MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – Cash cows need careful herding, just like the lactating and the beef species. As every cowboy knows, if you don’t fence them in properly, on cloudy nights you run the risk losing then to rustlers or wolves. Gazprom, Russia’s leading resource company and the world’s largest gas producer and exporter, has been […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, September 15th, 2004
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MOSCOW – It used to be said about a fraudster in Australia that he was too crooked to lie straight in bed. Until now, however crooked the Russian oligarchs – the handful of men who seized control of Russia’s oil and mineral wealth a decade ago – may have seemed, the lure of their money […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, July 7th, 2004
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MOSCOW – It used to be said about a fraudster in Australia that he was too crooked to lie straight in bed. Until now, however crooked the Russian oligarchs – the handful of men who seized control of Russia’s oil and mineral wealth a decade ago – may have seemed, the lure of their money […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) — Doveryai, no proveryai. It’s a hoary Russian maxim, meaning “trust but verify.” US President Ronald Reagan often used it, never managing to get the pronunciation right, during his scripted appearances with Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the Soviet Union. It was Reagan’s way of convincing the diehards at home that even […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, June 1st, 2004
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It takes times of despotism, when the best and brightest of a country’s elite are obliged to fawn, flatter, and commit crimes to make their fortunes, that a sensitive man discovers that virtues are usually only vices in disguise. At any rate, that’s what La Rochefoucauld – ducal courtier, failed plotter, brilliant aphorist in the […]

by John Helmer - Thursday, November 20th, 2003
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Oleg Deripaska, chief executive of Russian Aluminum (RusAI), Russia’s largest aluminum producer, and head of Basic Element, which holds his investments in other sectors of the Russian economy, has been feeling maligned for a long time now. A two-year-old lawsuit by smelting rival Mikhail Zhivilo in New York accusing Deripaska and his associates of using […]

by John Helmer - Tuesday, October 14th, 2003
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A word about the common, green, wrongly maligned toad. “Don’t play with the toad,” French mothers used to warn their children, “because if he pees in your eye, you will become blind”. The youngsters might have been forgiven for not knowing what to do, because the appearance of the ugly creature was also said to […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, August 10th, 2003
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Never apologize, never explain. Charles de Gaulle, the French leader, made this a tactic – which many lesser, and less popular, politicians than he have followed; but none as successfully as de Gaulle. Richard Nixon tried it, for example, when he was guilty of the minor crime of spying on his opposition. The tactic became […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, March 2nd, 2003
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