by John Helmer - Tuesday, December 18th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow It’s a cliché about greed. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon allows four witnesses to an affair of lust, robbery and murder to tell their own versions of what had happened. There is one corpse, and several versions of how it got that way – at the hand of the wife, the […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 14th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Oleg Deripaska (image centre) is not having a good week. It started more or less out of harm’s way with a report in a London magazine, Private Eye. This claims that at least two Caribbean companies and one UK entity, which Deripaska uses to channel sales revenues from United Company Rusal […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, December 13th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow There is a famous old anecdote in which Zmei Gorinich, the three-headed Russian dragon, sits hungrily down to table, and proceeds to stuff each of his mouths with food presented to him by villagers too terrified to do otherwise. At night, however, the dragon’s stomach rumbles, then swells, and finally explodes. […]

by John Helmer - Friday, November 30th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Reporters can hardly call themselves investigative journalists if their object is to report the obvious in plain sight — that people keep their purposes and their assets to themselves. But when reporters hide their own purposes and fortunes as assiduously as those they investigate, the purpose of the chase has been […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 29th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Not even the two people usually familiar with the matter were able to convince Bloomberg that there has been genuine demand in the London market for Megafon shares at Alisher Usmanov’s asking price. Instead, as the company and its underwriters tried to sign buyers before the subscription book closed this afternoon, […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow For a country of Russia’s physical size, trains are an obvious strategic necessity. So it’s peculiar that there is a monopoly for pulling and pushing those trains from place to place, and that this monopoly for building locomotives should be held by a single man, who, with Kremlin approval, has buried […]

by John Helmer - Monday, November 26th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow Going or coming, Russian users of private jet aircraft think they are screwed. If they fly on foreign-made planes which are registered in Russia, they are obliged under the current tax regulations to pay 18% value-added tax (VAT) on the customs-declared value of the aircraft, plus 2.2% annual property tax. If […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, November 20th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow The November 15 announcement by Megafon, the telephone property of Alisher Usmanov and Andrei Skoch, reveals a discount on last month’s valuation targets of up to 20%, depending on how the assets for sale are counted. To attract buyers for shares at bargain-basement prices, the company is promising to pay out […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 15th, 2012
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By John Helmer, Moscow The rising cost line in the latest loss-making financial report of United Company Rusal, the Russian state aluminium monopoly, is under investigation as Rusal’s Latvian bank operations are probed, as well as tax payments in Cyprus. The evidence is being gathered in Cyprus; and by lawyers in London and New York, […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 15th, 2012
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