By John Helmer, Moscow

If it wasn’t for a Russian, Americans wouldn’t be able to lick large lollipops.

Samuel Born – it isn’t known what his original Russian name was – emigrated to the US at the end of the 19th century. There he invented an apparatus he called the Born Sucker Machine. Its function was to insert sticks into hard lollies so they could be sucked slowly. This was a revolution in the sweets business. It allowed sugar confectioners to manufacture — and charge premiums for — much larger sucking sweets than had been known for two thousand years. Until the Born Sucker, a sweet had to be small enough to fit into the mouth at one go. Noone, from the Pharaonic Egyptians to the Obamic Americans, likes sticky fingers. *

But now the US is at war with Russia, bent on overthrowing President Vladimir Putin, and in the meantime cutting Russia off from the flow of bank capital, oil and gas technology, and imported lollipops too – because Putin and his friends depend on them. There has already been one confectionery casualty of this war – exports by the Roshen company, owned by the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, have been banned in Russia, their principal trade destination, and the Russian factory of the company arrested in Lipetsk.
(more…)

by Editor - Friday, October 30th, 2015
No Comments »

CLICK TO ENLARGE

By John Helmer, Moscow

Investigations into the collapse of National Bank Trust, one of the largest Moscow banks to be rescued by the Central Bank of Russia and the Deposit Insurance Agency, have targeted a Cyprus-based management group as the operational headquarters of a scheme which, according to current calculations, may have diverted more than $3 billion in bank funds over a decade between 2004 and 2014.

If and when the grand total of losses is toted up, this may beat the Bank of Moscow as the largest Russian bank fraud in history. But there may never be a toting-up — not by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) which has provided Rb129 billion in bailout financing, nor by the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA), the state organ in charge of supervising the bailout. Otkritie, the top-5 Russian bank selected by the government to take over Trust and keep it running, has yet to agree with the government on the results of the investigations and attempts at recovery of the funds from offshore.

According to a well-informed Russian state banker, Trust Bank had a high-level krysha, and he’s still at work to assure that the state refinancing of the losses, and the takeover by Otkritie, continue without embarrassment to the Central Bank, without risk for the stakeholders, and without cost for the perpetrators and beneficiaries. With shareholders as well-known as Mikhail Khodorkovsky who started by calling the bank Menatep St. Petersburg; then transferred it to Ilya Yurov, who renamed it Trust; and the current shareholders who have taken over — Ruben Aganbegyan, Vadim Belyaev, Alexander Nessis, Vagit Alekperov, and Alexander Mamut — the duration of the protective cover over the bank’s offshore operations also makes a record by Russian standards.
(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, October 28th, 2015
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The commodity supercycle made an offshore fortune for Oleg Deripaska, control shareholder of United Company Rusal, the Russian aluminium monopoly, and for Glencore, the Swiss combine which has financed and managed Rusal’s trade. But the cycle is now in reverse, as the markets accept that China’s economic performance will now trigger short-term booms and busts, keeping the price of aluminium low for the foreseeable future. Too low for the cost advantages to Rusal of the rouble crash to produce optimism for the company’s profitability as a global aluminium exporter.

In September Deripaska declared his first profit dividend in seven years. As an 8.75% stakeholder, Glencore’s share of the $250 million payout will be about $22 million. But Glencore chief executive Ivan Glasenberg’s parallel announcement of cuts to Glencore’s trade loans to its clients means that he is quietly asking Deripaska to pay more cash up front, both for trading commissions and interest on trade advances. How much is a secret Deripaska and Glasenberg aim to keep from the minority Russian shareholders in Rusal; and from the Russian government, which is pushing Rusal to refocus its business on the domestic trade in aluminium, for which Glencore is no longer necessary.
(more…)

by Editor - Friday, October 23rd, 2015
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Yury Trutnev, the Kremlin’s special representative for the Russian Fareast, has come up with a scheme, starting this month, for storing the world’s most valuable art works in Vladivostok, one of the world’s smallest art markets, with the personal backing of President Vladimir Putin; and on the advice of Dmitry Rybolovlev, the art-collecting oligarch exiled to Switzerland and Monaco, who is charging Yves Bouvier, the French operator of comparable art storage schemes in Europe, with multimillion dollar art fraud.

This tale was published in Mediapart, a French internet publication, on October 11. It was translated into Russian and published two days later. Not a shred of evidence has since been found to substantiate it. Desperation measures then, but for whose benefit?
(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, October 21st, 2015
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Tjibbe Joustra (lead image, right), chairman of the Dutch Safety Board, wants it to be very clear that Russia is criminally responsible for the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014; that a Russian-supplied ground-to-air missile, fired on Russian orders from territory under Russian control, exploded lethally to break up the MH17 aircraft in the air, killing everyone on board; and that Russian objections to these conclusions are no more than cover-up and dissimulation for the guilty.

Joustra also wants to make sure that no direct evidence for what he says can be tested, not in the report which his agency issued last week; nor in the three Dutch government organs which prepared and analysed the evidence of the victims’ bodies, the aircraft remains, and the missile parts on contract to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) – the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR), the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research ( TNO), and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). So Joustra began broadcasting his version of what he says happened before the release of the DSB report. He then continued in an anteroom of the Gilze-Rijen airbase, where the DSB report was presented to the press; in a Dutch television studio; and on the pages of the Dutch newspapers.

But when he and his spokesman were asked today for the evidence for what Joustra has been broadcasting, they insisted that if the evidence isn’t to be found in the DSB report, Joustra’s evidence cannot be released. So, if the evidence for Joustra’s claims cannot be found in the NLR, TMO and NFI reports either, what exactly is Joustra doing – is he telling the truth? Is he broadcasting propaganda? Is he lying? Is he covering up for a crime?
(more…)

by Editor - Monday, October 19th, 2015
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) conclusion on the missile detonation which caused the crash of Malaysian Airlines MH17 is based on a report of the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR), based in Amsterdam. The 66-page NLR report can be found as an appendix to the main DSB report. Combined in their release this week, the two Dutch organizations and the two Dutch reports claim that a Russian-made Buk missile of the 9M38 model series, armed with warhead type 9N314M, was fired at MH17, exploding to the left of the aircraft at about two metres from the cockpit. The blast and shrapnel spray from this detonation, the two Dutch reports claim, caused the break-up of the aircraft in the air, and the deaths of all on board.

From the evening of the crash day, July 17, 2014, western government officials and media reporters have blamed Russia for manufacturing the missile, ordering it fired, and causing the crash. They are now citing the Dutch reports as proof of the initial assignment of blame. This is despite the DSB’s reluctance to do so in its report; and despite the refusal to date of Australian and Dutch police, coronial investigators and pathologists to release the detailed autopsy evidence they have gathered of the shrapnel which struck the aircraft and the bodies of those on board. According to the DSB report, shrapnel killed the crew in the cockpit, and three pieces of shrapnel, characteristic of warhead type 9N314M , were found in the bodies of the pilot and co-pilot. No crew member or passenger in the aircraft, outside the cockpit, was struck by this shrapnel, according to the DSB.

On these three pieces of metal hangs the case for a Buk missile detonation as the cause of crash; the cause of death; and Russian culpability for the shoot-down. But a search through the DSB records, and through the technical reports of shrapnel impact and blast simulation on which the DSB has based its conclusions, together with interviews with spokesmen for the Dutch investigations, finds that the only evidence for the source of the three metal fragments turns out to be a classified military secret of the Dutch Ministry of Defence.
(more…)

by Editor - Friday, October 16th, 2015
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) reported yesterday that its evidence for concluding that a single ground-to-air Buk missile caused the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was an explosive blast of sound on the cockpit voice recorder lasting 2.3 milliseconds; a spray pattern of damage to the cockpit area of the fuselage; three distinctively shaped metal fragments (lead image) found in the bodies of the cockpit crew; a chemical analysis of explosive residues missing 2 out of 3 warhead explosives; and a match of paint samples collected up to 4 months apart.

The fine arithmetic of this evidence has convinced the Dutch to pinpoint the source as a Buk missile type 9M38, with a warhead model 9N314M. The larger arithmetic of the area from which the DSB has calculated the missile was fired – 50 square kilometres of crash area; 320 square kilometres of launch area – has proved to be inconclusive for a judgement of who fired the missile, and thus who is responsible for the crash and for the deaths of the 298 crew and passengers on board. That said, aviation lawyers close to the MH17 case now believe there is no evidence of a crime – a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a crime of terrorism — that would meet international prosecution standards. For what lawyers have done, or not done, to examine the case for evidence of a crime, or evidence of civil negligence, read this.

Just how circumstantial and inconclusive the newly reported Dutch results turn out to be was revealed two days before the release of the Dutch report, when the Australian Federal Police (AFP) released unusual criticism of Australian Government officials. According to the AFP, public Australian Government interpretations of the crash evidence and assignments of blame cannot be supported by the evidence the AFP’s officers had collected themselves at the crash scene in Ukraine, in the autopsy process in The Netherlands, and in the subsequent forensic testing of what was found in the bodies of the MH17 victims.
(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, October 13th, 2015
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

Between buying his bank from Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2004 and losing it to the Central Bank of Russia at the end of December, 2014, Ilya Yurov, chairman of National Bank (NB) Trust, made a fortune. How much of it he has kept for himself, at the expense of his depositors, shareholders and bondholders, isn’t clear yet. The Central Bank and Moscow prosecutors currently charge that $256 million was stolen from Trust over the past three years through fraudulent loans offshore, the money moved in and out of Cyprus, Switzerland, and Austria, back to Russia, and out again. The amount missing from the bank, according to investigators who have yet to finish the forensic accounting for a much longer period of time, may be turn out to be between $2 billion and $3 billion.
(more…)

by Editor - Monday, October 12th, 2015
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

“I wish I had sent one more helicopter to get the hostages,” former US president Jimmy Carter said at one of his farewell appearances in Atlanta recently, “and we would’ve rescued them, and I would’ve been re-elected.”

Compared to his predecessors and successors Carter was intellectually superior. He also didn’t suffer from the corruption of Bill Clinton, the untruthfulness of Barack Obama. But unlike all of them, Carter had an inferiority complex. It started with his career mentor, the Polish Jewish admiral Hyman Rickover, and ended with his national security advisor, the Polish Catholic Zbigniew Brzezinski. Their combination has produced the eventual destruction of the US positions in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and these days, Syria.

The other side to Carter’s complex is Carter’s and Brzezinski’s wishful thinking. Not their misjudgements have brought these defeats about, they say aloud. Why, they weren’t defeats at all, but victorious strategies missing just one increment of the force multiple, and costing the US little blood, affordable treasure. One more gunship in the sky, and their triumph would have been recognized for what it was. That’s to say, what they in their dodders think it was.
(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, October 8th, 2015
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow

A fight over fees by Australian lawyers claiming to launch a compensation claim on behalf of one of the victims of the MH17 shoot-down revealed last week in an Australian state court that the top officials of the Australian Government are unable to confirm evidence of what crime was committed, or who committed it when the aircraft was destroyed, and its 298 crew and passengers, including 38 Australians and 196 Dutch, killed on July 17, 2014.

In the Netherlands, meanwhile, a lawyer who has claimed to be representing Dutch kin in pursuing criminal and civil court suits on behalf of the victims, has declared: “Our government must clearly express that it is an illusion to believe that any study ever could lead to prosecution of the individual offenders.”

A secret file by the Australian Attorney-General to the Prime Minister, setting out the admissibility of evidence for prosecuting the crime, has recommended against a public declaration by the Government of what happened, and who is responsible. The disclosure of the file, though not of the secret evidence or of the internal Australian Government debate over its contents, comes just days before the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) is due to issue its final report on the causes of the crash.
(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, October 6th, 2015
No Comments »