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By John Helmer, Moscow The collapse of Otkritie Bank last month is the largest Russian bank failure since the collapse of National Bank Trust in December 2014.  The Central Bank rescue of Trust made inevitable the much more costly bailout of Otrkitie, announced a fortnight ago on August 29,   charges Ilya Yurov, the former […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the government-owned bank established in London in 1991 to finance market boosting projects in the former Soviet Union, has been secretly aiding UK and US intelligence services in espionage targeted at Russia. The US is a 10% shareholder in the bank, the UK […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  It’s the job of the Dorchester doorman to know his hotel guests’ sins; cater to them discreetly; but  keep them under his top-hat, forever secret. During more than a decade of Sergei Frank’s trips to London to direct High Court litigations against the men he succeeded at Sovcomflot, the Russian state […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Melchior Wathelet (lead image, left), the Advocate-General of the European Court in Luxembourg, publicly recommended on May 31 that the court should dismiss a challenge to the legality of European Union sanctions by the Russian state oil company Rosneft. Wathelet has a history of secret operations against Moscow. That history ought […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow On November 15, 2015, I told you so. “Since the US started the regime dominoes falling in Kiev in February 2014, the Polish regime has already toppled, and the French one is doomed – President Francois Hollande will be defeated by every one of the candidates now running to succeed him, […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow In the history of warfare there is nothing new in the engagement of mercenaries to do the fighting and run the risks. The mamelukes (mamluks) were the most successful at the game — they started as slaves, became a warfighting caste, and ended as the rulers of the countries they captured, […]

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John Helmer, Moscow Russia survived the threat of a homosexual boycott of the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games, handily. But can it survive the threatened boycott of the 2018 World Cup from a wannabe candidate to lead a minority party in the House of Commons; a British prince whose chance of becoming king is, failing accidents, […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Last week a Vienna, Austria, court ruled that US government charges against Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash are unsubstantiated and unlawfully motivated by political scheming. Next up for the rule of evidence and of law — the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg must judge whether European Union (EU) sanctions against Russia […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow Timothy Colton, a Russia expert at Harvard University in the US, has admitted he has been engaged in research on Russia’s leaders as part of the Pentagon’s top-secret Operation BODY LEADS. Top-secret, that is, until last week’s disclosure of the operation to investigate President Vladimir Putin’s and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow The UK High Court has rejected a lawsuit by Rosneft challenging the legality of sanctions against its oilfield operations and international financing. The court has ruled that for testing the legality of the sanctions British law and British courts are subordinate to the European Union, and that Rosneft must try its […]