By John Helmer, Moscow

The Khotin family are either the cleverest new men on Russia’s billionaires’ row, strutting out with prime commercial real estate and oilfield assets, which will double or triple in value as soon as the war is over and the Russian market for corporate bonds and share listings revives. Or else the Khotins are walking corpses, whose income has plummeted below the level required to meet the interest instalments on their debts; their oilfields cost more to pump than the oil can be sold for, and their bank is going broke on defaulted loans from related parties – that’s themselves. The advantage of being, as one Moscow newspaper calls them, the “most secretive of Russian businessmen”, is that noone is certain whether the Khotins are alive or dead. In the current war, they may have been, or they are about to become, the costliest of casualties.

In the history of the last war the British have excelled in portraying themselves as secretly cleverer than their allies, the Russians and Americans, as well as their enemies, the Germans. In the archive of grand British intelligence deceptions, none was a more effectively kept secret — so the British claim — than Operation Mincemeat. That’s the one where the corpse of a London suicide was dropped by British submarine on to a Spanish beach, dressed in an officer’s uniform and carrying top-secret plans (lead image from the movie). The objective was to fool the Germans into opposing the 1943 allied Mediterranean invasion in Greece when the landings were really intended for Sicily. The way the British tell the story, the corpse was very persuasive.

In their business career so far, the Khotins are like that. Unrepayable debts, loaned by state banks on the personal say-so of high state officials, secured by future revenues enhanced by administrative favours, would be one reason for making the Khotins’ papers look exceptionally valuable, while keeping their existence secret. There’s another reason. No photograph of either Yury or Alexei Khotin is known to exist. The national photo archives of Tass, RIA-Novosti, Kommersant, Interfax, and Moskovsky Komsomolets all say they have no picture of them.
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by Editor - Monday, June 13th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades is holding secret negotiations this week with Victoria Nuland (lead image, right), the US State Department official in charge of Turkey, Ukraine and Russia, on a plan to maintain Turkish military forces in Cyprus under the flag of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Anastasiades has sent his aide, Nicos Christodoulides (lead image, left), to negotiate in Washington; he met with Nuland on Monday.

After losing control of the Cyprus Parliament to an increasingly nationalist vote in an election on May 22, Anastasiades has remained behind at the presidential palace in Nicosia, where he met on Tuesday with the NATO official now conducting Cyprus negotiations for the United Nations, Espen Barth Eide. The Cyprus Foreign Minister, Ioannis Kasoulides, is due to met US Secretary of State John Kerry, on June 13.

So sensitive is the US-Turkish plan for Cyprus that American reporters for Associated Press and Reuters at the State Department have refused to ask Nuland about the talks. Gayane Chichakyan, a Washington-based reporter for the Russian government television company Russia Today (RT), has also refused to lift the news blackout.
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by Editor - Wednesday, June 8th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

European Union officials and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are so determined to wage sanctions war against Russia, they are refusing to obey judgements of the European Court in Luxembourg that sanctions are illegal if they lack reason and evidence.
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by Editor - Sunday, June 5th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In fifty-nine single-spaced pages, issued on May 31, Melchior Wathelet (lead image) has demonstrated that the European Union (EU) has descended into a lawless dictatorship, in which the executive power of the Union and its member officials have “broad discretion” to attack states, their corporations and citizens without reason. Wathelet is the Advocate-General of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), so he ought to know.
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by Editor - Wednesday, June 1st, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

First there was the red-line announcement. On Friday in Athens there was the cross-hairs statement. By the month of October, the month before the US presidential election, there will be the trigger point.

The US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies are going to war with Russia, accelerating the inevitability that Russia will strike in self-defence. This is what the first and second statements by President Vladimir Putin warn. There will be no statement of warning when the trigger point arrives.
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by Editor - Monday, May 30th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

A lucky man can stumble upon a treasure, runs an old Russian proverb; an unlucky one can’t even find a mushroom. If he does find a mushroom, Lewis Carroll’s account of Alice in Wonderland added a problematic choice: eating one side of the mushroom may dwarf you; eating the other may turn you into a giant. The blue caterpillar didn’t make clear to Alice which side was which.

Investing in Russian mushroom farming to replace imports is the same – your money could go either way. Especially if, as the new mushroom farmers of Moscow and St. Petersburg are finding out, they grow low-cost, high-margin oyster mushrooms, which Russians haven’t thought of collecting from the forest, or considered paying money to eat before.

For the moment, the case of the oyster mushroom is being called patriotic import substitution. But if the mushroom entrepreneurs are calculating that war conditions in Russia will be extended for years, continuing to diminish most Russians’ buying power and their ability to eat meat for protein, then mushroom protein for sale may be a new form of war profiteering, financed out of the state budget.
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by Editor - Sunday, May 29th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

An Australian coroner and a firm of Sydney, Australia, lawyers have taken the global lead in fabricating criminal charges and billion-dollar compensation claims for the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 — without producing evidence. Michael Barnes (lead image), a former tabloid journalist and now coroner for the state of New South Wales, ruled last week that MH17 had been shot down in a “deliberate” act of “mass murder” by “firing a missile equipped with an exploding warhead at the jetliner”. The coroner accepted testimony from the Crown Solicitor assisting the inquest who testified that “certain persons of interest have been identified” as the murderers.

Barnes issued his ruling after he decided to keep secret testimony from Australian police and forensic experts; and after he accepted as evidence a videoclip from the Dutch Safety Board (DSB). This, the coroner ordered to be excerpted in the courtroom, removing DSB criticism of the Ukrainian Government and Malaysia Airlines. Barnes also accepted that the evidence submitted by Catherine Follent, the Crown Solicitor, was “uncontested” and “comprehensive”.

Follent issued a warning in the courtroom, telling Barnes it was “inappropriate” for the coroner to draw conclusions for which there was no evidence. Barnes overruled her.

Barnes has been followed by an American named Jerome Skinner and a Sydney law firm called Leitch Hasson & Dent ( LHD). They claim to have filed suit in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, charging the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin with liability for the downing of the aircraft.

Publicity for this claim in the Australian media, amplified by the Financial Times and Guardian of London, has not been substantiated by the court itself. According to a spokesman for Roderick Liddle, the ECHR registrar, there is no confirmation that the LDH claim has been received. If it is, lawyers practising at the court say, it is fifteen months past the filing deadline set in ECHR rules, and barred by the ECHR requirement that claimants make their case in national courts first. Liddle refused to confirm or deny this.
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by Editor - Tuesday, May 24th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Since he first came to Russia as a Dutch journalist with leftwing claims, money, unlike butter, has always melted in Derk Sauer’s mouth (lead image). Until last week there’s been a quite lot of it — more of it for Sauer to keep than for the string of loss-making publications he has run in Moscow.

Sauer has been identified as a target in an investigation by state prosecutors of fraud at the RBC media group in Moscow. Mikhail Prokhorov owns the control stake in the group; Sauer has been his employee to supervise the editorial and financial sides of the business. A police raid on the offices of Onexim, the Prokhorov holding where Sauer is a vice-president, took place on April 14. Charges against RBC were announced by the Ministry of Interior on April 29. The editors of RBC were sacked last Friday, May 13. More criminal charges have been foreshadowed; Onexim, Sauer, and RBC executives deny them categorically.

A source close to Prokhorov says: “Mikhail doesn’t want to tell anybody, but the people close to him believe that the main reason is [President Vladimir] Putin took personal offence when RBC published a number of articles on the younger daughter Ekaterina and her husband’s [Kirill Shamalov] business, when Putin refused to approve or support one of Mikhail’s projects.”
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by Editor - Thursday, May 19th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

The privations of war and the taste for oysters don’t usually go in the same direction. Two years into the new war, the problem now for Russian oyster farmers is that if they aren’t careful, they may harvest not just plenty of home-grown oysters to replace imports within a year or two. They may also produce far more oysters than Russian consumers can afford to eat. If that happens, it will be the Russian oyster farmers and investors along the Black Sea shore who will suffer.
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by Editor - Tuesday, May 17th, 2016
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By John Helmer, Moscow

“There is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our western partners have crossed the line.” That was President Vladimir Putin’s declaration on March 18, 2014, when he addressed a special assembly of the Russian parliament before the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation was enacted.

It is likely to be the most consequential line in this century’s history of Russia – the rest of the world, too — because it marked the end of a half-century of peaceful co-existence between Moscow, Berlin, London and Washington; a quarter-century of the end of the Cold War. That’s to say, the limit reached, the line crossed, mark the start of a state of real war.
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by Editor - Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
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