By John Helmer, Moscow

The Financial Times, a London newspaper, recommends that under your Christmas tree you put a book called Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, who was the Moscow correspondent of The Economist between 2004 and 2007. According to the recommendation, “it’s a sinister, seductive read that paints a murky moral portrait of the new capitalist Russia.” That omits to say the book is fiction.

The FT also recommends you read a story called “A Realm Fit for a Tsar” by Catherine Belton, and illustrated with a picture of Vladimir Putin wearing reflecting sunglasses. Published on December 1, with tags “Analysis” at top right and “FT investigation” at top left, that too is fiction. Behind the shades it’s difficult to tell the novel from reality.
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by John Helmer - Monday, December 5th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Monkeys throw their excrement at their enemies – this is well-known among zoologists. But it happens only when monkeys are caged, not in the wild. The reason for this is obvious — free-ranging monkeys instinctively run away from their shit as quickly as possible, to evade predators. But if they are in captivity, their shit is all they have handy against enemies who aren’t predatory. Shit-tossing is a kind of simian revenge.
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by John Helmer - Saturday, December 3rd, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Michael Wilson, a Kazakhstan-based lawyer specializing in mining and natural resources, has won a judgement from Australia’s highest court, reinstating a December 2009 award of more than $11 million. The five-year record of litigation has nailed three Australian lawyers — John Emmott, Robert Nicholls, and David Slater – for nicking clients, business, shares and profits from Wilson’s law firm MWP. According to the court rulings, the defendants secretly moonlighted to earn fees and share bonuses for transactions involving several major Kazakh resource projects — Sunkar Resources’s Chilisai phosphate project; Frontier Mining’s Benkala copper project; Roxi Petroleum; Max Petroleum; two other Central Asian mining projects, Urals Gold and Ablai; and four projects tied to these and other operators in the same region — Karamandybas (oil and gas), Ravninnoye (oil), Beibars Munai (oil), Lancaster, and Kangamiut (seafoods).
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by John Helmer - Friday, December 2nd, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In American legend, Johnny Appleseed is the epitome of self-sacrificing kindness and charity to his fellow man. But he didn’t exactly give away his apple seeds. Johnny was a professional nurseryman – he gave seeds to friends and neighbours for planting in nurseries. The concessionaires and stakeholders then sold the trees and apples for commerce; Johnny kept the land. When he died in 1845, he was reputed to have accumulated an estate of more than 1,200 acres, not counting titles to land he’d forgotten about or lost. When the apple business went bust, Johnny stayed rich; his stakeholders weren’t so fortunate.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, December 1st, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Calliforida, the common blow-fly, has an exceptional talent – it has the ability to smell a corpse at a distance of up to 16 kilometres. Forensic investigators use the blow-fly’s eggs deposited in the flesh as a measure of how much time has elapsed since death, more reliable than the dead flesh itself.
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by John Helmer - Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Oleg Deripaska demanded, and received from Roman Abramovich, a warranty that in his takeover of Rusal shares, he wasn’t buying stolen goods. Testimony by Deripaska’s London lawyer, Paul Hauser, followed in the UK High Court last week with details which Deripaska himself claimed in his testimony he couldn’t remember at all.

The testimony ought to revise, dramatically, the history of the so-called Russian aluminium wars. Until now, it has been accepted that those who ended up with the goods bravely fought off gangs of primitive thieves and homicidal thugs acting on their own initiative.
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by John Helmer - Monday, November 28th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In May, when not a single head of a government holding a seat on the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) dared say what he thought about the criminal case against managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said: “it really is hard to believe that everything is as it was initially presented. I just can’t believe that – it is beyond me to understand it.”

It’s a safe bet at this point in time, looking back, that Putin was pretty sure there was a plot against DSK; and that he believed that French and American government officials were in on it. But note — it’s easier to speculate the French were; easier to prove the Americans were.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, November 27th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Early this morning, November 25, Flinders Mines announced that Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (MMK), owned by Victor Rashnikov, has signed a full takeover offer, proposing to buy all 1.8 billion Flinders Mines shares (including options) on issue at 30 Australian cents. This values the company at A$546.3 million (US$530 million) — a premium of 82% to the share price and market capitalization of the company on November 22, before the offer was announced; and at double the value of Flinders Mines three months ago. The MMK offer will also provide $10 million for the share options claimed by Flinders Mines managers who commissioned the Citi banking group in September to look for candidates to buy them out.
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by John Helmer - Friday, November 25th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

If you could make more money turning bananas into ballet, it’s likely that you couldn’t do it in places where the supply of bananas is plentiful and the price cheap, but the demand for ballet non-existent. But what if in places where the supply of ballet dancers is large and their unit price low, you can use banana sales revenue to kick start a business, where the profit target is a brand-name like the Bolshoi Theatre?
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by John Helmer - Thursday, November 24th, 2011
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By John Helmer, Moscow

To gauge the future welfare of Russia and the Russians, nothing is more telling than the Cat Test.

Michel de Montaigne (left) originated it in one of his 16th century essays, when he wrote: “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.” The name of Montaigne’s cat isn’t known. In any event, what he meant didn’t refer to a real-life cat. A hypothetical one would have done just as well, as Montaigne was making his point, not about cats, but about men. His point was: what if what we think about ourselves is insignificant, compared to what others think of us? In short, the Cat Test is a measurement of our capacity to think reciprocally.
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by John Helmer - Thursday, November 24th, 2011
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