By John Helmer in Moscow

Morgan Stanley has taken the plunge for its first-ever public investor offer of loan notes on behalf of a Russian maritime business — the Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port. The bank is also touting for business as financial advisor to a possible initial public offering of shares for Russia’s two state owned shipping fleets, Sovcomflot and Novoship.

In the highly secretive world of Russian maritime business, public prospectuses, drafted to meet the disclosure standards of European or North American market regulators, have rarely been issued, and even less often disclosed. Volgotanker, the largest Russian tanker group until it was attacked by the Samara regional government in 2004 and ultimately destroyed, issued the first credit-linked notes for $120 million in financing, managed by Raffeisen Bank of Vienna. Security for that issue in July 2004 comprised Russian-flag vessels and shore assets — a first in a sector in which foreign banks have always insisted on foreign flagging for loan security. The Volgotanker prospectus was not made public, however.
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by John Helmer - Monday, May 21st, 2007
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By John Helmer

An out of court settlement has been reached between Oleg Deripaska and his Russian Aluminium (Rusal) group, and Avaz Nazarov and a group of firms associated with the Tajikistan Aluminium Plant (TadAZ).

The confidential deal was announced on Friday in London by law firm Clyde & Co, which has represented Nazarov and his group. The lawyers’ statement said: “Rusal and Ansol have reached a comprehensive settlement of all of their outstanding claims against one another without any admission of liability by either side. Both parties are content with the terms of the settlement and pleased that their disputes have now been resolved.”

Nazarov and his associates at Ansol are unavailable, and their law firm says there will be no comment. There has been no statement from Rusal. Rusal spokesman, Vera Kurochkina, refuses to answer questions.
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by John Helmer - Sunday, May 20th, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Oleg Deripaska is under unexpected personal pressure, at home and abroad, just when his plan to take control of one of the largest bauxite and aluminium producers in the world is close to final government approval. And that is exactly why the trouble for Deripaska is growing now.

Russian government authorization this month of the creation of a monopoly aluminium concern, integrating domestic and foreign bauxite, alumina, and aluminium production assets, has followed a no-objection ruling from the European Commission (EC) in Brussels. The unconditional ruling was issued by the EC on February 1.

The published text indicates that EC anti-trust regulators found no evidence that the new United Company Rusal will control a significant volume of the alumina and aluminium traded in the European Economic Area. The Commission concluded, says the release, ” that the operation would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or any substantial part of it.”
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by John Helmer - Saturday, May 19th, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow

The decision of the Estonian government to remove the city’s Soviet war
memorial and the graves of Red Army soldiers who fell in the last war
against Germany has been an on/off thing for months.

Now that it’s on, clashes between protesters and supporters, have already
cost one life (Russian); inflicted grievous bodily injury; damaged property;
affronted the amour-propre of Estonian diplomats in Moscow; and generated
reams of anti-Russian media copy across Europe and the United States.

Even President George Bush has weighed in — on the side of the Estonian
victims of an alleged Kremlin oil cutoff. Only there’s no evidence of this.
An unusually warm burst of spring and early summer weather across Europe is
the real culprit, cutting demand for both gas and heavy oil for heating.

Gazprom, Russia’s dominant gas exporter, has also been feeling the pinch
from the weather, reporting this week that its exports to Europe fell in the
January-March period by 24%, compared to the same time in 2006. But if
Mother Nature — that Madame Butterfly ever faithful to the seasons — can
be pressed into campaigning against the Kremlin on behalf of the Bush
Administration, why blame Reuters for failing to check the temperature, and
for putting the blame on President Vladimir Putin instead? (more…)

by John Helmer - Friday, May 18th, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow

Never complain, never explain — that was the advice of the worst loser in
modern American politics, Richard Nixon.

Norilsk Nickel, the lead mining company of Russia and biggest nickel
producer in the world, appears not to understand how to lose, now that its
bid for LionOre has been topped by Xstrata, and the LionOre board has agreed
on terms that appear to lock in acceptance of the Swiss bid.

A statement issued by the newly named chief executive at NorNick, Denis
Morozov, commits both of the Nixon faults — first complaining at Xstrata’s
tactics, and then explaining why NorNick’s losing bid might be better — if
the world were different, and shareholdings didn’t cost money that
shareholders want.

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by John Helmer - Friday, May 18th, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow

It’s a pity Vladimir Lenin was tone deaf, and dismissed music (along with chess) as an entertainment for the ruling class. Had he an ear and taste for classical music (like Karl Marx, who was keen on Beethoven, and Leon Trotsky, who loved Verdi), he might have devised a revolutionary doctrine for the performing arts. This could have protected Russia from the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich the cellist, Nikita Mikhalkov the filmmaker, Valery Gergiev the conductor, and X the theatre director.

I regret I am obliged to avoid using X’s, or his Moscow theatre’s real name, because he and his colleagues are so thin-skinned, so despotic, and so vengeful, they brook no criticism, and would react by attacking the livelihood of a member of my family.

And this is the point: the erstwhile freedom which the presidency of Boris Yeltsin introduced, after toppling Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, was not a freedom for artistic expression in Russia at all. It was the start of a new dictatorship, much worse for Russian culture, its producers and consumers, than anything that had gone before.

The eulogies over the death of Rostropovich — which followed Yeltsin’s in Moscow by five days in April — miss the point of the human rights which Rostropovich made a reputation pursuing, aggressively, during the Yeltsin period – Rostropovich’s interest was limited to advancing his own right to make as much money out of Russia as possible. Even an oligarch as wealthy as Oleg Deripaska, owner of Russian Aluminium, expressed his shock at the size of the performance fee Rostropovich once demanded for a charity concert in the Samara region, sponsored by Deripaska’s company.

Just as Yeltsin privatized Russia’s natural resources for the benefit of a handful of his supporters, who banked the cash value abroad; so Yeltsin’s privatization of Russia’s cultural resources made a handful of performing artists very rich. The cultural privatization also started a reign of new terror, in which this handful of men took control of the performing arts in Moscow – the concert halls, theatre stages, film studios, airwaves – and systematically destroyed all rivals for a dwindling state culture budget, corruptly garnering the public resources which had supported Soviet arts education, copyrights, and broadcasting, for their private gain. Unreformed, they still rule today. The destruction they wreaked was far greater, countrywide, and longer lasting than the policies of the cultural commissars of Stalin’s time. (more…)

by John Helmer - Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow

There have been two deconstructionists and reconstructivists of the music of J.S. Bach in our time. Both are dead now — Glenn Gould, aged 50, died in 1982; and Mstislav Rostropovich, aged 80, died this week. The music of one of them will live forever.

It was forty-four years ago, I remember, on a dry, wintry Saturday afternoon in January of 1963, when Rostropovich played Bach’s six unaccompanied cello suites in Tokyo. The concert was in the then brand-new, ultra-modern concert hall in Ueno Park, which was sold out for the solo recital. To get in for a back seat, I spent all of my scarce student’s money, and had to do without dinner that evening to hear the music. After watching the ungainly bulk of the man, alone on the vast stage, wrestle his instrument into life, and release the music like a slow detonation from one end of the music-hall to the other, I felt a charge; as you can see, I remember it to this day. For years afterwards, there was no other performer for me of the Bach cello suites – not Casals, nor Fournier, nor Piatigorsky, nor Rose, nor the next generation of Du Pre and Ma. To a young man’s ear, Rostropovich’s interpretation replaced the romantic, rhapsodic lilt, exposing the revolutionary structures of sound that had been missed in Bach’s own time. For all I knew then, Rostropovich’s performance was the first not to miss it.
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by John Helmer - Saturday, April 28th, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow

If life were a circus, then the only reason a contemplative man would walk behind an elephant in a ring, wielding bucket and shovel, would be for the money, not for the laughs.

John Lloyd, a onetime Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, has made many of his colleagues and readers laugh at him. But it was his eulogy upon the death of ex-President Boris Yeltsin, just published by the Financial Times, that has been convincing. Lloyd hasn’t been clowning all this time for laughs. He’s been putting shit in a bucket for the money.

And good money it was, certainly when his then wife headed the Moscow office of a well-known English law firm, and Lloyd filled his Moscow despatches with tales of the good fortune falling from the parapets of the Kremlin for her clientele. There was the odd and embarrassing pratfall; the time, for example, when Lloyd reported, and the FT printed, that Yegor Gaidar had been voted in as prime minister, when that favourite of Lloyd, his wife’s law firm, and the FT had in fact been trounced by Victor Chernomyrdin. Thus did Gaidar’s high political career end – in retrospect, we can now say, for good – while Lloyd was telling the FT audience the reverse.
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by John Helmer - Monday, April 23rd, 2007
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By John Helmer in Washington

When Hank Greenberg owned and ran AIG as his personal fiefdom, he was credited in the industry with originating the policy of never paying out claims unless the claimants threatened costly recovery litigation. When Greenberg tried the non-payment ploy himself recently, his reputation has come back to haunt him in a Boston courthouse.

A secret exercise in public relations spending and planting of newspaper articles to burnish Greenberg, and smear his prosecutor, then New York state attorney-general Eliot Spitzer, has been exposed in a detailed court claim, charging Greenberg with stiffing his PR agents, and refusing to pay more than $2 million in unpaid invoices for the services he had procured. One of the services Green paid for was to hire a prominent US business academic to “blunt” the impact of the prosecution against Greenberg for AIG’s business practices.
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by John Helmer - Saturday, March 31st, 2007
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By John Helmer in Moscow

The worst-ever coal mine disaster in Russia, with a death-toll of at least 102 miners, and not less than another 8 still missing, hit the Ulyanovsk mine in Siberia on Monday afternoon.

Owned by Yuzhkuzbassugol (“South Kuzbass Coal”), one of the largest coal and coking coal producers in Russia, the mine was opened in 2002; it was reportedly equipped with the most modern equipment.

Failure to prevent a sudden increase in methane was initially blamed for the explosion that triggered the shaft collapse, trapping and killing miners. However, a statement from the General Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow, broadcast on national television Tuesday afternoon, said the explosion was triggered when mine managers were demonstrating equipment below surface to a visiting British auditor, Ian Robertson. All were killed. The name of the audit company has not been released yet. The audit was being conducted for the benefit of the initial share offering, planned by Yuzhkuzbassugol over the past six months.
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by John Helmer - Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
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