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By John Helmer, Moscow
Russia’s competition watchdog believes that a merger between two of the country’s top steelmakers, Evraz and Severstal, is a “pipe dream”, and will veto it if it is attempted. The swift, explicit reaction from one of the Russian government’s top market regulators indicates there has been no preliminary signal from the Kremlin of backing for the merger, announced in a carefully contrived placement in the Financial Times of London yesterday.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, December 14th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow
Investbank, the Russian banking group which was formerly the property of Vladimir Antonov, was asked to clarify its position in relation to the charges now pending against Antonov in Lithuania; the extradition case under way in London; and balance-sheet examinations of banks associated with Antonov in Lithuania, Latvia, and elsewhere. Here is the story.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow
While Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich and Oleg Deripaska are hard at work changing the British courts’ interpretation of the law on corruption, Vladimir Antonov has come along to challenge the British law on asylum and extradition.
Antonov, along with his Lithuanian partner Raimondas Baranauskas, were arrested in London on November 23, and charged in connexion with a Lithuanian extradition warrant. In Lithuania they are accused of embezzlement of several hundred million dollars from Bank Snoras, the bank they control in Lithuania, and the second largest in that country. The forensic auditors are reported to have found that Snoras’s books are short by $1.4 billion.
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by John Helmer - Monday, December 12th, 2011
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Krissy, November 1994-December 9, 2011
by John Helmer - Sunday, December 11th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow
On November 29, following up Russian media reports and after an investigation lasting a week, the Moscow Times published the following article, which speaks for itself. A week later, on December 7, the newspaper’s editor, Andrew McChesney, sent this letter:
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by John Helmer - Saturday, December 10th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow
BHP Billiton (BHP), the world’s dominant producer of manganese, last week slashed the price of manganese for delivery to China, the world’s dominant consumer, by 14%, arousing the suspicion that the Big Australian is aiming to drive rival producers from the business, and when Chinese steelmaking is expected to revive next year, corner a larger share of the market. Ironically, the price action may also accelerate the exit of the Australian independent Consolidated Minerals from Australia, where costs are now close to the break-even level, towards African operations.
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by John Helmer - Friday, December 9th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow
After the episode of the Louis Vuitton fountain-pen given in San Francisco in friendship, not favour, Dmitry Rybolovlev (left) has redirected his generosity to another seaport, this time Monaco. There the welcome appears to have been decidedly warmer than he got in California, where Rybolovlev said he was thinking of investing ; or in Florida, where he’s said he was thinking of living. The weather is also warmer in Monaco than in Geneva, where there has been icy wind blowing at Rybolovlev from the cantonal divorce court, which has issued a freeze order over Rybolovlev’s worldwide assets , and a contempt of court threat against Swiss reporters for reporting the claims and counter-claims, and legal manoeuvering.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, December 8th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow
The relationship between taste and power is what Karl Marx would have called dialectical; for today’s Russian oligarchs that’s a red flag – in the race track, not the Marxist sense of the term.
The oligarchs don’t mind showing off their taste in foreign places and foreign newspapers; inside Russia they show a guarded respect for the Nicholas Fouquet example. He was the treasurer and prime minister of French King Louis XIV, whose royally paid-for rise to wealth was turned into a grand chateau near Paris , Vaux le Vicomte (image below). That was so richly ornamented and stocked – ostentatious in contemporary terms — that it made the king jealous, as well as fearful for his own treasury and power. So he packed Fouquet off to jail to serve as an example for his fellow courtiers and concessionaires for 19 years — the rest of Fouquet’s life. Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s education apparently didn’t stretch to that story of 17th century France. His stretch in prison might be long enough to read up.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow
When Oleg Deripaska was completing his takeover of Russian Aluminium (Rusal) by buying out his partner, Roman Abramovich, the two of them agreed to arrange legal advice on the transaction from one of the leading mergers and acquisitions lawyers in London. But after she began probing the deal on her suspicion of money-laundering, she was fired. When a Swiss bank began having similar suspicions and asking awkward questions, it too was removed from the deal.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
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