By John Helmer, Moscow

Vladimir Potanin (right), control shareholder of Norilsk Nickel, loves Oleg Deripaska (left), control shareholder of Russian Aluminium (Rusal).

Potanin made his inamorata official on Monday. He even quoted Vladimir Lenin’s version of withdrawing before ejaculation, announcing that with Deripaska it has been necessary to “disconnect before combining…Time has shown that it was necessary to plunge into some negative, and only then move on to the positive. However, all this is in the past. The situation in comparison with 2012 has changed dramatically. There is not just a good, but a very high level of trust…” They call each other by their first names, and by the intimate you (“по имени и на ты”).

Let noone imagine, therefore, that Potanin’s former wife, Natalia Potanina, who is suing in courts all over the world for half of Potanin’s wealth, including his 30% of Norilsk Nickel shareholding, is Deripaska’s agent in a hostile takeover scheme.
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by Editor - Thursday, July 9th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A putsch in Athens to save allied Greece from enemy Russia is in preparation by the US and Germany, with backing from the non-taxpayers of Greece – the Greek oligarchs, Anglo-Greek shipowners, and the Greek Church. At the highest and lowest level of Greek government, and from Thessaloniki to Milvorni, all Greeks understand what is happening. Yesterday they voted overwhelmingly to resist. According to a high political figure in Athens, a 40-year veteran, “what is actually happening is a slow process of regime change.”

Until Sunday afternoon it was a close-run thing. The Yes and No votes were equally balanced, and the margin between them razor thin. At the start of the morning, Rupert Murdoch’s London Times claimed “Greek security forces have drawn up a secret plan to deploy the army alongside special riot police to contain possible civil unrest after today’s referendum on the country’s future in Europe. Codenamed Nemesis, it makes provision for troops to patrol large cities if there is widespread and prolonged public disorder. Details of the plan emerged as polls showed the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps neck and neck.” Greek officers don’t speak to the Murdoch press; British and US government agents do.

“It was neck to neck until 3 pm,” reports the political veteran in Athens, “then the young started voting. “
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by Editor - Sunday, July 5th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Leonid Lebedev (lead image) has been ousted from the Federation Council, the Russian senate, after serving twelve years as a senator representing the Volga region of Chuvashia. This follows a Council investigation exposing earnings from offshore entities which Lebedev had failed to disclose in his official income and asset reports to the Council. Lebedev claims he has resigned his senate post voluntarily.

By exposing Lebedev’s money trail in Switzerland and Cyprus, the Russian investigation now threatens to unravel Lebedev’s year-long lawsuit in an American court for payments he claims he didn’t receive from Len Blavatnik and Victor Vekselberg, and which he claims are still owed by them. Blavatnik and Vekselberg have asked the New York State Supreme Court to reject Lebedev’s claim because he is asking to be paid a second time for a 15% shareholding in the TNK oil company Lebedev sold to them in 2003, when they incorporated the stake in the TNK-BP combination with British Petroleum. Lebedev is asking the New York court to award him a share of the proceeds of Blavatnik’s and Vekselberg’s sale of their share in TNK-BP to Rosneft in 2013, ten years after Lebedev had sold out. Lebedev’s court papers make several calculations of shareholding value from $200 million to $2 billion.

Blavatnik and Vekselberg accuse Lebedev of hiding the decade-old deal and concealing the $600 million they paid him through a chain of offshore entities registered in Ireland and Switzerland, and ending up in Cyprus. According to Lebedev’s lawyers in the public court file, at a court hearing on April 9 Judge Saliann Scarpulla agreed to decide shortly on dismissing Lebedev’s claim.
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by Editor - Wednesday, July 1st, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) announced yesterday that it has managed a successful private placement of a quarter of the stake it owns in Lenta, the Russian supermarket chain. The press release by Anthony Williams, head of the EBRD’s public relations, said the selloff had “attracted strong interest and demand from a broad mix of institutional investors internationally.” Credit for EBRD’s deal, in which it earned $140 million, was given to Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley acting as the joint bookrunners.

The catch is that EBRD’s sharebuyers insisted on a price discount of 7.6%. When the market woke up to what was happening, it sold Lenta down by almost 9%.
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by Editor - Thursday, June 25th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 wiped out Amsterdam as the centre of the global diamond trade at the time. When the war ended, Antwerp, across the border in Belgium, was preferred by the diamantaires, and so it has remained. Until last week, perhaps.

That’s when the Belgian courts accepted an application from a group of Yukos shareholders to seek out and arrest bank accounts and other assets of identifiable Russian state entities. Alrosa, the state-owned diamond mining company, is considering whether it should continue to do business in Antwerp. Alrosa accounts for 28% of the world’s diamond supply, and 56% of Russian diamonds are exported to Belgium. As the Kremlin orders Russian trade in strategic commodities like oil and gas to move eastward and southward, away from Europe, will Alrosa redirect its diamonds?
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by Editor - Wednesday, June 24th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

With announcements they will trade crude oil in different directions, Russia’s state oil companies have this week put the kybosh on Ziyavudin Magomedov’s (lead image, left) attempt to establish himself as the oligarch in charge of Russia’s westward oil trade to Europe. Magomedov’s demise follows the decline in political influence of Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dorkovich (right), Magomedov’s ally and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s protege. Magomedov, sources in the maritime sector say confidentially, is unable to raise financing for his Summa group in the US or Europe, and Dvorkovich and Medvedev have been unable to help him with money from the Russian state banks. Dvorkovich is now thinking of a job outside the government, the sources add.
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by Editor - Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In the seedier studios of California, when the director cries “We’ve got wood!” he means the male lead has an erection, and it’s his cue to start his business while the cameras roll at a pornographic scene. Russia’s plywood business isn’t as sexy, but it’s faster growing and bigger too. It’s also becoming a oligopoly for Alexei Mordashov, who is already the well-known oligarch of the Russian steel and mining sectors.

Mordashov (lead image) met President Vladimir Putin in January. He claims he got the president’s go-ahead to build a new wood-processing complex at the village of Suda, outside Cherepovets. Public opposition is fierce – so fierce that the Kremlin is concealing what exactly Putin and Mordashov said about the project at their meeting; how much state money will be given to Mordashov for the scheme; and what Putin intends to do next. Not since Putin took sides with the locals in Irkutsk region against Oleg Deripaska’s paper and pulp plant on the edge of Lake Baikal, has there been such a test of Russians, oligarchs, the President – and who has wood.
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by Editor - Monday, June 22nd, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In publishing on Russia, there comes a time when a writer, journalist, bank analyst, television presenter, or academic produces something so lacking in truthfulness, so replete with fawning and meretriciousness, that this website must kill and skin another goat; dry out the vellum; and have a fresh scroll inscribed with the Cat’s Paw – that’s the Personal Abasement Award (PAW).

This award is designed to encourage accountability and ethical reporting on Russia. The PAW committee decided to suspend the Cat’s Paw awards when the start of the Ukraine civil war threatened to overwhelm the supply of vellum and the goat population on which it depends. The goats who have earned the Cat’s PAW scroll have also multiplied exponentially.
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by Editor - Wednesday, June 17th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Records uncovered in Canada reveal that Oleg Deripaska’s (lead image, right) Moscow holding EN+, which is the controlling shareholder of United Company Rusal, the Russian aluminium monopoly, is controlled by Cash Titan Mining Corporation Group Ltd. This company has an office at 1 Eglinton Avenue East, Toronto, Ontario. The premises exist, but the company doesn’t — at least not in the federal Canadian and Ontario company registers. How can such a phantom represent itself as the offshore owner, and what part does it play in the plan Rusal announced in 2013 “for the transfer of financial and economic activity to the territory of Russia”?

The answer ought to be available from Philippe Mailfait, a 64-year old French national and Montreal businessman, who sits on the board of EN+ as an “independent director”. Cash Titan Mining lists Mailfait as its only director. But Mailfait
cannot be found, and EN+ won’t confirm he exists.
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by Editor - Tuesday, June 16th, 2015
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By John Helmer, Moscow

What to do if you are a Russian mining company with a billion dollars’ worth of asset exposure securing large debts, and your chain of production is struck at start and finish by corruption scandals, international litigation, popular protest, collapse of government authority, and homicidal violence? The solution is to pretend to your bankers you aren’t Russian — and privately beg the Kremlin for help.

That is what the Solway Group of companies has been doing at its nickel mine in central Guatemala, and at its ferronickel refinery in southeast Ukraine. Asked about Solway’s Russian roots by a Ukrainian reporter last month, Solway’s chief executive Daniel Bronstein replied that “Solway Investment Group is a Cyprus-based international industrial group with a 100% EU capital and operational offices in Luxemburg, Switzerland and Estonia.”

At almost the same time, a Russian source in Guatemala City said the Russian Ambassador, Nikolai Babich, had been to see the President of Guatemala, Otto Molina, to ask for his intervention on behalf of the mine’s Russian management and the Solway owners.
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by Editor - Wednesday, June 10th, 2015
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