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MOSCOW – Vladimir Potanin has a plan to cash out somewhere between $3 and $5 billion worth of his fortune in Norilsk Nickel by converting it into a controlling shareholding of the South African mining company, Gold Fields. If he succeeds, he will have achieved a bigger transfer of Russian wealth offshore – beyond the […]

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Oleg Deripaska is probably too young, and certainly too self-confident, to contemplate those who marked the loss of their power, or their end, with famous last words. Farouk, the last king of Egypt, lived thirteen years after he was deposed, but nothing before, or afterwards, was as memorable as his words on losing his throne. […]

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MOSCOW – Nuri Said was the puppet prime minister of Iraq during the 1950s, when the British pulled all the strings in Baghdad. When he was toppled by revolutionary Iraqi officers in 1958, Said’s mangled corpse was dragged through the streets. His end more or less confirmed what he used to say: “You can always […]

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MOSCOW — There are so many different battles now going on for the assets of Yukos, inside the company, between the management and the shareholders, between different shareholders, between Yukos and Sibneft, and between the company and the state authorities, it is easy to mistake the plot. Last week, Yukos CEO Simon Kukes took out […]

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MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) – The Faberge Easter eggs, which Viktor Vekselberg has bought from Forbes in New York and has brought back to Russia as his peace offering to the Kremlin, may also come in useful as pacifiers, now that Vekselberg has gone to war again with fellow aluminium oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. After appearing to agree […]

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MOSCOW – The Moscow Times published an editorial Friday, which could only have been written by Judas Iscariot. The editorial is a wholesale denunciation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, demonizing the man as he faces a likely prison sentence if the charges brought against him by Russian prosecutors are proven to be true. Talk about hitting a […]