By John Helmer, Moscow

For Russians to eat as much cheese as they want, there aren’t enough cows in Russia, and too many palm trees in Malaysia. The impact of year-old sanctions in cutting off the flow of imported cheese from Russia’s suppliers in Europe is to stimulate the production of domestic cheese. But at the same time Russian cheesemakers face a lack of raw milk supplies. To feed the market, palm oil is being used instead for products the Russian dairy industry is calling fake. If the Russian milk supply is to match rising demand, then Russian farmers and traders say the government must subsidize the cost of domestic milk production and deter palm-oil substitution.

“Adulteration by palm oil and bad politics behind sanctions have produced an impossible position for the dairy producers,” says an independent dairy farmer near Moscow. “Today we cannot produce enough affordable cheese for the masses! In provincial supermarkets and shops pseudo-cheese is being sold at Rb500 to Rb600 a kilo. This is impossible when the average supermarket insists on its mark-up of 100%. For one kilo of genuine cheese you need 10 to 11 litres of milk. That means a minimum cost for one kilo of cheese of Rb300 – and that’s just the cost of the milk.”
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by Editor - Friday, November 13th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The Bible is clear on what horny musclemen like Samson should beware. If they want to go bed with Delilah types, they may wake up without their hair on.

Oleg Deripaska, control shareholder of the Russian aluminium monopoly Rusal and of Russian Machines, a holding of automobile and automotive component manufacturers, is suing Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, for cheating him of billions of dollars of profit in order to make a quick profit itself of “tens of millions of dollars”. The claims, kept sealed by a New York federal court judge until recently, reveal inside dealing between Deripaska and Canadian businessman Frank Stronach, which Canadian investment institutions and the Canadian press had tried to oppose when their deal was first made in 2007.

Deripaska is now accusing Morgan Stanley of insider dealing in a jury trial under way this month. The trial has required Deripaska and his long-time money manager, Gulzhan Moldazhanova, to face cross-examination in a US court for the first time. Deripaska testified by videolink yesterday; Moldazhanova was on the stand on Monday and Tuesday.
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by Editor - Wednesday, November 11th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Australian and Dutch police investigating the evidence of the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 have gone public in disagreement with their superiors and with their governments’ political leaders. The split has opened between forensic investigators and police on the one hand, who say they aren’t convinced what weapon caused the crash, or who fired it; and politicians on the other hand, who blame the Kremlin.
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by Editor - Monday, November 9th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Radoslaw Sikorski (lead image, right) plotted with the owner of Polish coalmines and electricity plants to use European Union sanctions against Russia to stop imports of rival, low-cost Russian coal in the Polish market. A clandestine tape-recording of a conversation between Sikorski, who was Poland’s foreign minister at the time, and Jan Kulczyk (lead image, left), one of Poland’s wealthiest businessmen, appeared in Warsaw this week. It reveals the first direct evidence that Sikorski, one of the most outspoken advocates of economic war against Russia, was engaged in war profiteering for himself and his friends.
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by Editor - Friday, November 6th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Noone holds Chrystia Freeland in higher esteem than she does. When she was the Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, she would react to correction or criticism by screaming down the telephone receiver. That’s when, among her fellow reporters, she picked up the Hysteria Freeland handle. That also is the assessment, according to two people familiar with the matter, of Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, when he decided to drop Freeland from each of the cabinet portfolios she had proposed for herself, naming her instead Minister of International Trade.

Few of Freeland’s predecessors in that portfolio, first created in 1983, have lasted more than two years in the job; none has gone on to higher office or political prominence. To Canadian political analysts this is the prime minister’s intention for Freeland. “The point of no return”, cracks an Ottawa veteran. “Trudeau is making sure Freeland can’t challenge him or anyone else for the top job.” In Brussels, a central European diplomat adds: “Freeland is going down the Russophobic road the Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski and his American wife, Anne Applebaum, have taken. That’s to say, down – and out. Is Russophobia out now in Canada?”
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by Editor - Thursday, November 5th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

For the first time in the international art auction market, paintings of the Soviet period between 1930 and 1990 have been auctioned in London, setting market benchmarks for several of the styles and genres included in the show, and a multi-million pound record for Aleksandr Deineka, a Moscow-based artist who died in 1969. According to William MacDougall, director of the eponymous auction house with offices in London, Moscow, Paris and Kiev, “the market [demand] for Soviet Art is rising, and it was a very successful sale.”

“Nothing short of a miracle”, commented James Butterwick, a London art dealer and specialist on Russian art. “Hats off to MacDougall’s for having the foresight and bravery to…sell Soviet Realist art. There are regular auctions in Moscow, though admittedly their quality is not as good, and they have never had such good results.”

“MacDougall’s could be on to something,” reported Simon Hewitt, international editor of Russian Art + Culture. “Until now, mainstream Soviet painting – broadly equating to Socialist Realism, though extending into the ‘Soviet Impressionism’ of the 1950s and ‘Severe Style’ of the 1960s – has looked a poor relation when sandwiched in auction catalogues between the Avant-Garde and the Non-Conformists. Parading it centre-stage grants it fresh coherence and respectability, underlining its nostalgic motherland appeal to Russians who cannot afford an Ayvazovsky or a Shishkin… Things needed shaking up. MacDougall’s have delivered.”
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by Editor - Wednesday, November 4th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Since the US started the regime dominoes falling in Kiev in February 2014, the Polish regime has already toppled, and the French one is doomed – President Francois Hollande will be defeated by every one of the candidates now running to succeed him, including Marine Le Pen of the National Front. The British Prime Minister David Cameron can postpone his day of reckoning, but on the margins of Europe, not inside. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel has less time, fewer supporters. When Merkel topples, she will take the European Union (EU) into the shambles with her.

Russia, under constant attack by the US, Germany, France and Britain in the war to overthrow President Vladimir Putin, is now the only European country to show more, not less voter support for the incumbent leadership. It is also the only one with the capability to repel unwanted migration; convert its economy to domestically sustainable growth; and defeat its foreign enemies by force. The war to defend Europe from Russia is destroying Europe, fast.
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by Editor - Monday, November 2nd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

If it wasn’t for a Russian, Americans wouldn’t be able to lick large lollipops.

Samuel Born – it isn’t known what his original Russian name was – emigrated to the US at the end of the 19th century. There he invented an apparatus he called the Born Sucker Machine. Its function was to insert sticks into hard lollies so they could be sucked slowly. This was a revolution in the sweets business. It allowed sugar confectioners to manufacture — and charge premiums for — much larger sucking sweets than had been known for two thousand years. Until the Born Sucker, a sweet had to be small enough to fit into the mouth at one go. Noone, from the Pharaonic Egyptians to the Obamic Americans, likes sticky fingers. *

But now the US is at war with Russia, bent on overthrowing President Vladimir Putin, and in the meantime cutting Russia off from the flow of bank capital, oil and gas technology, and imported lollipops too – because Putin and his friends depend on them. There has already been one confectionery casualty of this war – exports by the Roshen company, owned by the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, have been banned in Russia, their principal trade destination, and the Russian factory of the company arrested in Lipetsk.
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by Editor - Friday, October 30th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Investigations into the collapse of National Bank Trust, one of the largest Moscow banks to be rescued by the Central Bank of Russia and the Deposit Insurance Agency, have targeted a Cyprus-based management group as the operational headquarters of a scheme which, according to current calculations, may have diverted more than $3 billion in bank funds over a decade between 2004 and 2014.

If and when the grand total of losses is toted up, this may beat the Bank of Moscow as the largest Russian bank fraud in history. But there may never be a toting-up — not by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) which has provided Rb129 billion in bailout financing, nor by the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA), the state organ in charge of supervising the bailout. Otkritie, the top-5 Russian bank selected by the government to take over Trust and keep it running, has yet to agree with the government on the results of the investigations and attempts at recovery of the funds from offshore.

According to a well-informed Russian state banker, Trust Bank had a high-level krysha, and he’s still at work to assure that the state refinancing of the losses, and the takeover by Otkritie, continue without embarrassment to the Central Bank, without risk for the stakeholders, and without cost for the perpetrators and beneficiaries. With shareholders as well-known as Mikhail Khodorkovsky who started by calling the bank Menatep St. Petersburg; then transferred it to Ilya Yurov, who renamed it Trust; and the current shareholders who have taken over — Ruben Aganbegyan, Vadim Belyaev, Alexander Nessis, Vagit Alekperov, and Alexander Mamut — the duration of the protective cover over the bank’s offshore operations also makes a record by Russian standards.
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by Editor - Wednesday, October 28th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The commodity supercycle made an offshore fortune for Oleg Deripaska, control shareholder of United Company Rusal, the Russian aluminium monopoly, and for Glencore, the Swiss combine which has financed and managed Rusal’s trade. But the cycle is now in reverse, as the markets accept that China’s economic performance will now trigger short-term booms and busts, keeping the price of aluminium low for the foreseeable future. Too low for the cost advantages to Rusal of the rouble crash to produce optimism for the company’s profitability as a global aluminium exporter.

In September Deripaska declared his first profit dividend in seven years. As an 8.75% stakeholder, Glencore’s share of the $250 million payout will be about $22 million. But Glencore chief executive Ivan Glasenberg’s parallel announcement of cuts to Glencore’s trade loans to its clients means that he is quietly asking Deripaska to pay more cash up front, both for trading commissions and interest on trade advances. How much is a secret Deripaska and Glasenberg aim to keep from the minority Russian shareholders in Rusal; and from the Russian government, which is pushing Rusal to refocus its business on the domestic trade in aluminium, for which Glencore is no longer necessary.
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by Editor - Friday, October 23rd, 2015
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