE claims its mission adheres to the “principles of impartiality and transparency”. So Etherington was asked yesterday to clarify if he had performed combat advisory and military intelligence roles in Syria, and whether he is still associated with British forces. He and the OSCE spokesmen are refusing to say.   

by Editor - Wednesday, November 20th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Dutch Government have released  highly sensitive intelligence confirming what is said to be telephone communications between Russian military commanders, the Russian Defence Ministry, and at least one Kremlin staff man in their communications with the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

The purported telephone interceptions date from June through August 2014. Tape-recordings and text partially translating and interpreting what was said were presented publicly on November 14 by the Dutch-directed prosecution of crimes committed when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was destroyed over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

In the release,   the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), run by Dutch and Australian policemen, announced it “is looking for information on the individuals within the military and administrative hierarchy who enabled the shooting down of MH17 in Eastern Ukraine using a BUK TELAR.” The JIT has already announced its conclusion that the Russian Government was responsible and criminally culpable in the shoot-down of the aircraft. The Malaysian Government, which is a member of the JIT and owner-operator of the aircraft in which 43 Malaysians were killed, has  refused to endorse the allegations first announced by the Dutch on June 19. 

In fact, as lawyers and analysts of the MH17 case now realize, last week’s disclosure of the top-secret interceptions reveals the JIT has no tape evidence of communications with Moscow on July 17 and 18, 2014, in the immediate aftermath of the aircraft crash. Alternatively, if the JIT has this evidence but is keeping it secret, the latest interception records demonstrate what the JIT cannot prove. In the period when the Russian involvement is most likely to have been direct, as the Dutch allege, and communications ought to have been intense over many hours, the JIT, and its NATO and US sources, have nothing to show.

This means the opposite of the JIT’s conclusion. The latest evidence proves what the JIT doesn’t have.

by Editor - Tuesday, November 19th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A new book has just been printed by Harvard University Press, written by a professor of French history at the University of Houston, Texas, explaining five ideas for Americans from events which took place in the court of Empress Catherine II (the Great) in St. Petersburg over five months between October 8, 1773 and March 5, 1774.

The first idea is that it is ethical for Americans to support the overthrow of the ruling regime in Russia. The second is that when it comes to international law or rules-based order in the world, the US is superior to Russia. The third is that Russia’s rulers can spend the modern equivalent of millions of dollars on buying positive PR for themselves abroad, but the message is never  credible. The fourth is that the best way to improve Russian morals is to plant a colony of foreigners into the middle of the country’s administration so that “their particular character will spread and become generalized”. And the fifth idea is that Crimea isn’t really Russian because Catherine took it from the Turks by the war ending in the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji, signed on July 21, 1774.

Robert Zaretsky, the author of the book and these ideas, reports the treaty signing on July 23, a mistake by two days. That’s the least of Zaretsky’s mistakes.

by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2019
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Igor Kolomoisky has given the New York Times the interview US intelligence agency officials wanted him to give.  As they predicted, he spoke right on cue. The rest, as intelligence agency officials say the world over, is history. Only Kolomoisky and the New York Times don’t know history.

by Editor - Wednesday, November 13th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the mind of Fiona Hill (lead image, right), the recently departed senior director for Russia at the National Security Council (NSC), everybody in Washington is vulnerable to Russian attacks of one kind or another, but not her.

Instead, she admitted in testimony to the Congressional committees investigating impeachment evidence against President Donald Trump,  that she’s on an attack operation of her own.  “I’m sorry to be very passionate but this is precisely…why I joined the [Trump] administration. I didn’t join it because I thought the Ukrainians had been going after the President.”  She says the reason she joined up was to fight the Russians.

“I thought it was very important to step up, as an expert, as somebody who’s been working on Russia for basically my whole entire adult 1ife, given what had happened in 2016 and given the peril that I actually thought that we were in as a democracy, given what the Russians I know to have done in the course of the 2016 elections… I’m extremely concerned that this is a rabbit hole that we’ re all going to go down in between now and the 2020 election, and it will be to all of our detriment.”

Hill testified that she’s certain that “what happened in 2016” was that the Kremlin intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. “We’re in peril as a democracy because of other people interfering here. And it doesn’t mean to say that other people haven’t also been trying to do things, but the Russians were [the ones] who attacked us in 2016, and they’re now writing the script for others to do the same. And if we don’t get our act together, they will continue to make fools of us internationally.”

 “He’s [President Vladimir Putin] looking out there for every opening that he can find, basically, and somebody’s vulnerability to turn that against them. That’s exactly what a case officer does. They get a weakness, and they blackmail their assets. And Putin will target world leaders and other officials like this. He tries to target everybody.”

So, in the logic of Hill’s analysis of how the Russians operate against everybody, including herself, what evidence is there that Hill hasn’t, by concealment, calculation, corruption, or by mistake, succumbed to Putin’s attack,  too? Not once was Hill asked by either the Democrats or Republicans during the deposition, nor did she volunteer her own explanation, of how she managed to inoculate herself and is now telling the truth.

If Hill is telling the truth, and equally if she isn’t,  she has inflicted serious damage on her own colleagues and superiors,   the US Government’s Russia-hating professionals. In her testimony Hill depicts them as lying to each other and to the press; constantly scheming for and against the President; incapable of coordination among themselves, agreement with their allies, or negotiation with their enemies. Most valuable of all to the Kremlin, Hill reveals that the American warfighter is predictable in everything he or she understands, plans or does.

To reveal this much is precious intelligence for Moscow because the Russian secret services and Putin would be less willing to believe it if it had come from home-grown agents. Either Hill is a willing dupe, or she is the fool she is warning her colleagues to beware of. 

by Editor - Tuesday, November 12th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow

   @bears_with

Alexei Mordashov is the largest single shareholder of Tui, the Germany-based tourism company. After the September crash of Thomas Cook, Tui is the leading tourism brand and travel company in the world.  In theory Tui has gained from the misfortune of its market competitor. But in practice the gain has been offset because of Tui’s losses from the crash of the Boeing 737 MAX, which Tui had been counting on to expand its capacity to carry additional travellers to their holidays.

Tui is already the biggest operator of the 737 MAX in the UK, and the second in Europe after Norwegian Air Shuttle. Tui has ordered another 72 of the aircraft from Boeing.

The 737 MAX crashes on October 29, 2018, and March 10, 2019, killed 346 passengers and crew. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was forced to follow worldwide bans of the aircraft on March 13. This decertification, and the widespread perception that Boeing had acted corruptly and illegally in the approvals process for the new aircraft, have cut Tui’s share price from its high last November 8, 2018, by 21%. That’s a drop from a market capitalization of €9 billion then to €7 billion now.

This €2 billion subtraction means that Mordashov’s near-25% stake in Tui has lost him half a billion dollars already. He will also not be receiving any dividend: Tui’s loss in the nine months to June 30 has ballooned to €240 million. The losses to the company and to Mordashov are expected to grow when the accounts for the end of Tui’s financial year, September 30, are published shortly.

So why did Tui’s chief executive, Friedrich Joussen, summon a reporter for the Financial Times of London to announce in the headline this morning: “Tui stands by Boeing 737 Max — with safeguards”. Joussen claimed, according to the newspaper,  that he and his company  plan “to add 2m more airline seats next summer to cater for extra demand following the collapse of major rival Thomas Cook this year. He said that the aircraft would be the 737 Max model 8: ‘If they are approved to be safe we would fly them. It will be potentially the most checked aircraft,’ he said…. ‘We need to know what the damage is but we don’t know what the damage is until it’s flying again.’

By damage, Joussen meant losses on Tui’s balance-sheet. He didn’t mean death to passengers from a faulty aircraft Boeing has been lobbying the US Government to certify for flying again, since the ban was imposed by a hesitant FAA eight months ago. Passenger death, or Tui’s profit – that’s the tradeoff Joussen discussed with his management and board before letting fly in the Financial Times this morning.

There is another profit tradeoff which Mordashov has in mind. This is to make a public show of Tui’s backing for Boeing now in exchange for Boeing’s help to lobby the US Government to lift the sanctions on Mordashov’s engineering company, Power Machines, imposed since January 2018.  

by Editor - Monday, November 11th, 2019
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