By John Helmer, Moscow

Vladimir Yakunin, the recently replaced boss of Russian Railways, says President Vladimir Putin saved his bacon when he was fired the first time in June 2013, and then a second time a year ago. But last month, Yakunin has been telling his friends, it was Putin who made a pig’s breakfast of himself. On August 18, the day after Yakunin disclosed what he claims was his resignation, Putin said the move had been Yakunin’s choice, adding: “I have yet to speak to him about it.”

For Yakunin to appear to have been driven out of Putin’s “inner circle” – the US Treasury uses that term; the White House prefers “cronies” – has triggered speculation in the Anglo-American media that the US campaign against the Kremlin has begun to produce the first signs of regime crack-up.

Yakunin is encouraging the speculation himself by telling his friends that his ouster is political, maybe ideological, but nothing to do with the state of Russian Railways (RZhD) or the capacity of the state budget to cover its rising costs and growing losses. Putin won’t listen to him any longer, Yakunin is confiding. The President is isolated more than ever before, he adds. For the usually loyal Yakunin to be saying this, even if quietly and to non-Russians, can only mean that reality is getting away from one of them. Some of Yakunin’s foreign friends like to think it’s Putin. The Russians think it’s Yakunin himself. “He’s lost his usefulness to the boss,” says one. “Age and the arrogance of power have overtaken his sense. He hasn’t been defeated by Putin’s enemies. He’s defeated himself.”
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by Editor - Wednesday, September 9th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Cyprus Government investigators have opened an inquiry into ex-Senator Leonid Lebedev (lead image) for transfers into a hidden Cyprus trust of $150 million in cash allegedly stolen from the regional Russian electricity company TGK-2 and a related company, TKS. Investigations by Russian prosecutors and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), reported to court hearings in Yaroslavl, have counted almost $240 million Lebedev has been accused of stealing through a chain of companies associated with his Sintez group, ending up in Cyprus. A Russian Government request for the Cypriot authorities to open Lebedev company registers and tax filings has been confirmed as triggering criminal checks on the island.

The Cyprus authorities are also checking how Lebedev managed to obtain a Cyprus passport in 2011; and the source of the funds he pledged to place in Cyprus to meet the €5 million requirement for buying citizenship. That was a year before Lebedev swore in the Limassol District Court that he was a Russian citizen, without assets in Cyprus, and “impossibil[ity] to travel to Cyprus”. His testimony was in response to a lawsuit by Commerzbank of Germany charging Lebedev with $240 million in loan fraud. At the time, Lebedev was a Politically Exposed Person (PEP), according to Cyprus and European Union regulations, and subject therefore to much tougher official checks.

Lebedev also hid his Cyprus nationality from the Federation Council, where he was the senator for the Chuvash Republic between 2002 and April of this year. For more on his dismissal, read this.
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by Editor - Monday, September 7th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In Kiev on Sunday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko complained that he isn’t getting cash from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) fast enough. Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, told him to stick to the Fund conditions, but she also promised to go soft on whether the IMF will stop the money if Ukraine decides not to repay the $3 billion bond owed for repayment to Russia in December.
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by Editor - Sunday, September 6th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Officials of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are in flight from evidence of negligence, incompetence, and corruption in their management of billions of dollars in loans for Ukraine.

Nikolai Gueorguiev, head of the Ukraine team at IMF headquarters in Washington, DC, and Jerome Vacher, the IMF representative in Kiev, refuse to respond to questions on their role in the offshore diversion of IMF loan money through Privatbank and Credit Dnepr Bank, banks owned by Ukrainian oligarchs Igor Kolomoisky and Victor Pinchuk. The Fund’s Managing Director Christine Lagarde (lead image, front) and her spokesman, Gerry Rice (rear), are covering up evidence of conflicts of interest and multiple violations of the IMF Staff Code of Conduct which have been occurring in the Ukraine loan programme. Simonetta Nardin, head of the Fund’s media relations, refuses to explain her apparent violations of the Code, or respond to evidence that she fabricated elements of her career resume.

On Tuesday a spokesman at the US Department of Justice in Washington confirmed that an investigation is under way of the role played by US clearing banks in the movement of IMF funds through the Privatbank group and companies connected with Kolomoisky. Speaking for the Asset Forefeiture and Money Laundering Section, Peter Carr declined to give more details.
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by Editor - Thursday, September 3rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Listeners to US Government radio and readers of the London papers are being told that Kaliningrad is a Russian dagger pointed at the soft underbelly of the NATO alliance in central Europe. According to NATO sources, the dagger must be reversed so that it threatens the Kremlin instead.

Officials in the German Chancellery in Berlin and in the Polish government in Warsaw have begun asking their intelligence chiefs to prepare memoranda on how vulnerable the Russian outpost, formerly Königsberg in German East Prussia, is to a campaign of economic pressure and political subversion. Does this make Kaliningrad a potential flashpoint on the eastern war front, the next Crimea?
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by Editor - Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015
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by Editor - Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015
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On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”

by Editor - Sunday, August 23rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has taken sides in the homicide trial of Nadia Savchenko, a Ukrainian military volunteer who is standing trial in Russia for the murder last year of two Russian journalists reporting on the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Jerome Vacher, the resident representative of the IMF in Kiev, appeared at the Ukraine art pavilion at the Venice Biennale, at the official opening sponsored by the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. The event took place on Thursday, May 7, and Vacher was there at the invitation of the Pinchuk Art Centre. The day was a regular working day in the Ukraine office of the IMF, and at IMF headquarters in Washington, DC. Pinchuk’s insolvent Ukrainian bank and steel company are beneficiaries of the current multi-billion dollar IMF loan to Ukraine, the disbursement of which Vacher is responsible for supervising.
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by Editor - Wednesday, August 5th, 2015
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It’s traditional at this time of year to rest, chew things over, do a little flossing of the teeth, and return sharper than ever.

by Editor - Monday, August 3rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Leonid Lebedev (lead image) has been charged with stripping millions of dollars from TGK-2, the regional electricity utility he controls. Details of the lawsuit have been revealed this week in the files of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in Tortola, British Virgin Islands (BVI).

The 4-page court filing of June 24, 2015, names Lebedev personally, according to the court’s registry clerk, plus seven of his companies in the scheme. The core allegation against Lebedev is that he arranged to strip cash out of TGK-2 through transactions with Russian subsidiaries of his Sintez holding and offshore companies which Lebedev registered as TGK-2 shareholders. These sold shares among themselves, passing cash out of TGK-2 on terms which ran up TGK-2’s liabilities and diminished the value of its assets, and hence the equity value left to minority shareholders and investors. When they woke up, they described the “knowingly unprofitable transactions” on the internet in this way. Unless the culprits are sent to jail, another investor said, the probability of recovering the money which has been moved offshore “tends to zero.”
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by Editor - Monday, August 3rd, 2015
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