SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1112 (78), Tuesday, October 11, 2005
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TITLE: Ecologists Mock Nobel Peace Prize Decision
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian environmentalists are crying foul at the controversial decision of the Nobel Committee to award this year’s Peace Prize to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its head Mohamed ElBaradei.
The Nobel Committee announced that IAEA and ElBaradei have won the prize in recognition of their efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons on a global scale. The winner was selected from 199 candidates, which included, among others, Ukranian president Viktor Yushchenko, the Salvation Army, rock musician Bono and ex-president of Finland Martti Ahtisaari.
“At a time when disarmament efforts appear deadlocked, when there is a danger that nuclear arms will spread both to states and to terrorist groups, and when nuclear power again appears to be playing an increasingly significant role, IAEA’s work is of incalculable importance,” the Nobel Committee said in its official statement. 
To the consternation of many Russian environmentalists, however, ElBaradei has openly supported a move by the Nuclear Power Ministry to build a giant international site for spent nuclear fuel from other countries for storage and reprocessing in Siberia. 
Russian environmentalists expressed their bewilderment at the commitee’s move. Lev Fyodorov, head of Russian environmental organization Ecodefence, said he was shocked by the Nobel Committee’s verdict.
“The Peace Prize has never before been awarded to such a deeply compromised organization,” Fyodorov told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday. “IAEA has been involved with distribution of dual-use nuclear technologies but, most disturbingly, it tainted its reputation by trying to turn Russia into an international nuclear waste dump .”
Ecologists have repeatedly pointed to Russia’s inability to deal with waste from its own nuclear industry, let alone from abroad. 
Dmitry Artamonov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Greenpeace, told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday that the situation at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station, or LAES, is indicative of the plight of the industry on nationwide level. He said that the storage facilities at LAES are overloaded by over 40 percent.
“The station’s overloaded storage site is located only 90 meters from the Gulf of Finland,” Artamonov said. “The plant’s authorities said they are compressing the waste to make it safe to store larger amounts of material, but the problem is that radioactive material isn’t safe in principal.”
The decision to give the award to IAEA and El Baradei was welcomed by many international high-ranking politicans from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko. But Greenpeace International has scathingly branded ElBaradei as serving “nuclear policeman and nuclear salesman” at the same time.
Spent fuel and other radioactive waste from power plants is currently kept in temporary facilities warehouses  and reprocessed in various countries, including the United Kingdom, France and Japan. A number of countries are unable to treat their nuclear waste and send it abroad.
The material only becomes harmless after 10,000 years of storage. All current facilities store the waste on a temporary basis, and no permanent agreements have yet been made, though Russia appears to be on the verge of making one.
Since 2004, the IAEA and ElBaradei have been backing a plan to construct a global nuclear waste storage warehouse in Siberia. Russia is the only country in the world where legislation would allow for such a plan . In 2001, the State Russian Duma amended the country’s environmental legislation and allowed the import of spent nuclear fuel from abroad for reprocessing and storage.
Advocates of the idea have included head of the Russian Nuclear Ministry Alexander Rumyantsev and the former head of the ministry, Yevgeny Adamov. They have argued that a commercial fuel dump would bring Russia billions of dollars that could be spent on nuclear security. The Siberian storage site alone would fill the state coffers with $20 billion over a period of ten years.
But security concerns remain high.
Greenpeace’s Artamonov has also expressed alarm at the fact that the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station is repairing its outdated Chernobyl-type reactors to prolong their use, without having carried out environmental tests. “The first block, currently being repaired, was designed to serve for 25 years. This term expired last year, but the plant is repairing it as there’s no money to replace it with a new one.”
Over the past decade, Russian environmental organizations have also reported a number of minor leaks at different plants, including LAES.
Russian ecologists are not alone in having criticized the Nobel Committee’s decision. The Japanese humanitarian organization Hidankyo, which was established to support and represent the surviving victims of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has expressed its disappointment at the choice.

TITLE: Gaidamak Takes Over Flagship Newspaper
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moskovskiye Novosti, a leading liberal publication from the time of perestroika that is now suffering a deep editorial crisis, has an unexpected new owner.
Arkady Gaidamak, a Moscow-born businessman with four passports and a controversial past, confirmed to Ekho Moskvy radio late Friday that he had bought the weekly newspaper. 
No details of the deal were given, and Gaidamak could not be reached Sunday. Moskovskiye Novosti had been owned by Ukrainian media magnate Vadim Rabinovich, who acquired it in July from Leonid Nevzlin, a core Menatep shareholder, who lives in Israel and is wanted in Russia on charges of fraud and tax evasion.
Last week, Rabinovich, who had not appointed a new editor for the newspaper, told Interfax that he had received an offer for the newspaper from a previous owner, theatrical producer Alexander Vainshtein, and would probably accept it. Vainshtein had sold the paper to Nevzlin in 2004. 
In March 2005, Moskovskiye Novosti descended into crisis after editor Yevgeny Kiselyov, a former television anchor appointed by Nevzlin, fired several prominent veteran journalists. Kiselyov left when Nevzlin sold the paper. 
At the time, media industry observers speculated that Rabinovich had paid no more than $1 million for the paper, which also publishes an English edition, Moscow News. 
Gaidamak’s last known major purchase was the Israeli Premier League football club Beitar Jerusalem, which he bought in August. The price was not disclosed. He also has a controlling stake in a Jerusalem basketball club. 
His name has appeared in the press this year in connection with a raid in March on an Israeli bank suspected of money laundering. He has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged.
In an interview with the Versia newspaper published in March, he said his business interests lay in the production of mineral fertilizers.
Gaidamak was once better known, however, for his alleged involvement in a scheme in 1993 to provide arms to Angola during its civil war, and for his role in negotiating a reduction in Angola’s Soviet-era debt to Russia in 1996. He remains an adviser to Angola’s Foreign Ministry and has Angolan citizenship. He also has Israeli, French and Canadian passports.
Gaidamak, who was born in Moscow in 1952, emigrated to France on an Israeli visa at age 19. 
In the early 1990s, he did business with two of the new Russian banks — Menatep and Rossiisky Kredit — and with the Chyorny brothers, who had metals interests, the French newspaper Le Monde said in a 2002 investigative report into Russian business involvement in France. He was also reported to be a mediator in the sales of Soviet arms left in Eastern Europe to Latin America and Africa.
In 2000, the French put out a warrant for his arrest in connection with the Angolan arms-for-oil scandal, in which the son of former French President Francois Mitterrand was briefly jailed on charges of receiving kickbacks from Gaidamak’s business partner Pierre Falcone.
Gaidamak and Falcone arranged for shipments of Russian arms that were to have been paid for with Angolan oil contracts. There was an international ban on weapon sales to Angola at the time. 
An investigation into what happened to the profits, held in the French bank Paribas, led to money-laundering and tax-evasion charges against Gaidamak and others, The Guardian reported.
In a 2001 interview to The Guardian, Gaidamak said the oil-for-arms deal and his involvement in it was a legitimate transaction between the governments of Angola and Russia. “Everyone knew about the operation and everything was legal,” he said.
In the Versia interview, Gaidamak said his troubles with the French authorities stemmed from upstaging French intelligence by facilitating the release of two French military pilots who had been taken prisoner in Serbia in 1995. 
Gaidamak said he had helped connect then-Federal Security Service chief Mikhail Barsukov and then-Foreign Intelligence Service chief Yevgeny Primakov to then-French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua in Moscow in October 1995. Russian intelligence officers then flew with him to Bosnia and helped to release the pilots.
Gaidamak also told Versia that in 1997 he had helped to release four French intelligence officers from captivity in the North Caucasus. He said they had been operating in the region under the cover of the French humanitarian organization Equilibre.
In 2000, Gaidamak left France for Israel. From June 2000 to April 2001, he headed the board of the directors at Rossiisky Kredit Bank. 
Gaidamak was also a central figure in another scandal related to Angola, stemming from his role in negotiating Russia’s agreement in 1996 to slash Angola’s Soviet-era debt from $5.5 billion to $1.5 billion. 
Le Monde and Sovershenno Sekretno, a Russian newspaper, reported in 2002 that the Russian government agreed to accept half of the money to be paid in promissory notes received by an offshore company set up by Gaidamak, Falcone and Vitaly Malkin, then president of Rossiisky Kredit. The reports alleged that Gaidamak had earned $130 million in the scheme, and that the Russian government had received only a small fraction of the $750 million due. 
In interviews with Le Monde in 2002 and Versia in 2005, Gaidamak defended the arrangement, saying a commission for his role was part of the deal. He told Versia that Russia had received the full $750 million by 2001, and a Swiss investigation in 2004 determined the deal had been legal. It was not immediately possible to verify his claims.
His name surfaced again this year after the Israeli bank Hapoalim was raided in March in a crackdown on suspected money laundering. 
Police sources leaked to the press the names of some of the bank’s clients, which included Gaidamak, Nevzlin and Vladimir Gusinsky.
Gaidamak told the Haaretz newspaper at the time that his account at Hapoalim amounted to as little as $9,000 and was used mainly to pay his gas bills.
Several weeks later, Kommersant, citing another article in Haaretz, reported that shortly before the crackdown on Hapoalim, Gaidamak transferred $120 million from his account to another account in Luxembourg. No further information about the investigation could be immediately obtained.
In an interview with Israeli television in August, Gaidamak said he had never been questioned by police in the case, Reuters reported. 
“Russian Jewish money is the most honest, the most dynamic money in the world,” he is reported to have said.
Since 2002, Gaidamak has lived in Moscow. In May of this year he was elected head of the Congress of Jewish Communities and Organizations, one of the three largest national Jewish organizations. Nevzlin heads another one, the Russian Jewish Congress.

TITLE: Pensioners Triumphant at Local Elections
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The populist Pensioners’ Party narrowly beat out United Russia in Tomsk legislative elections over the weekend, while voters in five other regions picked municipal council members for the first time.
The Pensioner’s Party garnered slightly more than 19 percent of the vote in Sunday’s elections, while United Russia received slightly more than 17 percent, according to preliminary results released Monday, Interfax reported.
The result was unusual because United Russia, which dominates the State Duma, has managed to muster a majority in more than half of the country’s regional legislatures over the past two years.
The Pensioners’ Party is led by State Duma Deputy Valery Gartung, an independent from Chelyabinsk who once belonged to United Russia and helped President Vladimir Putin win the Chelyabinsk vote in 2000 presidential elections.
In Tomsk, the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party and the “against all” option tied for third place with about 14 percent, while the Communist Party received 9 percent and a joint Yabloko-Union of Right Forces ticket received 8 percent.
Meanwhile, five regions — Perm, Sverdlovsk, Leningrad, Saratov and Sakhalin — voted for council members for newly formed municipal districts on Sunday. The elections are part of a self-rule reform that creates a two-tier system of municipal government that should provide a rigid delineation of powers among federal, regional and local authorities. 
The reform will more than double the number of municipalities by introducing self-rule to tens of thousands villages. The Duma recently delayed the reform from next year until 2009, but many regions had already organized elections.
In Perm, voters picked council members for 285 new districts. Ballot counting was continuing Monday, and Perm elections chief Anatoly Lebedev said winners would take their posts only two weeks after results were officially published in local newspapers, Interfax reported.
The Perm legislature also confirmed President Vladimir Putin’s appointment of Oleg Chirkunov as governor. Chirkunov, 47, had served as acting governor since March 2004, when former Governor Yury Trutnev was promoted to natural resources minister — apparently as a reward for his efforts to merge Perm with the neighboring Komi-Permyatsky autonomous district.
Chirkunov, a former deputy chairman of the Federation Council’s Budget Committee, has yet to be confirmed by the Komi-Permyatsky legislature.
In Sverdlovsk, voters picked council members for 21 new municipal districts. Election officials said Monday that a second round would be held to choose district heads in 11 districts after no candidates won more than 50 percent.
In the Leningrad region, more than 7,000 candidates ran in 966 districts for 2,275 posts. Only 1,500 candidates were affiliated with political parties, Interfax reported.
In Saratov, people voted in 1,082 districts, but elections in five were ruled invalid due to turnout of less than 20 percent.
On the island of Sakhalin, council members were picked in 16 districts.
In other elections on Sunday:
• A second round was held in the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district for 34 district heads. The first round, which covered all 65 districts, was held Oct. 2.
• Residents of the deer-herding areas of the Koryaksky autonomous region started voting in a referendum on uniting the region with neighboring Kamchatka. Authorities are sending helicopters with ballot boxes to the areas.
• Incumbent Irkutsk Mayor Vladimir Yakubovsky won re-election with about 27 percent of the vote.

TITLE: Fires Burn Into Russian Forestry
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW A total of 165 fires over 4,300 hectares were raging in Russian forests and peat bogs, 18 of them in the Moscow region, the Emergencies Situations Ministry said Monday, evoking memories of the fires in summer 2002 that engulfed areas of Moscow in clouds of acrid smoke.  
Smoke from burning peat bogs outside Moscow produced levels of carbon dioxide twice the legal maximum in southern and southeastern Moscow on Monday, the Moscow Weather Forecasting Bureau said.
The Emergencies Situations Ministry promised last week to put out the fires around Moscow within a few days, and dispatched a total of 1,700 firefighters, 455 fire engines and four helicopters, the ministry said. 
The country’s two biggest forest fires, accounting for more than half of the total area burning, were in the Far Eastern Khabarovsk and Chita regions on Monday, the ministry said.

TITLE: Flying Mercury Returns
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The bronze sculpture of the Flying Mercury, which disappeared from the Pavlovsk museum during the Second World War, was returned to its historical site in front of the Gonzago gallery at the Pavlovsk Palace on Friday.
Interfax reported that the Austrian foreign affairs minister handed the sculpture over to the Pavlovsk Palace after years of negotiation.
Nikolai Tretyakov, director of the Pavlovsk Museum, said the Pavlovsk Palace lost about 8,000 historic artefacts during the war.
The Flying Mercury was made at the St. Petersburg Art Academy in 1783, having been commissioned by Empress Catherine the Great for her Tsarskoye Selo estate.  Tsar Paul I later ordered the sculpture to be transferred to Pavlovsk.

TITLE: Ford to Talk to Workers
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The management of the Russian Ford plant, located in the town of Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast, has agreed to consider calls for wage increases coming from its workers.
The Ford management are to review the demands by Thursday, Yekaterina Kulinenko, press-secretary of Ford Motor Company in Russia said Monday.
“The workers held their conference on Saturday.  They decided that their interests will be represented by the plant’s trade union.  
``They also went forward with their demands on an increase in salary and the organization of a commission on social insurance,” Kulinenko said.
Ford workers in Russia threatened last month to strike if the management refused to increase wages by 30 percent and offer other concessions.
The workers’ demands came at a time when the company is planning to almost double production at its St. Petersburg plant, putting additional pressure on its workforce, the union official said in September. 
In 2004 the plant increased the production of its Ford Focus cars by 80 percent, producing 29,000 cars.  In 2005 it plans to produce about 35,000 cars.
Most of the plant’s workers earn between 10,000 ($350) and 17,000 rubles ($600) a month, according to the union.  In comparison, Ford workers in Brazil earn between 16,000 rubles ($560) and 26,000 rubles ($911) a month, as well as sharing in 1 percent of the profit a plant makes. 
Cheap labor is a key factor attracting multinational companies to set up shop in emerging markets. The wages at Ford’s Russian plant are comparable with workers’ paychecks at other car plants in Russia.

TITLE: Gifts and Gerhard for Putin’s Birthday
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin received a double-barreled shotgun from German Chancellor Gerhard SchrÚder, a book about virgin soil from a fire-extinguishing farm worker and a heavy dose of sarcasm from Russia’s most famous prisoner as he celebrated his 53rd birthday on Friday.
The best present of all, Putin said, was the German chancellor’s arrival in St. Petersburg for the occasion. SchrÚder’s visit came as talks over who will lead Germany’s government drag on, and could well be his final foreign trip as his country’s leader.
Putin spent his birthday in St. Petersburg meeting with the leaders of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan at a summit of the Central Asian Cooperation Organization, as well as handing out medals of honor and talking shop with SchrÚder, whom he said he hoped to see again soon.
In Moscow, meanwhile, jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky passed on ironic birthday greetings to Putin via the pages of Friday’s Kommersant, and police broke up a small anti-Putin demonstration on Pushkin Square on Friday evening after protesters donned Putin masks and prisoners’ caps and called for the president’s ouster.
Putin and SchrÚder met Friday during the German chancellor’s two-day private visit, the two leaders’ eighth meeting this year. Putin was the guest of honor at SchrÚder’s 60th birthday last year, and the two leaders’ cozy relationship was on display again Friday.
“For me the best gift is that Mr. Federal Chancellor came to visit me,” Putin said at a news conference Friday evening, RIA-Novosti reported.
SchrÚder was pressed, to no avail, by journalists to reveal what gift he had brought for Putin.
“I can’t tell you about the present before I give it to him,” SchrÚder said, RIA-Novosti reported. “I can only say that it is related to the president’s interests and to Germany.”
A Kremlin spokesman said SchrÚder had given Putin a double-barreled shotgun, Regnum.ru reported Saturday. It was unclear in exactly what respect the gun was related to Germany.
Earlier Friday, Putin said that his best birthday present was an agreement to merge CACO with the Eurasian Economic Community, one of several overlapping regional organizations comprising former Soviet states — in the case of the EEC, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
“I consider the decision of my colleagues and friends to be the best birthday present,” Putin said in televised comments Friday, hours before SchrÚder’s visit bumped the merger from the top of Putin’s birthday wish list.
Earlier in the day, Putin presented Hero of Russia awards to actor Kirill Lavrov and Vyacheslav Chernukha, a farm mechanic from the Orenburg region who last year extinguished a fire that threatened to destroy $50,000 worth of grain.
Chernukha presented Putin with a book titled “The Planet of Virgin Soil,” and Putin invited the mechanic to have breakfast with the leaders attending the summit.
While SchrÚder’s visit was unofficial, he and Putin did address bilateral cooperation in their news conference, and Putin even commented on SchrÚder’s tenuous hold on power after his narrow defeat in last month’s German parliamentary elections.
“We all know how complicated the internal political events in Germany are becoming,” Putin said. “Nevertheless, you have found time to come here.”
Putin added that he would like high-level contacts between the two governments to “remain undisrupted, despite internal political events.” SchrÚder said that cooperation would continue should his conservative rival, Angela Merkel, assume the chancellorship, and he was optimistic that his Social Democrats would soon strike a deal with Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
“Everyone is deeply convinced of the great strategic importance of the development of relations between Russia and Germany, Russia and Europe,” SchrÚder said. “The likelihood that the two big parties will form a grand coalition is great.”
Asked when he would like to see SchrÚder again, Putin said, “Soon,” RIA-Novosti reported.
Khodorkovsky used the same word in expressing his desire to see Putin, though it was unclear on which side of the Matrosskaya Tishina walls the jailed oligarch meant in his wry birthday note to Putin published in Kommersant on Friday.
“We’ll see each other soon, God willing,” Khodorkovsky wrote. “Happy birthday!”
Khodorkovsky heaped biting, sarcastic praise on Putin, noting, “Unfortunately, for reasons that you well know, I don’t have an opportunity to congratulate you in person.”
Khodorkovsky also took an apparent jab at the difference between his own fate and that of billionaire Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, who is thought to be a loyal ally of the Kremlin.
“You are a generous person, and you clearly like football,” Khodorkovsky wrote to Putin.
Posters of Khodorkovsky were on prominent display at a small anti-Putin rally near Pushkin Square on Friday evening that was cut short by police.
Decked out in plastic Putin masks and striped prisoners’ caps, about 30 demonstrators showed up for the rally, which was organized by the Garry Kasparov-led United Civil Front and the youth group My, or We.

TITLE: Collins Concert
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Phil Collins will perform two farewell concerts in St. Petersburg and Moscow as part of his First Final Farewell Tour. 
The Peteresburg concert will take place at the Ice Palace on Oct. 18, with the Moscow concert coming on Oct. 20. 
The ex-member of Genesis’s last world tour took place eight years ago.
Collins has admitted that he is losing his hearing, a factor that has played a major role in his decision to quit the stage, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Exiled Oligarch Does Business With Bush’s Brother
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Kremlin outcast Boris Berezovsky and Neil Bush, the scandal-tainted brother of the U.S. president, have joined forces in an educational software company that they are trying to promote in the former Soviet Union.
With the unusual partnership, many believe Berezovsky has succeeded in further annoying President Vladimir Putin, who counts George W. Bush as a friend.
The investment in Bush’s company, Ignite!, also sees him joining a well-connected group of former and current shareholders such as former President George H.W. Bush and major Asian and Middle East financiers, at a time when Berezovsky claims he has been struggling to gain permission to travel to the United States.
The flip side for Berezovsky is that he has become a shareholder in a U.S. company that has come under criticism in the United States for dumbing down schoolwork and for peddling political ties.
In recent months, Berezovsky has helped Neil Bush take his company on a tour of countries from the former Soviet Union that have spun out of Moscow’s sphere of influence. First stop was Ukraine in June, where Berezovsky said he had “masses of friends” who helped Bush find his way. Then a few days later was Georgia, where Berezovsky’s longtime partner and Tbilisi power broker Badri Patarkatsishvili was on hand to wine and dine the U.S. president’s brother. Last month, they were in Latvia.
“He asked me to think about possible projects in the regions that I know about,” Berezovsky said of Bush’s expansion plans for the company he founded in 1999. “I’ve known this region for a long time. The CIS is my area of expertise.”
Berezovsky, a former Kremlin king-maker who had extensive business interests in Russia, served a stint as executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States under former President Boris Yeltsin. He became an archenemy of the Kremlin after falling out with Putin shortly after his election in 2000. 
Since fleeing for Britain, where he has been granted political asylum, Berezovsky has continued to irk the Kremlin by funding anti-Putin activities and by emerging as a possible string puller in revolutions that brought pro-Western leaders to power in Georgia and Ukraine. In Latvia, one of his charitable foundations funds pro-Western programs aimed at the Russian-speaking community.
When Berezovsky turned up with Bush in Latvia two weeks ago, Russia’s patience frayed. Once again, prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to have him extradited to Moscow, where he is wanted on charges of fraud.
Even with a partner like Neil Bush on board, Berezovsky’s Latvia trip caused Riga’s political establishment to sweat. The prime minister and president late last week called on the country’s National Security Council to consider blocking any future visits by Berezovsky. Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis said his visits posed “a real threat to the Latvian state” by putting it at loggerheads with Russia. Neither commented on his partnership with Bush.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow distanced itself from the visit. “The Department of State had no involvement in, or any role in arranging, the activities of these two private individuals in Riga,” an embassy official said.
The Kremlin is bound to be smarting at the Bush-Berezovsky partnership, especially since Putin has taken pains to build a personal relationship with the U.S. president.
“For Putin, it must be a very sore point that the brother of his friend has some kind of business with Berezovsky,” said Vladimir Pribylovsky, the head of the Panorama think tank.
For the exiled tycoon, the partnership looks more like his own art of politicking. “For Berezovsky, politics is business,” Pribylovsky said. “He doesn’t need to make money out of this company. He is an influence peddler. To have influence you need exposure.”
The Berezovsky partner who set up the Latvia visit may have gotten a little more exposure than he bargained for. Just days after Bush and Berezovsky flew out of Riga, articles appeared on Russian Internet sites claiming that the bank belonging to the trip’s organizer, Valery Belokon, was coming under scrutiny from Moscow authorities for possibly laundering funds from Russian clients. As a result, a major Moscow bank broke off relations with the bank, Baltic International Bank, Belokon said by telephone from Riga. “This seems like a PR action by one of the Kremlin structures,” he said. “This can’t be possible. We work in line with the law.”
Ignite! president Ken Leonard said he was unaware of any political shadows that might follow Berezovsky. “We know him in terms of his relationship directly with the company,” he said.
Berezovsky said he became a shareholder two years ago.
Despite the fallout over the Latvia visit, Belokon, who has close ties to right-wing and anti-Russian political leader Einars Repshe, said he was still hopeful of potential future deals with Bush. “It is not a big bank, although we do work with a lot of clients,” he said. “Our relations with Mr. Bush allow us to say we have a very serious client base. We are in negotiations with Mr. Bush about a joint business.” He declined to elaborate further.
Bush declined a request for an interview made via Leonard. Bush told Leonard that as a private citizen he would prefer to keep quiet, while Leonard could speak for the company, Leonard said.

A History of Scandal
The activities of the 50-year-old brother of George W. Bush have often caused controversy. There were lurid divorce proceedings in 2002 in which Neil Bush boldly testified that on at least three occasions when he was staying in hotels in Asia, a woman came into his room and had sex with him. The practice, he said, seemed “very unusual.”
And then there were his businesses, which, as The Washington Post said, “have a history of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion.”
Neil Bush first drew attention during the Silverado Savings and Loan scandal, while his father was president. Federal regulators reprimanded him for having “multiple conflicts of interest” in his dealings as a board member of Silverado, which went belly up in 1988, costing U.S. taxpayers $1.3 billion.
His business partners have also attracted scrutiny, among them Jamal Daniel, a Syrian-American businessman, who is co-chairman with Bush of a fund called Crest Investment Company. Daniel boasts important connections with leaders and their families in the Middle East, including former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, the Financial Times reported in a December 2003 investigative article on the Daniel-Bush relationship.
The little-known fund last year surprised all by being granted lucrative rights to develop a plant to process liquefied natural gas near Freeport, Texas, in the process pushing out ExxonMobil, which had first rights to develop the plant.
Daniel attracted further attention when it became known he was a member of the advisory board of New Bridge Strategies, a low-profile Washington firm set up to help companies invest in postwar Iraq. Directors of New Bridge include political heavyweights Joe Allbaugh, the former manager of the Bush-Cheney election campaign in 2000, and Ed Rogers, a former senior White House aide to President Bush.
Bush revealed during his 2003 divorce proceedings that he was paid $60,000 a year at Crest for providing “miscellaneous consulting services ... such as answering phone calls when Jamal Daniel, the other co-chairman, called and asked for advice,” according to newspaper reports.
It was not clear how much Bush is paid by Ignite!, where he serves as chairman. Leonard declined to disclose the amount. His annual salary in 2003 was $180,000, the Post and The Houston Chronicle reported at the time.
Daniel is also involved in Bush’s educational software company. A fund linked to Daniel is a shareholder in Ignite!, Leonard said.
Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show Bush’s parents and major Taiwanese financier Winston Wong, who founded a semiconductor manufacturer with the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, have also been shareholders in Ignite!, along with other financiers from the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
Berezovsky’s investment in Ignite! appears to put him at a nexus of influence peddlers and financiers, as well as at the center of yet more controversy.
Selling educational software might seem to be an innocuous occupation, but Bush has drawn controversy with that, too. The company, which produces software designed to provide teachers with interactive material such as videos and computer programs, has been criticized by some educators for dumbing down classwork. One Ignite! program taught the Constitutional Convention as a rap song, the Post reported in its December 2003 piece on Bush.
Leonard defended the company’s software, saying teachers had found it to be “a viable and credible resource for teaching and learning.”
Bush also has been accused of using his influence to line up charitable funding to make sure schools can buy his company’s software. The Houston school board agreed in 2003 to accept $115,000 in charitable donations to spend on software from Ignite!, The Houston Chronicle reported in February 2004.
“We’ve been looking at the willingness of Bush to use his name in philanthropic fundraising that his firm would benefit from,” said Rick Cohen, director of the Washington-based National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. “Even though it’s legal, it doesn’t mean it’s right. This is a clear conflict of interests.”
Leonard said Bush’s name had nothing to do with the donations raised that year and that they had been made by benefactors who every year made contributions to education in Texas.

The Real Prize
It was not clear how big an earner the company is for investors like Berezovsky. Leonard declined to disclose any of the company’s earnings or profits since it was founded six years ago. He also would not say how many schools had bought the company’s software, but only that “thousands of students” had access to it in a number of states, including Texas, Florida, Washington and California.
With projects just starting in Latin America and South Korea, Leonard said the company was also eager to expand into the former Soviet space. As a result of Berezovsky’s help in arranging visits to Georgia, Ukraine and Latvia, these countries have each ordered 10 of Ignite!’s science courses for pilot programs in their schools. So far, the agreement is to use the English-language U.S. curriculum available in existing material, Leonard said. But the programs, if successful, might be first translated into Russian and then localized to meet each country’s curriculum, he said.
The real prize, however, would be Russia. “The problem with many of these republics is that they are focused on their own languages and they are very small markets,” Leonard said. “Russia is similar to the U.S. market.
“We would openly welcome an invitation to meet with schools in Russia, and we would gladly come to present the company. Obviously, it is a much bigger market,” he said.
So far, however, no invitations have been forthcoming, presumably because Berezovsky has been unable to arrange a visit. 
Berezovsky said his investment in Bush’s firm was just business and an investment in an area he had always been interested in. Declining to disclose the sum he put in, Berezovsky said: “I invested in the company because I think that it is doing the right thing. I had no other aims for making this investment. If the company had not been owned by Bush, I would have invested in another that was doing the same thing.
“When I received the offer to invest, I sent specialists to look at what the company was doing and they approved,” he said. Even though he invested in Ignite! two years ago, Berezovsky said he had been unable to travel to the United States to discuss business.
Berezovsky said he had made two official requests for a visa, the first two years ago and the second as recently as last month, but had yet to receive a response.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow, citing privacy issues, said it could not comment on Berezovsky’s visa status.

TITLE: New Houses Sprouting on Lake Baikal’s Shore
AUTHOR: By Stephen Boykewich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: ENKHALUK, Buryatia — This tiny town on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal is a picture of tranquility. Goats lope up the dusty main street, a sandy beach stretches as far as the eye can see, and smoke rises from the chimneys of unpainted wooden homes at night.
The only eyesore is an unfinished concrete foundation of what would have been a large new house, which local residents say former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was building before he was arrested two years ago. 
But in hundreds of other spots around the lake’s 2,000-kilometer shoreline, new houses are coming up fast — with no regard for environmental protection laws, according to officials in the Natural Resources Ministry. 
The housing construction, together with a planned oil pipeline to the north and a pulp and paper mill to the south, has set the stage for Lake Baikal to become the first-ever UNESCO World Heritage Site to be designated “in danger” against a government’s wishes. 
The designation would be an alarming sign of Russia’s failure to enforce its own environmental laws, as well as a major embarrassment, environmentalists said.
An evaluation team from the World Heritage Committee plans to visit the lake in late October and make a final recommendation on the designation, said Mechtild Rossler, the World Heritage Center’s Europe director.
“We’ve made our position to the Russian authorities clear” about the threats facing the lake, Rossler said by telephone from Paris. “The question is whether they want to take their obligations as signatories to the World Heritage Convention seriously.”
The convention, which the Soviet Union ratified in 1988, was designed to help member states protect their natural and cultural heritage by designating sites of exceptional value.
UNESCO placed Lake Baikal on the list in March 1996, citing a catalogue of superlatives. Baikal is the oldest and deepest lake in the world, the largest single source of unfrozen fresh water — holding 20 percent of the planet’s fresh water — and a rich store of biodiversity, with 1,340 animal species and 570 plant species, many of them endemic.
Rossler stressed that all 812 of the sites on the World Heritage list were placed there at the initiative of the host governments. Thirty-four of those sites have been designated “in danger” — also at the initiative of host governments.
Which is precisely what makes the current situation unique.
“Governments sometimes ask to have World Heritage Sites designated ‘in danger’ in order to call international attention to the site or attract aid,” said Larisa Batotsyrenova, manager of ecological programs at Club Firn, an environmental defense organization based in the Buryat capital of Ulan-Ude. “But if Baikal becomes ‘in danger,’ it will be the first time in history it has happened without a government wanting it to.”
Alexander Lbov, assistant head of the the Federal Service for the Inspection of Natural Resources Use in Buryatia, said not only environmentalists would be upset by this.
“I can’t say exactly what the consequences would be, but it would clearly be a serious political embarrassment for Russia as a whole,” he said during an interview in his Ulan-Ude office. His service is overseen by the Natural Resources Ministry.
In an article posted on the Foreign Ministry’s web site on Wednesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Yakovenko called the World Heritage Committee’s preservation efforts “probably the best known of UNESCO’s activities in Russia.” The article notes that Russia has 22 properties on the list and names more than a dozen sites nominated for future listing, but makes no mention of Lake Baikal.
Rossler declined to predict the likelihood of an “in danger” designation for the lake, but Roman Vazhenkov, coordinator of Greenpeace Russia’s Baikal program, said, “I would put it at close to 100 percent.”
It would not have come without warning, though.
In June 2003, a majority of the World Heritage Committee was prepared to place the lake on its “in danger” list, but delayed its decision in an attempt to avoid what it said would be “a major blow to Russia’s international reputation.”
Threats to the lake’s ecology have only grown since 2003. In early September, the Natural Resources Ministry sent a 25-member commission to conduct an inspection of the lake in preparation for the UNESCO visit. 
Lbov, who was among the inspectors, said the commission determined that household waste from illegally built homes was now causing greater harm to the lake than the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, which has spewed industrial waste water into the lake for nearly four decades. The commission counted 500 homes, newly built or still under construction, that are in violation of environmental protection laws, and it suspects there are many more, he said.
The illegal construction of houses along the water has become a major concern of the Federal Service for the Inspection of Natural Resources Use. The service, led by crusading deputy head Oleg Mitvol, has targeted dachas in the Moscow region it says were illegally built on protected land near city reservoirs. Court marshals stormed dacha communities and demanded owners tear down the houses or risk having them seized by federal authorities.
But the most serious threat to Baikal continues to be the planned construction of an oil pipeline by Transneft, the state pipeline monopoly. Transneft’s planned route cuts through the UNESCO World Heritage Site and the lake’s water basin, running as close as 500 meters to the shore.
A federal environmental impact assessment commission approved a far different route in April 2004, one that ran 20 kilometers north of the lake at the closest point. Transneft then began prospecting and logging — illegally, according to the Federal Service for the Inspection of Natural Resources Use — along the present route. 
Transneft vice president Sergei Grigoryev said the northern route had always been “only one of a number of options.” 
“We abandoned it after we looked more closely and came to the conclusion that there’s no infrastructure there at all, there are mountains up to 2 kilometers high, and it’s a completely unpopulated area with no population points for hundreds of kilometers,” Grigoryev said. “It’s very hard to understand how we’re supposed to build up there.”
The southern route would take advantage of infrastructure along the Baikal-Amur Railway. But opponents say the risk is unacceptable.
“By Transneft’s own assessment, an oil leak along the present route could reach the lake in 20 minutes. The technology doesn’t exist to respond to a leak that quickly,” said Greenpeace’s Vazhenov.
A comparative analysis of the two routes conducted for Transneft by Giprotrudoprovod shows that construction along the southern route is riskier by nearly every criterion: ongoing seismic activity, active and potentially active tectonic faults, and tributaries crossed by the pipeline.
Grigoryev, however, said it was wrong to conclude that the northern option was safer.
“What is ‘safer’ supposed to mean?” he said. “We are technicians. We use the most sophisticated safety measures in existence. Anyone complaining because they simply feel it’s too dangerous is doing it to gain political capital.”
Lbov, for his part, found it difficult to explain why Transneft was preparing for construction along an unapproved route that presented what he called “a grave threat” to the lake.
“The only explanation I can think of is that someone’s sitting in a very nice office thinking only about money,” he said.
Vazhenkov said that Transneft’s actions were likely to provoke a UNESCO “in danger” designation, but could also lead to far more damaging consequences.
“If Transneft builds along this route, one major accident will mean there will be no site left worth protecting,” Vazhenkov said.
Back in tranquil Enkhaluk, a longtime resident stood outside her steep-roofed home and recalled how the sound of a helicopter meant Khodorkovsky was on his way. He and other Yukos employees used to stay in the yurts of the town’s lakeside tourist base, she said, and he liked the town so much he decided to build a house here.
When her talk turned to legends of the lake’s purity, she spoke as though it were a thing of the past.
“They used to say it cured 43 different diseases,” said Angelina Ulanovna, 73. “I knew a woman who would bring her children to the lake and have them drink from it with a cup.
“But that was a long time ago,” she said.

TITLE: Elcoteq Opens $30M Plant in City
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Elcoteq SE, a Finnish electronics manufacturer, opened a 25 million euros ($30 million) plant last Friday, hoping to capitalize profits in one of the world’s fastest-growing telecommunications market. Total future investments in the city plant could reach $120 million, the CEO and president of Elcoteq, Jouni Hartikainen said at the factory’s opening ceremony.
Situated near Pulkovo Airport, south of the city, Elcoteq’s 15,000 square meters plant will manufacture mobile phones among other telecoms equipment, and be the only facility of its kind in Russia.
Antti Piippo, the company’s chairman of the board said Elcoteq’s client list is largely made up of foreign telecoms firms, but there are plans to cooperate with Russian firms as well.
“We want to be a good partner with local Russian companies and help them in their internalization efforts. We want to help the local companies to globalize and global companies to localize,” he said.
Ksenia Tikhankina, Elcoteq’s PR coordinator in Russia said the company could not name their prospective clients yet. Elcoteq have been rumored to be cooperating with fellow Finns Nokia to manufacture the mobile phone producer’s handsets in Russia.
Nokia’s director for communications in Finland, Maija Tommila, said Monday that she could not confirm or deny the speculation.
Taking part in the official launch ceremony, Prime Minister of Finland Matti Vanhanen said that reasons, stated by Elcoteq for investing in Russia included high customer demand, as growth rate of mobile subscribes is very high in Russia.
The number of mobile phone subscribers in Russia reached 111.7 million at the end of September, which is more than double that of a year ago — 52.2 million subscribers, ACM telecoms research agency said Monday in a monthly industry report.
In Moscow there are now 127 active SIM cards for every 100 people, and in St. Petersburg that figure is 112 cards. Overall penetration of mobile phones in Russia grew to 77 percent by the end of last month, the report said.
Elcoteq has so far invested 25 million euros in its St. Petersburg project, not including the value of machinery and equipment installed at the plant. The overall value will be determined later, based on the products, production volumes and schedules, Hartikainen said, adding that if Elcoteq decide to build new units at the site the overall financial input from the Finns could hit 100 million euros ($120 million).
Analysts saw the building of a local factory as mainly motivated by cost-cutting. Alexander Shatikov, partner at SiM Consulting, said Elcoteq would be able to capitalize on Russia’s cheaper labor force and its proximity to Finland. In addition, importing electronic components for assembly at the St. Petersburg plant will mean paying lower customs duties than are set for ready-made products.
Yelena Bazhenova, an analyst with Aton brokerage agreed, but added that the new plant is unlikely to affect the local retail prices for mobile phones. “This won’t mean that we will see cheaper offers from [mobile phone] dealers, although it will depend on the production volume of the factory,” she said.
Until recently Elcoteq concentrated on the production of communications network equipment. Elcoteq first started operations in St. Petersburg in 1997 at an older production facility, which employed 290 staff. The new plant, when fully operational, will create 1,500 jobs.

TITLE: Emissions Plan to Lift Car Costs
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government’s plan to reduce the level of automobile emissions will lead to increased costs for consumers and force car companies to phase out old models, analysts and carmakers said Friday.
On Thursday, the government approved a plan for carmakers, introducing progressively steeper emission standards that would match current European Union standards by 2010. A second government plan setting out guidelines on fuel standards is also planned.
The emission standards specify the maximum amount of pollutants such as carbon monoxide allowed in exhaust gases. The plan — expected to be approved by Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov this week — will introduce a standard known as Euro-2 in six months.
The tougher Euro-3 standard comes into force in 2008, Euro-4 in 2010 and Euro-5 in 2014.
Bringing Russia up to the Euro-2 standard will save the country a total of 243.6 billion rubles ($8.54 billion) in reduced environmental protection costs and savings to the health system, according to the Industry and Energy Ministry, which came up with the plan.
The scheme was widely expected, coinciding with the growth in the number of cars in Russia as incomes increase. 
“First and foremost, it affects domestic production,” said Denis Nushtayev, an analyst with the Metropol investment bank. AvtoVAZ, the country’s top carmaker, will soon jettison its old models, he said. 
Russian consumers will also be affected as carmakers will be required to modify car engines and will pass on increases in production costs to motorists, Nushtayev added.
Vladimir Torin, a spokesman for RusPromAvto, which produces Volga sedans and GAZel trucks, said a switch to the new emission standards would add between $400 and $1,500 per vehicle to the company’s range. 
A flood of foreign models into the country has made this year especially tough for Russian automakers.
Domestic car production in the first eight months of the year dropped by 7 percent to 684,000 units, according to the State Statistics Service.
Annual sales of passenger cars in Russia look set to top 2 million by the end of 2008, up from last year’s total of 1.6 million, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The emission standards will only apply to vehicles either domestically produced or imported into the country. “The current car fleet will be in circulation until the end of its life cycle,” Industry and Energy Deputy Minister Andrei Reus said in a statement. 
RusPromAvto’s Torin attacked the state plan, objecting to its equal treatment of passenger cars in Moscow and trucks in the Far North.
“While there is an urgent need to introduce the Euro-4 in Moscow, it is hardly a problem in Siberia.”

TITLE: Wearing a Suit Does Not Mean Being a Conformist
AUTHOR: By Maria Pirogovskaya
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The office has of course rather spoilt the reputation of a suit, which has become almost synonymous with leading a complicated, yet regulated business life, with its need to abide by the code,  the dress code to be precise. But one need not complain about the discomfort of a three-piece suit or the stifling grip of a tie. The trick is not to blame suits per se, but to purchase a good one.

After all, suits are not just a uniform, they are a continuation of a person, like all clothing. A suit has its own disciple, which can transfer onto the wearer. Unlike the other uniform clothes creation jeans, a suit can look good on nearly all men.
There’s something about the cut of a suit that can hide all the limitations or extravagances of the figure and gather all within a slender and manly posture. The form of the suit lapels influences the shape of the shoulders and the length of the neck. The way trousers hang on a man can be very flattering to the legs and the bottom.
However, theory is all well and good, but in practice it is also important to understand how much you are willing to spend on a suit; then you can pick the one for you.
What’s more, it is important to bear in mind variation. A man cannot get by with just one suit (a jacket and two pairs of trousers). If you have the slightest inkling of ambition, the number of suits in your wardrobe will mount as you climb that corporate ladder.
With time, the wardrobe will find room for a woolen suit and one from a mix of linen and silk (the best combination for hot weather: silk cools, while linen is great for ventilation). It’s not a bad idea to invest in some warmer suits: one that is strictly conservative, three button, steel gray, and another that’s dark two button, pin-striped.
Then there could be a light woolen suit for daily wear and one for the evenings in a smart casual style. Business negotiations and social gatherings require quite different approaches.

Where to Buy in St. Petersburg
• Conservative suits from high-quality wool, partly tailor-made, partly factory-produced can be found at Canali, Ermenegildo Zegna, Machiavelli, and Kaligula. You should wear such suits with fairly dapper shirts, for example ones by Francesco Smalto (sold at the multi-brand Bosco di Ciliegi boutique) or Kenneth Cole, and shoes by John Lobb.
• Tranquil in their cut, but quite daring in their essence, the Italian suits sold under the Etro brand are tough to wear without coming off as too pretentious, unless you are a very self-confident man. Etro has a good selection of rich colors as well as shirts, cashmere coats and excellent warm scarves (Etro, Urbanomania).
• To be honest, it would be hard to call the amorphous jackets by Comme des Garcons or the multi-layered coats of Volga-Volga business wear. Yet with some imagination, they can be combined with other clothes to enhance the wearer’s presence to something aristocratic.
• A designer costume that is mass produced will set you back anywhere between $800 and $2,500. Within this price range you will find the precisely proportional jackets and trousers of the Calvin Klein Collection, the neutral wear of Boss Hugo Boss, and the baggy, wide-shouldered and bright offerings from Paul Smith.
• For a men’s suit in the $150 to $600 range there are numerous brands and shops in the city. Among the better ones are Zara, Benetton, Strellson (which concentrates on checkered shirts), Mexx and Banana Republic. As a rule, the suits in these shops are sewn from mixed wool and tailored in third-world countries. One should note that such suits only look well on people with a well-proportioned figure.

Details
We are not talking about shoes here (the first thing to spend the money on) or socks (which should complement the color of the trousers). Neither is the topic ties (and those with a penchant for cartoon characters or museum souvenirs should keep those gems for non-business hours).
Details are accessories that are perhaps not so noticeable to the person himself, but very noticeable for those around him. It’s the color of the wallet (which should never be placed in the back trouser pocket). It’s the shape and the style of the notebook. It’s the look of the mobile phone — not its manufacturer, size or its various functions.

Cologne
Like any public space, the office does not bear extremes well. Avant-garde perfumes are best used at the weekend or in the evening. The smell that fits during the day is one that is very subtle, quite in contrast to the seductive aroma that an evening after-shave may give you.
Cologne that is used during the day should appeal to popular taste. Good eau de toilettes include those with a citrus base (lemon, bergamot, bitter orange, grapefruit), pine needle base, or with herbs (basil and mint).
Some examples: Route de Vetiver/ Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier — a stable, calm, non-extreme aroma that’s very popular among men; Kenneth Cole Black — sweet, with a hint of southern gardens, notes of lotus, jasmine, ginger and muscat; KenzoAir Intense — a purely city and autumn smell: ozone, tea, and a little burnt rubber; Baldessarini del Mar — a fresh cologne with the smell of water and wind.

TITLE: Constructors Dig Deep For New Sales Schemes
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As the real estate market matures, bringing with it more picky buyers, property sellers are turning to more innovative means to attract clients.
Local construction firm Peterburgstroi Skanska, a subsidiary of Swedish constructor Skanska AB, has decided to follow the parent company’s practice and introduce sales offices at its construction sites.
Hoping to stimulate more direct client interest, last month the subsidiary installed three onsite sales offices, which operate throughout the week. The offices contain full price lists and house planning schemes.
“One of the main steps leading a person’s decision to buy [an apartment] is visiting the construction site. The client wants to see what his potential home looks like, to imaging being its host, to see the view from it and surrounding landscape,” said Eduard Kiyamov, marketing and sales manager at Peterburgstroi Skanska. “We decided to create comfortable conditions for that.”
For upcoming projects, the St. Peterburg firm plans to install sales offices soon after construction starts, he said. Just one sales manager will work at each location, although Kiyamov said the company has “born in mind” staff expansion and the offices will allow space for that in the future, if there is demand.
Skanska AB has run onsite sales offices in Sweden for 10 years. Kiyamov said he hoped to repeat the “positive experience” the Swedish firm had on its domestic market in St. Petersburg, especially in terms of conveying the quality and image of the company.
Leonid Sandalov, deputy director at Becar real estate agency, sees both headquarter and onsite sales offices as reasonable in terms of efficiency.
“There is a type of buyer who responds to sales announcements placed on property windows. Similarly, driving past the house they could get interested and come into the office to find out more details,” he said.
Onsite sales offices target audiences that are indifferent to standard real estate advertisement, Sandalov said. Already a number of Russian construction firms have picked on the practice, at least by parking a simple trailer by the construction site with advertising information, he said.
“We have six onsite sales offices, placed by large residential complexes. It is convenient because the client can see the flat and discuss the agreement terms on the spot,” said Inna Malinovskaya, press secretary for LEK.
Sandalov said, however, that “we are not talking about a sales office in full sense of the word. The buyers do not come in with the money or sign the contract there.”
Most flat-hunters still prefer to apply to the head office, where they can be shown a wider property selection and receive more details calculations, said Inga Yarosh, press secretary for Peterburgskaya Nedvizhimost construction company.
Above all, construction companies agreed that selling new property meant using a broad advertising spectrum, in which “any new way of dealing with the clients, including a new service level, can contribute to a sales increase.”
In addition to the now traditional sales methods of placing ads in the mass media, joining industry fairs and launching promotional campaigns, Yarosh said the Internet was becoming the next most focused on advertising space.
“Recently the impact of the Internet has significantly increased because of the growing ru.net audiences. Besides, attracting clients from other cities is becoming more important for developers. The Internet is the most efficient and the cheapest way of doing this,” she said.

TITLE: Banks Loan to Build With Interest
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Stroimontazh construction corporation’s recently acquired $30 million bank loan to finance local and European development projects has proved once again that credit schemes could be mutually beneficial for developers, construction companies and banks alike. However, bank analysts say that high risks still keep them from wider involvement in the industry.
At the end of September, Dutch subsidiary of Alfa-Bank — Amsterdam Trade Bank NV — granted a five-year loan to Stroimontazh, credit that can be extended to eight years. This followed a similar move earlier this year when Alfa-Bank’s St. Petersburg branch granted a $7.4 million loan to Stroimontazh.
Boris Medovoi, senior vice-president and corporate department director at Alfa-Bank St. Petersburg branch, said last week that cooperation with Stroimontazh is only at a starting phase.
“Our experience proved that developers are interested in bank financing. Alfa-Bank has such clients in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major regions where our branches operate,” Medovoi said in an e-mail.
Construction companies count for about 10 percent of Alfa-Bank’s credit portfolio, a standard figure across the banking sector.
At the St. Petersburg branch of the National Reserve Bank construction projects account for nine percent of the credit portfolio, with PIK shopping and entertainment center, a hotel in Krasnoye Selo district and several projects by construction firm Stroimaster being the more notable.
“The construction industry is still one of the most dynamic in the Russian economy, so developing ties with the leading construction companies is one of our main goals,” Medovoi said.
Stroimontazh will use attracted financial resources for construction projects in France and buying land plots in St. Petersburg. The latter will involve land for residential and commercial real estate projects, Alexander Baburin, vice-president for economics and finance at Stroimontazh, said last week in an e-mail.
Stroimontazh’s French venture is being run by a subsidiary firm Hermitage Immobilier. The company is developing two residential complexes, occupying 50,000 square meters, in the suburbs of Paris. The first, to be build in Montevran will start construction by December, with a project in Massi to follow soon after, Baburin said.
The Russian construction firm attracted about 20 percent of the finances through loans. It expects a return on the French investment within two years, Baburin said. The St. Petersburg projects meanwhile will not start earning profit sooner than two to five years, he said.
Experts say that considering the average profitability of real estate development against banks’ interest rates, Stroimontazh will easily win out.
“In Russian banks interest rates vary between 12 percent and 14 percent. Attracting foreign loans the companies can expect rates to be between 9 percent and 11 percent, and even lower,” said Nikolai Kazansky, senior consultant at Colliers International real estate agency.
At the same time, the internal rate of return, or IRR, for most development projects is between 15 percent and 30 percent, which forces “developers to seek positive leverage by attracting borrowed resources alongside the company’s own investments,” Kazansky said.
In upcoming projects Stroimontazh will use project funding, Baburin said. The first project to attract financial resources in such a way will be the Mont Blanc elite residential complex in the center of St. Petersburg. Sberbank will provide a $10 million loan for the project, Baburin said.
Stroimontazh is also completing negotiations with several European banks to attract further funding for its foreign ventures, he said.
However, despite high demand for loans from developers, financiers are concerned about the construction market’s general instability.
“The real estate market is high risk in any country. In St. Petersburg the actual demand for flats is less than the volume of property sold, though just a couple of years ago the demand was growing and increasing residential property prices,” said Natalia Grigorieva, head of loans department at the St. Petersburg branch of the National Reserve Bank.
To this disadvantage, Grigorieva added the risks of developer failure, of the projects not being completed and double-selling of the property.
Taking out a bank loan gets more complicated as construction companies do not provide any collateral, she said. “Often they have only equipment as the capital assets, the depreciated cost of which is significantly less than the investment necessary to realize a construction project,” Grigorieva said.
Higher risks trigger an interest rate growth as bank specialists check out “the company’s credit history, experience in running similar projects and analyze if the project is economically and legally sound,” Grigorieva said.

TITLE: Russia to Fit In 2 Disneylands
AUTHOR: By Conor Humphries
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A second Russian “Disneyland” is planned as part of a mammoth $2.1 billion leisure development southeast of Moscow — although as at the city’s other giant amusement park project, Mickey Mouse is not invited. 
At a Moscow region government meeting last week, deputy economy minister Valery Filchenko announced plans for a vast development in the Ramenskoye district that would include “Disneyland, a motor track, a professional golf course and a safari park,” according to a report on the legislature’s official web site, www.mosreg.ru.
Filchenko later confirmed by telephone, however, that no agreement with Disney was actually planned and that the park would not carry the Disney name. 
Disney Parks and Resorts does not have any plans for resorts in Russia or Eastern Europe, spokeswoman Lisa Haines said by e-mail. 
The Ramenskoye project, dubbed Parkland, is to cover a total of 3,000 hectares near the village of Nikonovskoye and is to cost 60 billion rubles ($2.1 billion), Filchenko told the legislature, which passed a decree on an investment plan for the project.
According to that plan, the project should be completed by 2010 and make back its investment in four years, the report said. 
The plan names Russkiye Gazony-Nikonovskoye as the primary investor in the project. A year ago, the Belaya Dacha group, founded by State Duma deputy Viktor Semyonov, bought an agricultural facility in Nikonovskoye, and that enterprise’s land is to be used for the park, Izvestia reported. 
Belaya Dacha is also planning an amusement park beside the Belaya Dacha Mega Mall, a joint venture between Belaya Dacha and IKEA.  
Another “Russian Disneyland,” designed by artist Zurab Tsereteli, is planned for a 350-hectare site on the Moscow River island of Nizhniye Mnevniki. The recently opened Disneyland in Hong Kong covers 126 hectares.

TITLE: Show Me The Info!
TEXT: The question is why. A journalist colleague is showing off a recently acquired mobile phone number — of a general director whose factory has for years been as secretive as if it had been producing nukes and not plain old processed food. The factory’s information highways had been so narrowly squeezed you’d think it were sacrilege to allow even a one-word comment on the market or on competitors to pass. We are not even talking about a comment on the factory’s huge advertising expenses that fed into a promotional campaign which added less than a 2 percent market share. So, what does that factory director need now? Forgive the skepticism, but what’s in it for him?
As it happens, the factory has some foreign shareholders. Now, could it possibly be that the foreigners want out and the director needs publicity to gain the attention of new investors? Indeed, the transparency of information is often the price for attracting investment. But besides the financiers, there are a lot of other parties eager to learn a company’s secrets: Competitors, partners, the tax authorities and, finally, gangsters. “Those who sell should be cautious,” said the manager of a company that was preparing to sell off premises in a prime-location to a well-known Moscow-based market player. The manager was afraid of interest from the criminal element, but in the end the deal failed anyway after the City Hall stopped it.
The less is known about you and your business, the easier it is to undertake risky operations, the Russian edition of Forbes magazine said when it printed a rating of the country’s top 200 private companies. The companies in the list had grown faster than Russia’s economy, but the turnover of many could only be estimated: Those firms do not disclose their business information. Photos of some of their founders and owners are hard to find in media archives because those people do not want to attract extra attention, neither from the press nor from the authorities. At the moment, the best strategy is to feign a dead cockroach, Forbes quoted one of PR adviser as saying.
Many successful Russian companies have some skeletons in their cupboard, so they keep closed and remain suspicious. Having been a business journalist for more than a decade I’ve said this and written about it a hundred times. But it gets pretty sickening when you cannot even contact the guys who sold their business to Coca-Cola for $500 million. It seems Forbes has it right when it writes: what need is there for publicity when you have enough money?
Yet, fast developing companies often need more money than they have. When they are looking for external investors, they have to open their books. I’ll admit, it has never been as easy to get corporate information than now, when so many Russian companies are racing to the stock exchange to go public or to issue bonds. Information about owners, as well as turnover and earnings figures come in a prospectus that all public companies have to provide for investors. 
The size of a stake that a major national bank acquired in a prominent St. Petersburg-based bank was released in a corporate memorandum, which the former prepared before its Eurobond issue. The memorandum issued by another company going public informed prospective shareholders that one of the firm’s founders had been imprisoned in Soviet times. And, by the way, it didn’t hurt their IPO.

Anna Shcherbakova is the St. Petersburg bureau chief of business daily Vedomosti.

TITLE: Clamor for Oil Has a Soviet Ring
AUTHOR: By Konstantin Sonin
TEXT: The debate about why the Soviet Union collapsed began the day after it happened. As often happens with questions like this, however, no clear-cut answer has been found and probably never will be.
Most people do have a strong opinion on the subject. Some believe, for example, that the collapse was caused primarily by increasing disparities in the economy that resulted from extreme centralization of production and management and the political leadership’s inability to respond to increasingly acute economic problems. Others contend that the union fell apart as the result of the subversive activities of spies and agents of influence employed by our Cold War enemies, the treachery of Mikhail Gorbachev and so on.
Both groups are so sure they’re right that they don’t even argue any longer. The question of what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union now gives rise to heated debates only among professional political scientists. But the question is not as academic as it might seem at first glance. To understand why, consider a purely economic event that took place recently — Gazprom’s acquisition of Sibneft.
Your assessment of the Sibneft deal — as well as of state-owned Rosneft’s acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz, state-owned Unified Energy Systems’ planned purchase of a large stake in Power Machines and the possible acquisition of Norilsk Nickel by state-owned diamond giant Alrosa — will depend to a large extent on how you explain the downfall of the Soviet Union. If spies, Star Wars and geopolitical forces were to blame, then everything’s fine.
But if the main reason for the collapse was economic, then we’re in trouble, because this means that we’re expending our own money and effort to rebuild the very same Soviet system of industrial organization and management whose ineffectiveness, so obvious in the final decades of the Soviet era, led to such regrettable consequences.
If this is the case, all the government’s talk about economic stimulus, private property and transparency that economists love so much is pure nonsense. In effect, this means that the old Soviet-era Oil Industry Ministry, Nonferrous Metals Ministry and Medium Machine-Building Ministry have become the driving forces behind Russia’s new economic policy.
It would have been nice if the authorities had bothered to tell us that they had set a course — and not just economically — back to the U.S.S.R. Then again, not telling us is very much in line with the Soviet style of leadership, a haughty disdain for the governed that seemed to say: It doesn’t matter if you believe us or not, we’re still going to do it our way.
Our current leaders are behaving exactly the same way. Take Gazprom deputy CEO Alexander Ryazanov. When asked about the Sibneft deal, Ryazanov replied: “If we have the money, why not buy it?” But a significant portion of the money used to purchase Sibneft was borrowed from Western banks! And I don’t have to remind you that when the state owns half of a company like Gazprom, it is liable for half of its debts as well. Meanwhile, top officials have been making much of the fact that Gazprom paid the market price for Sibneft.
Now there’s something to be proud of. Their self-satisfaction would make more sense if they’d managed to get hold of Sibneft for half-price, or even one-third of the market value. After all, anybody can buy a company for the sticker price.

Konstantin Sonin, professor at the New Economic School/CEFIR, is a columnist for Vedomosti, where this comment first appeared.

By Igor Pototsky 

Back in October 1993, the reformers vanquished the anti-reformers. The Soviet system, which existed like a parasite on a senseless paternalistic system of oil in return for imports, was liquidated, and a liberal economy was started up. But it has somehow gone unnoticed that, 12 years later, sociologists find that more than half the population does not support market economics, and that the concept of oil in return for social programs smacks so much of the defeated Soviet system that it is time for the few genuine liberals who have by chance survived to cry, “What did we fight for then?”
Dependency on oil exports is increasing and inflation is rising — to such a degree that in order to rein it in, the Finance Ministry is ready to reconcile itself to a rising ruble, which could slow down growth even further and, as happened under Brezhnev, make Russia even more dependent on oil. And with all this as a backdrop, state expenditure is growing. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin recently said that although he personally would like to reduce it, the political situation sometimes makes extra expenditure inevitable. And this slows down growth.
All round there is so much money that it is hindering growth, but the population needs state handouts because there is so little small business that it is unable to earn a living. And how is that different from the Soviet system? Perhaps all this should really be called a social democracy — although it’s a highly radical form of one. What is especially unpleasant is that the people who year in, year out are involved in these social democratic outrages have always been regarded as liberals.
 What is happening is awful. And not only in view of the direct economic consequences — given the present prices for oil, the economy can weather all sorts of storms. What is awful is that by pretending to be social democrats, these people discredit liberals as well and allow the enormous bedrock of leftist ideas, for which no one ever answers, to remain intact. Leftists in the government have yet to make themselves politically responsible. The natural progress of things is interrupted, and this is extremely convenient for populists, who can then demand anything. The more points these spiritual heirs to the Soviet regime score, the more the government will swing back and forth between nostalgia for liberal growth policies and the reality of increasing social obligations. And this is simply because by playing at someone else’s game, the liberals in the government have turned out to be social democrats and, as a result, at the same time the only people to bear responsibility for everything at once.

Igor Pototsky, an independent analyst, contributed this comment to Vedomosti, where it appeared in longer form.

TITLE: Russians Feel Poorer Than Statistics Show
AUTHOR: By Alex Fak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When the Soviet state made millions of schoolchildren intone on the first day of class, “Thank you, the Party, for our bright future,” it could hardly have imagined that the brainwashing scheme would turn against its successors.
But this is exactly what happened as the economic security of the Soviet days evaporated. According to several recent surveys, Russians feel poorer than they really are. They fear lurking economic dangers even where economists cannot perceive any — and blame the government for it all, just as they once credited it for their relative prosperity.
Some 42 percent of Russians consider their financial state “poor” or “very poor,” according to a recent report published by consultancy firm FBK in conjunction with the Levada Center. That figure is double what World Bank and government numbers testify about Russian incomes.
To most folks, the solution is simple. Almost 61 percent of respondents told pollsters that it was up to the government to pull the nation out of poverty, while another 15 percent said it was up to businesses to take up the burden of social services. Some 11 percent signed up for a “seize and redistribute” approach. 
“The numbers speak for themselves: The feelings of social dependency are extremely high,” the authors of the report concluded.
Russians’ gloomy assessments stand in striking contrast to those of Americans.
A Time-CNN poll last October found that 19 percent of U.S. taxpayers thought they would benefit from tax cuts on the top 1 percent of earners. Another 20 percent of respondents believed they would reach the top 1 percent in their lifetime. 
The attitude of dependency in Russia more closely resembles sentiments in Europe, where people tell pollsters that they have limited control over their economic destiny. In the FBK/Levada survey, just 8 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “People should be responsible for their own well-being and not blame the government and society for their problems.” 
Russians “continue to be poor ... and they are not putting in the effort,” said Ekaterina Marushkina, one of the authors of the report. “They can always find someone to blame — the state, government policies. But when the question turns to ‘What can you do about it?’ they do not want to discuss it.”
Experts point out that in Soviet times, Russians were conditioned to believe that the state would always be there for them. 
“Fifteen years ago, people learned that they could not trust the state. But they still have expectations for what the state is supposed to do,” Marushkina said.
Article 7 of the Constitution famously defines the Russian Federation as a “social state whose policy is aimed at creating conditions that ensure a decent life and unimpeded development for the individual.” But this is on paper. In reality, people have had more than a decade to learn that things are not so rosy.
“There is a feeling of being abandoned by the state,” said Olga Nikitina, a researcher at the Sociology Institute, a part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Access to social services has been blocked, so people have to pay for them out of their own wages. If you deprived the French of their social benefits, they’d be staging mass protests too.”
Russians’ distrust of the state has grown enormously since the Soviet collapse. 
Relatively little of the popular discontent is aimed at business, said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a researcher who specializes in studying Russia’s elites. Entrepreneurs “risk their own money” and people understand that, she said. 
As for the public sector, many Russians have the “feeling that the government pays some privileged employees under the table, while neglecting the rest,” she said.
The fact that the poor live in such close proximity to the rich might explain some of the pessimism.

TITLE: Foreign Funds and Oil Fuel Russian Bond Boom
AUTHOR: By Olzhas Auyezov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Russia’s ruble corporate bond market boom shows no signs of slowing as a petrodollar influx and growing foreign interest makes it possible for a widening range of borrowers to tap the market, analysts say. 
Foreign investors facing low yields around the world started buying ruble bonds from second- and even third-tier issuers this year as yields compressed on top-line bonds from the likes of gas monopoly Gazprom. 
And market players believe that the stream of “hot” money often driven by short-term considerations, such as hopes for exchange rate gains by the ruble, will keep flowing in 2006. 
“The influx of speculative capital can be seen throughout the emerging markets, not only in Russia,” says Dmitriy Dudkin, an analyst with ING Bank. 
“At the time when interest rates are so low around the world, especially in Europe, investors are looking for a place that offers some premium.” 
The value of outstanding corporate ruble bonds grew by 33 percent in the first eight months of 2005 and reached about $12.5 billion by the end of August, according to bond market specialist Cbonds.
The fourth quarter features a heavy issuance schedule, headlined by Russian State Railways, which plans to raise $1.2 billion in several tranches with tenors of up to seven years. 
Foreign banks and funds currently hold about a third of Russian corporate bonds outstanding, estimates Alexander Losev, a dealer with Raiffeisen Bank. 
High oil prices that boosted Russian banks’ liquidity have also created additional demand, in turn prompting more companies to come to the bond market for financing. 
“Investors have rushed in to buy whatever was offered,” says Raiffeisen’s Losev. 
“And foreigners who used to stick to Moscow municipal bonds and blue chips are now interested in second- and third-tier securities, even those not rated by the international agencies,” agrees Yekaterina Leonova, an analyst with Alfa-bank. 
Hitherto obscure companies have managed to raise substantial sums via bond issues. Only this week heavy machinery firm Uralvagonzavod raised 3 billion rubles ($105 million) for five years at 9.35 percent, well below the inflation rate. 
Higher yields are not the only factor luring investors. 
“There is hope that Russia’s Central Bank will allow the ruble to appreciate in an effort to curb inflation, although that’s a moot point,” says Raiffesen’s Losev. 
Russian authorities face a tough choice between supporting domestic industry by pegging the ruble to hard currencies at the cost of high inflation, or allowing appreciation, which would tackle inflation but erode economic competitiveness. 
A top Central Bank official, Alexei Ulyukayev, signaled on Thursday that exchange rate stability had priority for now, saying he expected the ruble to hold in a range of 28 to 29 to the dollar until the end of this year. 
The Central Bank has piled up gold and foreign currency reserves of over $160 billion — the largest for any country outside Asia — as it buys up petrodollars. In the process, it is printing rubles, which are finding their way into the bond market. 
Analysts expect inflows to continue as long as returns are better than abroad.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Belarus Currency 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia and Belarus have agreed on a plan to introduce the Russian ruble as the sole currency of Belarus, Interfax reported Monday, citing the Belarussian Central Bank.
The plan was adopted in Minsk on Friday, the news service reported.
No date for replacing the Belarusian ruble with the Russian ruble was set, Interfax said. Under a previous agreement, Belarus was due to retire its currency on Jan. 1, 2005, a date that was later pushed back to Jan. 1, 2006, the news service said. Belarusian Central Bank Chairman Pyotr Prokopovich has said that it won’t be possible to make the switch in early 2006 because of “technical problems,” Interfax said.

Tomskneft Output
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Tomskneft, Yukos’ largest production unit, will probably pump 28 percent less crude this year than it did last year, chairman Viktor Gerashchenko said, Interfax reported Monday.
Production is expected to decline to 13.5 million tons (271,000 barrels per day), from 18.8 million tons last year, after the company paid tax claims for 2000 to 2003, Interfax said. Tomskneft will probably produce 13.6 million tons of oil next year, Interfax cited Gerashchenko as saying in Tomsk, where the unit is based.
Tomskneft may receive a new tax bill for 2004, Interfax said, citing Gerashchenko. 

Yugansk Reverse
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The Moscow Arbitration Court overturned 5.6 billion rubles ($197 million) in tax claims for 1999 and 2000 against Yuganskneftegaz, once Yukos’ largest production unit, Interfax reported Monday.
The court this summer suspended hearings on Yugansk’s challenge of a 9 billion-ruble tax bill for 1999 and other tax claims while the market price of oil for the period is being appraised, Interfax reported.
State-owned Rosneft bought Yugansk for $9.3 billion after the government sold it off to recover some of the more than $28 billion in tax claims against Yukos and its units. Yugansk is suing Yukos for more than $10 billion over losses it says were caused by mismanagement.

Kryvorizhstal Bids
KIEV (Bloomberg) — Mittal and Arcelor, the world’s largest steel producers, paid the $200 million to bid for Ukraine’s Kryvorizhstal, in a $2 billion auction on Oct. 24, Kommersant-Ukraine reported Monday, citing company officials.
Mittal and Arcelor are among 12 companies that expressed an interest in the stake, the newspaper reported, citing Ukraine’s property fund. The stake may be worth as much as $3.5 billion, Kommersant-Ukraine reported, citing Andriy Dmytrenko, an analyst at Dragon Capital in Kiev.
(Bloomberg)

Novolipetsk Sales Up
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Novolipetsk, which is considering an initial public share offering in London, posted a 20.2 percent rise in first-half sales on Monday under U.S. GAAP standards to $2.38 billion.
Gross profit rose by 19.3 percent to $1.21 billion, and net profit by 16.9 percent to $838 million, a Novolipetsk statement said.
“The financials have increased, in spite of the worsening of the steel market conditions in the second quarter of 2005, due mainly to the acquisition of raw materials and transport assets in 2004 and a strategy of vertical integration,” the statement quoted Galina Aglyamova, deputy general director for economy and finance, as saying.

MTS Wins  Over 50 Millionth Customer
Mobile TeleSystems, Eastern Europe’s largest mobile phone company, signed up its 50 millionth customer in September as demand surged in Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Russia’s regions.
Subscriptions rose by 2.03 million in the month, or 4.2 percent, to 50.36 million on surging demand, the company said in a statement.
Subscriptions rose 4.7 percent in regions outside Russia’s two largest cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, to 26.9 million. Growth in both Moscow and St. Petersburg was 3.2 percent.
(Bloomberg)

Aeroflot’s Airbus Buy
MOSCOW (Reuters) — The board of directors of Aeroflot has approved the purchase of seven Airbus-321-200 aircraft, the airline said on Monday. 
Spokeswoman Irina Danenberg said Aeroflot will receive three airplanes in the fourth quarter of 2006 and the remaining four in 2007. 
Aeroflot said in September it planned to purchase 12 Airbus-320 airplanes in the next 18 months and two to five Boeing-767s within 12 months as it seeks to update its fleet.

TITLE: The Danger of Porous Borders
TEXT: By Dmitry Rogozin

One of the benefits of being Russian is that there is never a lack of constructive advice on sensitive social matters like immigration and ethnic and religious tolerance — not only from Russia’s own liberals, but from friendly foreign countries and international nongovernmental organizations that are glad to instruct Russia on its duty to move toward the democratic standards of an open society. Russia need only adopt advanced Western models, they insist, and all will be well. 
Then again, maybe not. Recently, the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia made the following statement in a report on anti-Jewish violence in EU countries: “France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the U.K. witnessed rather serious anti-Semitic incidents such as numerous physical attacks and insults directed against Jews and the vandalism of Jewish institutions — synagogues, shops, cemeteries.” Evidently, even some of Europe’s longest-established democracies are not immune to such ugly behavior.
It turns out that few of the responsible parties are indigenous French, Belgians, Dutch and Britons. The vast majority of the perpetrators are first- or second-generation immigrants from Muslim countries, many of them illegally taking advantage of lax border controls. Rejecting assimilation of the languages, traditions and values of the countries that have welcomed them — and despite the fact that they are often supported at public expense — some of them find the allure of crime, even jihad, irresistible.
Although Jews often are singled out, they are not the only victims. France has become home to Muslim ghettos where polygamy is openly practiced and sharia law enforced in defiance of secular law. Muslim girls who reject arranged marriages or the wearing of headscarves are denounced as whores and risk gang rape. Normal citizens and even police fear entering crime-ridden outer suburbs of Paris and Marseille, where native French are mocked as “Gaulois” — aliens in their own land.
Among the suspects in the July 7 bombings in the city some call Londonistan are a Somali, the son of an affluent Pakistani fish-and-chip shop owner and a Jamaican-born convert to Islam. They all attended the Finsbury Park mosque, inspired by the radical imam Abu Hamza al-Masri. Courtesy of hundreds of thousands of pounds paid to him by British taxpayers as an asylum-seeker, for years he exhorted his disciples to jihad — and, unsurprisingly, some heeded the call.
The filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was an outspoken critic of the treatment of women in some Muslim households, was murdered on the street by a Dutch-born Moroccan, and his killer left a note threatening more attacks in the name of radical Islam. As Michael Leaden of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, van Gogh’s murder “is a textbook case of what happens when a tolerant but confused society takes political correctness to its illogical extreme.”
Along with terror, immigrants also have imported a growing problem of organized crime. In many European cities, the Albanian mafia is involved in trafficking sex slaves from Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus as well as in distributing heroin, cultivated in the poppy fields of Afghanistan and smuggled through former Soviet states.
If what is happening in European democracies is indeed a textbook case of tolerance taken to a dangerous extreme, this is one Western paradigm that Russia must not imitate. The current government’s laxity in enforcing Russia’s laws and its failure to implement a national strategy of border protection amount to dereliction of duty.
Facilitated by a visa-free regime with most of the CIS and by sloppy and corrupt administration, thousands of illegal immigrants — and not only from the CIS but also from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and Vietnam – enter Russia daily, unobstructed and unobserved. Russia is now home to an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants, about 2 million of whom live in the city of Moscow and the Moscow region, most of them illiterate and low-skilled. We can only guess how many enter with criminal or terrorist intent.
In Russia, as in Europe, certain illegal immigrants constitute ideal recruits for jihad terrorism, and terror and crime are often linked. For example, just this month, members of the Hizb-ut Tahrir terrorist organization were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the distribution of heroin in the Moscow area. Without legal status, undocumented immigrants in Russia are often forced by criminal organizations into drug trafficking and prostitution. These are gross violations of human rights that the Russian authorities and NGOs prefer to ignore. Moreover, even when working legally — in horrible conditions and for pay that is low even by Russian standards — they displace Russians in the job market, drive down wages and place a burden on the infrastructure.
There is an urgent need for laws and policies to restore Russia’s control over its borders so it can put its house in order. There should be a strict visa regime with neighboring CIS states to screen out criminals and potential terrorists. Foreign labor should be admitted only as long as it benefits Russia’s national economy and international competitiveness, with priority given to Russian-speaking nationals of the former Soviet Union with high educational and vocational levels who are willing to become permanent residents and, eventually, loyal Russian citizens. Russia needs skilled foreign labor. 
Cultural integration and Russian language proficiency should be made requirements for receiving government resettlement aid. This does not mean that there should be discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity or religion: Xenophobia and chauvinism are unacceptable and have no place in Russia. A strict immigration policy is no excuse for the violent racist fringe, who have proudly adopted Nazi regalia and slogans. No more tolerable in Moscow than anywhere else, the ideology they represent was delivered a fatal blow 60 years ago by the immortal feats of Russian arms.
“This country has lost control of its borders. And no country can sustain that kind of position.” Those words of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan could easily be used to describe Russia today. There is no possible justification for violence and hatred that could tear apart Russian society, whether it comes from the neo-Nazi fringe or from the advocates of ersatz tolerance, who would open our doors to the very extremism they claim to oppose. 

Dmitry Rogozin is chairman of the Rodina party and a State Duma deputy. He contributed this piece to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: Tendering Transport
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: A new tender for passenger transport in the city is slated to begin in November, with a whole new system set to be introduced on April 1 of next year.
Following the total failure of the last, scandalous tender, Governor Valentina Matviyenko has demanded that the bureaucrats seriously take into consideration the interests of the bulk of private carriers. And, to the surprise of many, including these private entrepreneurs themselves, the recently announced rules for the holding of the new tender seem to be just what the Governor ordered.
It seems that the result achieved by the conciliatory commission owes much to the first deputy chairperson of the city’s Transport Committee, Nikolai Konstantinov, and to Valentina Matviyenko herself, who personally took part in the lengthy negotiations with the entrepreneurs. 
A constructive dialogue between the authorities and business allowed a sensible escape route to be plotted out of a heated and complex conflict. With the removal of the main defect of the first tender — the strengthening of the monopoly held by Passazhiroavtotrans — private carriers will now be given a real chance to carry on working on commercial routes, as long as they also agree to operate less commercially viable, but socially crucial routes, acquiring larges buses to that end. At the same time, Smolny, having created a new set of rules for the game, is stimulating the development of private companies, and raising the standards of their work and the quality of the transport services provided (in particular, that move towards larger buses). Another bonus is that the existing transport companies are being given a chance to grow. 
The tender for the city’s transport routes provides a positive example of how reforms affecting business interests should be carried out. Both the Russian authorities and the authorities in St. Petersburg haven’t quite managed to shake off the naÕve conviction that they know best when it comes to reforming our lives, and so they needn’t bother to listen to the opinions of other interested parties. The sorry history of the monetization of social benefits has demonstrated the risks of that naivety with regard to the population at large, and the equally troubled history of reforming Petersburg’s transport system has demonstrated the same risks with regard to business. 
The key lesson that the authorities should learn here is that reforms simply won’t be implemented unless a compromise can be achieved with all the interested parties. Otherwise, the authorities simply don’t have the resources to achieve their ends. And that should come as no surprise — we’re no longer living in the Soviet era. The current reality of life in Russia means that the authorities are not only deprived of an unquestioned mandate to regulate our lives (the legislation prevents that). They are also deprived of any real opportunity or means to carry out that regulation. In this case, that means that the authorities can’t force the private sector to work at a loss. 
In the development of adequate reforms, difficulties arise in the move from primordial chaos to a more or less sensible order, and that’s precisely what we’ve seen in the St. Petersburg transport sector. The combination of the loss-making Passazhiroavtotrans, responsible for socially important, loss-making routes, and the chaotically arising commercial routes serviced by private companies, operating despite monopoly conditions, prevented simple reforms that would have led to a straight privatization. 
The first attempt at reform merely reinforced the monopoly of Passazhiroavtotrans. Only hours of discussion with the entrepreneurs were able to bring about what appears to be a reasonable solution. Without those talks, this would be hard to imagine, so unusual is the approach now adopted. In essence, the procedure allows for a largely fictitious tender, as a win for the majority of the participants is almost guaranteed — hardly standard operational procedure for a tender. 
The paradox here results from demand being almost equal to supply in this sector. That means that a standard tender wouldn’t have provided for those socially important routes. In other words, the original tender would have been fine, if Passazhiroavtotrans had been left out of the equation. Which is what happened — the monopolist won’t be taking part in the tender, its reward being that it gets half of the socially important routes. This was the only option if the goal was to develop the private transport sector, rather than rub it out. At a later date, when the transport market is more mature, a proper tender can be held. 
The fact that Petersburg’s governor, Valentina Matviyenko, had the common sense and political strength to pursue this option, so out of character in the current Russian administrative climate, is entirely to her credit, and gives us hope that at least a portion of the reforms planned for Petersburg will bring some positive results. 

Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday.

TITLE: Moot Court
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: Last week, President George W. Bush filled the final vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court — and right on cue, all the knee-jerk Bush-bashers were up in arms, sputtering the usual objections: Unqualified crony! Right-wing apparatchik! Fawning, groveling Bush Family factotum! Wheel-greasing goon in high-priced threads! 
Poor little dissident lambkins. They must be the only people left in the United States who still take the country’s governance seriously. For it’s obvious that the nation’s political elite — whatever party label they happen to wear — do not. No ruling class that was actually serious about governing would ever countenance the pair of jokers whom Bush has foisted on what is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of law in the land. Yet the first bad joke sailed through with bipartisan support and the second is bound to follow. Clearly, this is an Establishment in the throes of nervous breakdown, collapsing in a fit of hysteria-induced giggles while a pack of ruthless thugs loot the store and burn down the house.
For its sheer brazen mockery of the judicial system, Bush’s nomination of his personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the high court outdoes the installation of hard-right knee-capper John “Jughead” Roberts as chief justice. Jughead spent most of his early career trying to screw the poor and the dark-skinned out of whatever meager rights and protections they had won after centuries of slavery, exclusion and savage repression. He really made his bones, however, with his stalwart service in the Busha Nostra’s shutdown of the Florida recount in 2000. For this, Jug was elevated to the federal appeals court, where — while he was negotiating for the Supreme slot — he upheld Bush’s imperial right to “disappear” anyone on earth into his own rigged system of military tribunals.
Miers, who has zero experience as a judge, is cut from the same cloth. Bush first hired her to dig into his own past and bury the skeletons she found there as he limbered up for his presidential run in the 1990s, The Associated Press reports. Miers delivered the goods, brokering a convoluted $23 million payoff to former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes and his business partner. Barnes said he’d used political pull to get young war-coward Georgie into the National Guard back during Vietnam, The Washington Post reports. With payoff in hand, the whistleblower’s memory suddenly got all fuzzy. Miers was also key in wangling Bush out of a jury duty assignment: The standard jury questionnaire would have revealed the drunk driving conviction that Bush had hidden for over 20 years, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. (Yes, Bush is the first convicted criminal ever elected — or in this case, selected — president.)
Miers, an ex-Catholic turned hardcore Protestant evangelical, has broader experience, of course. She was the managing partner of a high-powered Texas law firm that, under her gentle Christian guidance, paid out more than $30 million in two separate cases of helping corporate clients defraud their investors, The Huffington Post reports. At the firm, Miers also walked in Our Saviour’s footsteps by specializing in union-busting and gutting worker safety protections. As the firm’s prospectus proudly noted: “We defend [safety and injury] claims of any type, including multiple death cases.” If you accidentally fed a few of your coolies into the company wood-chipper, no worries: Holy Harriet and her crew would have your back.
After defrauding investors and backing corporate killers, Miers moved to the White House, where, as the Los Angeles Times reports, she became Bush’s chief gatekeeper for his most important briefings, including the Aug. 6, 2001 number titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” — you know, the explicit, hair-raising report that somehow lulled the entire Bush team into a deep sleep until Sept. 11. According to Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman, Miers then became “heavily involved in the War on Terror” that followed the attacks.
This week Mehlman has been on the horn to Bush’s hard-right “base” (although we prefer the more eloquent Arabic term for this loyal band: “al Qaida”), assuring them that Miers “will not interfere with the administration’s management of the War on Terrorism,” The Hill reports. He said Miers believes that neither the courts nor Congress should “micromanage” the Terror War, i.e., put fetters on the unrestrained powers of the commander-in-chief to kill, incarcerate and torture whom he sees fit. This is particularly important now, as the revelations of blood-soaked atrocity in Bush’s prisons have grown so mountainous and foul that even the rubber-stamps in the Senate were forced this week to approve a cosmetic and meaningless measure to set guidelines for interrogating captives. (The bill leaves a gaping black hole for unregulated CIA interrogations, and will in any case either be killed or watered down to even thinner gruel by the more zealous Bushist cadres in the House.)
In fact, as White House counsel, Miers “provided the president with guidance on the legal parameters” for the War on Terror, Mehlman said. In other words, Miers helped draw up the “justifications” for torture, rendition and war which she will now be ruling upon at the Supreme Court. Oh, there’ll be a hot time in the old gulag when Harriet joins Jughead on the bench!
But who cares? The wiggly, giggly Democratic “opposition” is already rolling over and playing dead for Miers; in fact, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid actually recommended that Bush appoint this torture-enabling, worker-whipping political fixer to the nation’s highest court. The whole American leadership class has given up democratic government for the brutal absurdities of junta rule: cronyism, conquest, corruption and moral collapse.

For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com.

TITLE: Russian Mixed Martial Arts Fighter Wins Fame and Fortune in the Caged Rings of Japan
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: He is one of Japan’s most famous sporting heroes. Fans beg to know the smallest details of his diet, or how he met his wife. For millions, he is the modern embodiment of a samurai: strong, faithful, skilled, and contained. And he’s Russian.
Fyodor Yemelyanenko, 29, has ruled the mixed martial arts cage of PRIDE, Japan’s most popular combat tournament, for the last two years — its reigning champion since March 16, 2003. Yet, the man nicknamed “The Last Emperor,” for he leaves the ring last — its ruler and its champion — is virtually unknown in his native country, though he says citizens of Stary Oskol, a town of some 200,000 people in central Russia where he was born, often stop him to shake hands.
In the PRIDE tournament, where bleeding noses are as regular inside the ring as popcorn is in the stands, the mere addition of Yemelyanenko’s name to a ¸ghting bill can guarantee crowds of over 50,000 people at the Tokyo Dome, even if entrance tickets start at $65 and cost up to $900 for VIP seats. Japan’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi counts himself a fan. And the country’s young businessmen turn woozy and girly in Yemelyanenko’s presence and beg for his autograph.
When Yemelyanenko walks downNevsky Prospekt he can relax. The ¸ghter, 1.83 meters tall, weighing 106 kilograms and wearing a navy-blue tracksuit, is unlikely to draw much attention on the main street of St. Petersburg, a city the champion is about to move to from Stary Oskol.
“I don’t mind that,” Yemelyanenko said in an interview. “It makes life easier.”
After all, his entry to the mixed ¸ghting arena was not motivated by a search for fame, Yemelyanenko says. His motivation was far more basic.
“I had ¸nancial problems. I was in the Russian national squad for sambo and judo. But, we were facing severe ¸nancial restrictions; professional sport had absolutely no backing in terms of money,” he said.
Years of training in self-defense and judo as a teenager, then weights, cross-country runs and extra workouts on top of army exercises during the obligatory two years of service, had molded Yemelyanenko into a top national athlete, winner of the European Sambo Championship in 1997, a runner-up and bronze medalist at three international judo tournaments in 1999.
“I entered my ¸rst competition, literally, a week out of the army,” the ¸ghter said. Within a couple of years Yemelyanenko earned the of¸cial Master of Sport quali¸cation in judo and sambo, a Russian martial art that is close to judo. 
“But after three years competing at the top level, the ¸nancial rewards were nothing to speak of. So, I had to search a little.”
By then, Yemelyanenko had an extra motivation to spur on the search. In 1999, the athlete had decided to marry his childhood sweetheart, Oksana, and later in the same year became a dad, nursing a baby girl, which the couple named Maria. The ¸ghter’s personal story — tying the knot with a girl he met during a Pioneer summer camp, where Oksana acted as brigade leader and the teenage Yemelyanenko competed in a sports event — had much to do with propelling the ¸ghter to celebrity status in Japan.
“The image of a caring father, which sometimes runs contrary to the traditional idea of a Japanese salaryman who is forever at work or at meetings with clients until late into the night, has been very important in capturing Asian audiences,” said Yekaterina Korsakova, the Russian representative of Dream Stage Entertainment, or DSE, the company that has organized PRIDE since 1997.
“Japanese viewers see Fyodor [Yemelyanenko], watch the way PRIDE’s combatants express their emotional side in the ring, and it fascinates them,” she said.
“It’s not just a ¸ght pure and simple. The ¸ghters’ backgrounds play a vital role in telling the audience who it is that they are watching. Then, what unfolds in the huge arenas is an entertainment of a very high level, with multimedia, a wind-up of emotions, and of course the showdown. And that last part is de¸nitely real. Just look at the blood,” Korsakova said, pointing to one the magazines DSE publishes to promote the tournament in Japan and abroad.
Contrary to the barbaric image mixed ¸ghting has inadvertently attracted, PRIDE maintains that their tournament has strict rules, “attempting to mimic the realities of an actual ¸ght in the form of a legitimate and honorable sport,” DSE says on its of¸cial web site.
The tournament, the most popular of several similar competitions running in Japan, presents ¸ghters of mixed national and sports backgrounds, practicing a variety of styles from jujitsu to wrestling, in “a match that is still ultimately a sport.”
Fighters ranging from the 2000 gold medalist in Greco-Roman wrestling, Rulon Gardner, to Brazilian Muay Thai champion Wanderloi Da Silva compete for three rounds, the ¸rst lasting 10 minutes, the last two 5 minutes, attempting to win with a technical knockout, through a judges’ decision or an opponent’s submission.
According to PRIDE rules, punching, kicking, wrestling, grappling, and choking are in. Biting, eye thumbing, head butting, attacking the groin, elbows to the head, pulling hair and attacking the back of the head are out.
In practice, Yemelyanenko said the rules are prone to “some digressions.” After a pause, he adds, “in fact, quite often.”
“There are some contestants that ¸ght dirty, even attracting attention to themselves on this very basis,” he said.
For ¸ghters and wrestlers of traditional Olympic sports, in which illegal moves are strictly controlled and mean automatic disquali¸cation, the biggest challenge in the caged ring is con¸dence, Yemelyanenko said. “Coming over to mixed ¸ghting means starting from zero, means learning attacks and how to deliver blows,” he said.
In 2000, after being spotted by Japanese scouts at a judo championship in Tula, which Yemelyanenko won, he was invited to take his wrestling skill to a Tokyo-based mixed ¸ght tournament called RINGS, also managed by DSE. The RINGS event allows younger ¸ghters and those with less experience to test their prowess in “a more sporty mixed martial arts tournament, [in which] you can’t hit the opponent in the face,” Yemelyanenko said.
For mixed ¸ghting, the sambo champion studied new techniques. “I had to learn boxing, which was a completely new discipline for me. For a wrestler it is hard to accept. All life you grapple [with opponents], and then you have to switch to working in a lot of punches,” Yemelyanenko said, speaking in a soft monotone.
When the ¸ghter arrived for his ¸rst match in Japan, in May 2000, months of learning, training, exhaustive repetition of new maneuvers culminated in just a 12-second combat appearance. The ¸ght involved one three-blow combination.
“When I walked out onto the ring I sensed that the opponent was a worse ¸ghter than me. He moved slowly, kept his hands on his belt like a karate kid. I went in with a ¸rst attack and it was a knockout,” he said.
Yemelyanenko went on to win the world crown of the RINGS tournament twice in 2001 and was consequently invited to join the senior-class PRIDE event. In less than ¸ve years, the Russian champion has recorded 22 wins, 1 loss, and 1 “no contest,” when a match was annulled due to an accidental cut.
Yemelyanenko won two matches despite having his ¸nger broken during the contest. “I thought it had been only sprained, and I didn’t show it to the ring doctors,” he said. Mixed ¸ghters in the RINGS and PRIDE tournaments don’t wear gloves as in boxing, but wear pads on the outside of their arm that allow for very high-impact blows. Cuts and bleeding noses are common.
Over the last four to ¸ve years, Yemelyanenko has picked up Muay Thai, kickboxing and persevered with boxing. Nonetheless, on his ¸ghter’s card the style still reads: “judo and sambo.”
“A lot of what I learned from sambo and judo has stayed. Certainly all of the throws. [The skills] have just adapted,” Yemelyanenko explained. “The main thing is that [mixed ¸ght tournaments] are not an arena for a street ¸ght or a brawl. The ¸ghters involved are specialists in their ¸eld. And what they perform is their art.”
The champion disagrees that such sporting entertainment necessarily encourages violence or inÿuences youngsters to take to street brawls. The mixed ¸ght tournaments pit “professional ¸ghters against each other,” Yemelyanenko said. “The contestants are thinking people with years of training behind them. They try to catch the rival out, show an audience their class, their style, and its specialty.”
“In Japan, you sometimes see people bring little two-or three-year-olds to PRIDE matches. The sport has a lot of respect,” he said.
Vadim Finkelshtein, a St. Petersburg-based entrepreneur who is the ¸ghter’s manager, said Yemelyanenko’s success has brought recognition and respect to sambo, lifting the prestige of the Russian martial art around the world.
“Before Fyodor, who rated sambo abroad? Everyone thought jujitsu was the best martial art, because Brazilian ¸ghters, [who regularly top PRIDE rankings] used it. Now, sambo has won respect,” Finkelshtein said.
Yemelyanenko has not abandoned practicing his original style in its pure form. The ¸ghter plans to travel to the Sambo World Championships in Prague this month, although admittedly it could be his last appearance as an amateur sportsman.
“My schedule with PRIDE is pretty full and takes away too much energy,” Yemelyanenko said. This is also the reason the champion cites for having little to do with promoting sambo and mixed ¸ghting tournaments in his native country.
“It’s hard for many Russian ¸ghters to get somewhere in professional tournaments such as PRIDE at the moment, which is why Fyodor’s achievement merits him a heroic status,” said Finkelshtein. “Most of the interested ¸ghters are dotted around the country, they have little access to proper gyms or consistent training.”
Only two mixed ¸ght clubs operate in Russia: the St. Petersburg-based Red Devil, which Yemelyanenko belongs to and which is run by Finkelshtein, and Moscow-based Russia Top Team. Both clubs list 30 or more ¸ghters, but very few are of tournament standard, PRIDE’s Korsakova said.
While the success of Russian tennis players abroad has sparked off mass popularity for the sport at home, combat sports, apart from boxing, have had a slow response.
“The ¸rst [problem] is Russian television,” Yemelyanenko said. “The media in Russia is not as developed as in Japan. There, the fans are very supportive. They want to know about their idols. They follow the sports very keenly — on TV, in the papers, on the Internet.
“If, in Russia, New Year is a time for broadcasting all kinds of glitz-glamour evenings or musical concerts, in Japan the majority of channels compete to show mixed martial art matches,” he said.
Korsakova notes that the slow spread of Japan-based ¸ghting tournaments to Europe and America is in part due to the caution with which the entertainment companies behind the sport test new markets.
“With the high cost of organizing a PRIDE ¸ghting bill, it aims at a mass audience. And, of course, our company realizes it cannot immediately pack a Russian venue with 50,000 fans. That’s if a venue that size exists in Russia,” Korsakova said.
Meanwhile, the sport has found strong backing in North America, and is broadcast on cable TV in 11 European countries, about 20 countries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as New Zealand and parts of Southeast Asia.
Recent negotiations with Eurosport have resulted in the network agreeing to cover mixed martial art tournaments co-sponsored by PRIDE, which took place in St. Petersburg on Wednesday (Oct. 4) and in Holland in November.
“Except that Eurosport asked us for the ¸ghts to be held in a normal ring, not in a cage. For them, if it’s in a ring then it’s a real sport — in a cage it’s not,” Finkelshtein said. “Well, that’s ¸ne with us. We’ll do without the cage.”
As for Yemelyanenko, joined in the last few years in the PRIDE tournament by Alexander, the oldest of his two younger brothers, the aim is to continue competing and earn some more of the ¸nancial stability he sought at the beginning. In Japan, product endorsement and TV advertising revenues often double the wages of popular sporting heroes, and Yemelyanenko has no qualms about letting the years of tough ¸ghting pay off handsomely.
“If people know me, they want to see products with my name on them. Globally, [Fyodor Yemelyanenko as a brand] has only started to develop as an image and an industry.”
“I always dreamed of realizing myself as a sportsman,” Yemelyanenko said. “Now, I do work that I love and it pays.”

TITLE: Looting Breaks Out in Wake of Deadly Quake
AUTHOR: By Sadaqat Jan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan — Shopkeepers clashed with looters Monday, and hungry families huddled under tents while waiting for relief supplies after Pakistan’s worst earthquake razed entire villages and buried roads in rubble. Death toll estimates ranged from 20,000 to 30,000. 
British rescuers on Monday unearthed a man trapped in rubble for 54 hours.
Eight U.S. military helicopters from Afghanistan arrived in Islamabad with provisions, and Washington pledged up to $50 million in relief and reconstruction aid, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said.
“The magnitude of this disaster is utterly overwhelming,” Crocker said. “We have under way the beginning of a very major relief effort.”
The United Nations said more than 2.5 million people were left homeless by Saturday’s monster 7.6-magnitude quake, and doctors warned of an outbreak of disease unless more relief arrives soon.
With landslides blocking roads to many of the worst-hit areas, Pakistan’s army was flying food, water and medicine into the disaster zone. International relief efforts cranked into action, and an American plane full of relief supplies landed at an air base near Pakistan’s capital on Monday.
Most of the dead were in Pakistan’s mountainous north. India reported more than 800 deaths; Afghanistan reported four.
In the shattered streets of Muzaffarabad, where at least 11,000 people died, a reporter saw shopkeepers scuffle with people trying to break into businesses. They beat each other with sticks and threw stones, and some people suffered head wounds. No police were nearby.
Residents of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan’s portion of divided Kashmir, said looters also targeted deserted homes. Survivors lacked food and water, and there was little sign of any official coordination of relief in the devastated city of 600,000.
An eight-member team of British rescuers using a sniffer dog, drills, chain saws and crowbars pulled a 20-year-old tailor from the rubble Monday afternoon, 54 hours after a two-story building collapsed over him and dozens of others.
The man, Tariq, was wide-eyed and covered in dust when he emerged, and he begged for water.
“I haven’t eaten in three days, but I’m not hungry,” said Tariq, who suffered a leg injury and was carried away on a door serving as a stretcher. He had been trapped beneath concrete and wooden beams, and a dead body lay on either side of him.
About 2,000 people huddled around campfires through the cold night on a soccer field on the city’s university campus, where most buildings had collapsed and hundreds were feared buried in classrooms and dormitories. Soldiers burrowed into the concrete with shovels and iron bars.
“I don’t think anybody is alive in this pile of rubble,” rescue worker Uzair Khan said. “But we have not lost hope.”
On the soccer field, Mohammed Ullah Khan, 50, said a few biscuits handed out by relief workers was all he had to eat for three days. His wife, who suffered a fractured leg, was wrapped in a yellow quilt beside him.
Their three-story home had collapsed in the quake. His family of 10 survived because they were on the top floor, which crashed to the ground. “My children are now on a hillside, under the open sky, with nothing to eat,” he said.
A doctor, Iqbal Khan, said there was a serious risk of diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia if drinking water and other relief supplies do not arrive quickly. “These people feel as if there is no one to take care of them,” he said.
The city had no electricity, and people collected water from a mountain stream. Shops and the city’s military hospital had collapsed. 
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said the earthquake was the country’s worst on record and appealed for urgent help, particularly cargo helicopters to reach remote areas.

TITLE: Romania, Turkey Start Preventative Slaughter
AUTHOR: By C. Onurant
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ISTANBUL, Turkey — The slaughter of thousands of domestic fowl in Turkey and Romania began Sunday as a precaution against the spread of bird flu after both countries confirmed their first cases of the disease over the weekend. 
It has not been determined in either country that the disease is the same H5N1 strain that has swept through poultry populations in Asia since 2003, infecting humans and killing at least 60 people.
In western Turkey, military police set up roadblocks at the entrance to a village near Balikesir. A three-kilometer radius was quarantined as veterinarians and other officials began destroying poultry at two turkey farms.
It was not clear how many animals would be destroyed, but the Anatolia news agency reported that authorities had slaughtered 600 out of 2,500 turkeys on one farm by noon Sunday.
Other fowl — including pigeons — and stray dogs in the village would also be killed as a precaution, said Nihat Pakdil, undersecretary of Turkey’s Agriculture Ministry.
Bird flu was detected at a turkey farm after some 1,800 birds died this week, the Anatolia news agency reported. All animals in the farm were destroyed.
Turkey’s Agriculture Ministry confirmed the outbreak Saturday and said the disease was believed to have spread from migratory birds on their way to Africa from Russia’s Ural mountains.
The Russian government revealed in August that the H5N1 strain, which first appeared in western Siberia in July, had spread to the Ural region of Chelyabinsk.
Scientists have apparently narrowed the disease in Turkey down to an H5 type virus — the family of the bird flu virus that experts fear could be the source of a potential global pandemic among humans — but have not narrowed it further to determine whether it is the H5N1 strain that health officials are particularly worried about.
Cases of bird flu were also confirmed Saturday in Romania, where a total of 40,000 birds were expected to be slaughtered as a precaution. Authorities there said no new cases of bird flu had been confirmed yet.
Tests in Britain will determine whether the disease, which infected fowl in the Danube River Delta, is the H5N1 strain.
“I think it’s better to take these preventive measures now,” even without the confirmation of the virus, said Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu.
Germany appealed to Romania and Turkey to provide the European Union and international specialists with all available information on the outbreaks.
“The risk to Europe and Germany itself is difficult to establish,” said Alexander Mueller of Germany’s Agriculture Ministry.
Some German states have already ordered farmers to keep their poultry in closed sheds or cages for two months to keep them from being exposed to migratory birds that might spread bird flu from Russia.
In Asia, the H5N1 strain has killed at least 60 people, mostly poultry workers, and resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million birds. The virus does not pass from person to person easily, but experts believe it could mutate to a form that becomes a human flu virus, passing easily between people and triggering a pandemic.

TITLE: German Election Dilemna Close to Going Merkel’s Way
AUTHOR: By Noah Barkin and Markus Krah
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BERLIN — Conservative leader Angela Merkel will become Germany’s first woman chancellor under a deal that sees Gerhard Schroeder step aside but gives his Social Democrats top posts in a new government, sources said on Monday. 
Three weeks after voters gave Merkel’s conservatives an unexpectedly narrow win over Schroeder’s SPD in a federal election, sources from both parties said an agreement had been struck that would set the stage for a power-sharing cabinet and break Germany’s political deadlock.
According to a senior SPD source, the SPD is poised to get the foreign, finance, justice and labor ministries in a new government led by the 51-year old Merkel, a pastor’s daughter who grew up in the former communist east.
That would give Schroeder’s party a key role in shaping budget and labor market policy, as well as influence over foreign policy.
Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Christian Social Union (CSU) allies would get the economy, interior and defense portfolios.
Current Economy Minister Wolfgang Clement said CSU chief and Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber would replace him in the post, leaving Merkel’s CDU with very few major ministries.
“In exchange for getting the chancellery, the conservatives will have to make compromises in personnel,” said Andreas Rees, an economist at HVB Group in Munich.
“It is unlikely that reform-minded politicians will have a lot to say in the new government.”
The tough negotiations between the main forces on the German center-left and center-right come after the September 18 election gave neither the conservatives nor the SPD enough votes to rule with their preferred partners.
Following the tight vote, Schroeder’s SPD initially refused to relinquish its hold on the chancellery.
The deal should break the deadlock, paving the way for detailed coalition talks and the formation of Germany’s second “grand coalition” since World War Two. Those talks are likely to extend into November.
By securing many of the most important ministries in return for sacrificing Schroeder, 61, the SPD is expected to force concessions from Merkel on economic policy, resulting in a dilution of the reform agenda she pushed during the election campaign.
Merkel advocated an easing of firing rules, a cut in payroll costs and changes to the way labor agreements are negotiated as ways to boost growth and spur job creation.
“The reform mandate is probably not going to be as strong as it would have been under an outright victory by Merkel,” said Ian Stannard, senior foreign exchange strategist at BNP Paribas. 
Markets showed little reaction to the news. Germany’s Dax index of leading shares was trading 0.8 percent higher and the euro currency and bonds were little changed.

TITLE: Cops Charged for Battery
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW ORLEANS — Three New Orleans police officers pleaded not guilty Monday to battery charges based on a videotape showing two patrolmen repeatedly punching a 64-year-old man accused of public intoxication and a third officer grabbing and shoving a news reporter who helped capture the confrontation on tape. 
After a brief hearing, at which a trial was set for Jan. 11, the officers were released on bond. They quickly left in cars without commenting.
They were suspended without pay Sunday, police spokesman Marlon Defillo said. The police promised a criminal investigation.
“It’s a troubling tape, no doubt about it,” Defillo said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Nobel Prize Winners
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Israeli-American Robert J. Aumann and American Thomas C. Schelling won the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday for their work on game theories that help explain political and economic conflicts from arms races to price wars. 
Schelling, 75, is a professor at the University of Maryland’s department of economics and a professor emeritus at Harvard. Aumann, 84, is a professor at the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
It was the sixth straight year that Americans have won the prize, or had a share in it.

Kabbalah Protest
JERUSALEM (AP) — A song on Madonna’s upcoming album dedicated to a Kabbalist rabbi is drawing criticism from other rabbis, the Israeli Maariv daily reported Sunday. 
The album, “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” is to be released on Nov. 15 and features a track entitled “Isaac” about Yitzhak Luria, a 16th century Jewish mystic and Kabbalah scholar.
Rabbis who oversee Luria’s tomb in the northern town of Safed see the inclusion of the song about Luria on the album as an attempt by the pop star to profit from his name.

FBI May Chill Out
WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI, famous for its straight-laced crime-fighting image, is considering whether to relax its hiring rules over how often applicants could have used marijuana or other illegal drugs earlier in life. 
Some senior FBI managers have been deeply frustrated that they could not hire applicants who acknowledged occasional marijuana use in college, but in some cases already perform top-secret work at other government agencies, such as the CIA or State Department.
FBI Director Robert Mueller will make the final decision. “We can’t say when or if this is going to happen, but we are exploring the possibility,” spokesman Stephen Kodak said.

TITLE: Red Wings Make Good Start
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Despite many offseason changes, the Detroit Red Wings are off to an impressive start. 
The Red Wings will look to keep their perfect record intact when they face the Vancouver Canucks at Joe Louis Arena. 
The Red Wings beat the defending Western Conference champion Calgary Flames 6-3 on Sunday, becoming one of just two teams so far in the NHL, along with Montreal, to win their first three games. Henrik Zetterberg had a goal and three assists for Detroit, which scored five power-play goals. 
The Red Wings scored three power-play goals in the first period, when it outshot Calgary 22-4, and finished the game 5-for-9 with the man-advantage. Detroit came into the game 3-for-14 on the power play. 
“We got off to a real good start,” coach Mike Babcock said. “Obviously the power play was real good.” Detroit has scored at least four goals in each of its first three games and has outscored its opponents 15-7. The 15 goals ties the Red Wings with Atlanta for most in the league. 
Nicklas Lidstrom, Brendan Shanahan, Mikael Samuelsson and Robert Lang each had a goal and an assist on Sunday, while Pavel Datsyuk added a goal and Jason Williams collected two assists. 
Lidstrom passed Ted Lindsay to move into sixth place on Red Wings’ career scoring list with 729 points. 
The Canucks lost 4-3 in a shootout at Edmonton on Saturday after opening the season with a 3-2 home victory over Phoenix. 
Captain Markus Naslund had two power-play goals and an assist for Vancouver, which was 3-for-12 with the man-advantage against the Oilers. 
“We’ve got to put teams away when we have chances,” said Naslund, who is tied for the league lead with four goals.

TITLE: Turin Fights Budget Cuts for Olympic Games
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROME  — Turin Olympics officials expressed alarm Monday over a government proposal to cut $19.43 million from the budget for the Winter Games just four months before they open. 
The reduction is part of $26.59 billion in spending cuts and revenue-raising measures designed to bring Italy’s budget deficit within limits set by the European Union. The measures must be passed by the end of the year. 
Italian Olympic Committee president Gianni Petrucci said he was “surprised and worried” over the possible cuts. 
“I had the feeling that everyone, from the government to the opposition, was in agreement over the importance of the Olympics,” Petrucci told Corriere della Sera. 
“A cut like this so soon before the games start does not permit adjustments to the schedule,” he said.
Turin organizers believed they had overcome persistent budget problems in June, when premier Silvio Berlusconi signed an agreement to cover $157.87 million for the games. 
The deal allows funds to go to the organizing committee of the games through Sviluppo Italia, an agency linked to the Economy Ministry that promotes business development and investment. 
TOROC deputy CEO Luciano Barra stressed that the proposed measures still must be approved by parliament. 
Sviluppo Italia president Massimo Caputi told Corriere that the proposed reduction includes money allocated for a $7.29 million publicity campaign to boost sluggish domestic ticket sales. The campaign was slated to begin within a few days.

TITLE: ‘Gentle Giant’ Admits to Drugs
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Former world heavyweight boxing champion Frank Bruno has admitted he took cocaine and said he believes it may have affected his mental health.
“Taking it was the worst thing I could have done in my mental condition,” Bruno said.
Bruno was talking to Sunday’s News of the World newspaper, which published extracts from his new autobiography and also carried an interview with the British boxer.
“It was like a black hole with no ending,” Bruno said. “Cocaine took control of my brain.”
Bruno first took the drug in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2000.
“I just remember flying out of the room like Concorde after I took it, you know what I mean?” he said.

TITLE: Russian Hopes Boosted by Luxembourg Rout
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia blitzed Luxembourg 5-1 in their penultimate World Cup qualifier on Saturday to keep alive their hopes of reaching next year’s finals in Germany. 
The Russians must beat Slovakia, who overcame Estonia 1-0 on Saturday, in their final qualifier in Bratislava on Wednesday to clinch second place and advance to the playoffs. 
Luxembourg remained rooted to the bottom of the standings after 11 defeats. 
Marat Izmailov and Alexander Kerzhakov put the hosts 2-0 ahead after just 18 minutes as the Russians threatened to open the floodgates in the European zone Group Three match. 
Luxembourg rarely threatened Russia keeper Igor Akinfeyev in the first half, their only real chance coming early in the game when Sebastien Remy fired a free kick into the top corner which Akinfeyev pushed over the bar. 
But Claude Reiter cut the deficit with a 52nd-minute penalty after Dmitry Sennikov was called for a handball. 
However, the Russians quickly restored order with two goals in the next 22 minutes. 
Spartak Moscow striker Roman Pavlyuchenko made it 3-1 with a fine volley in the 65th minute after a Vasily Berezutsky cross and fellow substitute Dmitry Kirichenko put the result beyond doubt with a diving header nine minutes later. 
Kirichenko, the Russian league’s top scorer this season, completed the rout with a clinical finish in the last minute. 
Russia coach Yuri Syomin was satisfied with the outcome. 
“Of course, I’m pleased with the result and the way we played,” said Syomin, who replaced Georgy Yartsev as national team coach midway through the qualifying campaign. 
“We made several substitutions to keep our main players fresh for the Slovakia match. We also got a great result from all our substitutes,” he added. 
“Now, all our efforts shift into preparation for our next match in Bratislava and we’re confident of achieving our goal.” 
The Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, England and Poland all secured their places in the World Cup in European qualifiers on Saturday. 
With Ukraine already through to join hosts Germany the remaining automatic qualifiers and playoff berths will be decided on Wednesday. 
The Netherlands advanced with 2-0 win at fellow Euro 2004 semi-finalists the Czech Republic — a result that had widespread ramifications as it also sent through England and Poland and kept Romania in the hunt for a Group One playoff spot after their 1-0 win in Finland. 
The clash in Prague between the top two in Group One lived up to expectations, particularly in an action-packed first half. 
Edwin van der Sar saved a harshly-awarded penalty by Tomas Rosicky in the 29th minute and a minute later Rafael van der Vaart put the Dutch ahead. 
Barry Opdam headed the second in the 37th and though the home side made most of the running after the break it was the massed ranks of orange-clad visiting fans celebrating at the end. 
The victory sent the Dutch to Germany as group winners with a game to spare and left the Czechs needing to win in Finland to pip Romania for second. 
England had earlier limped to an uninspired 1-0 home win over Austria despite having captain David Beckham sent off after an hour — the first England player ever to be dismissed twice and the first England captain to bve sent off in England’s 133-year international history. 
However, it proved enough once the Dutch won as they and Poland, who were not in action, are guaranteed at least one of the two best-runners-up places. 
That left their Manchester meeting on Wednesday merely to decide the Group Six honors. 
Portugal stuttered to a 2-1 home win over Liechtenstein but it was enough to secure top spot in Group Three for the Euro 2004 runners-up. 
The day began with no less than 12 permutations of the top two finishers in Group Four and ended little clearer with the top four all still in contention.

TITLE: Raikkonen Wins Japan Grand Prix
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SUZUKA, Japan — Kimi Raikkonen took the only opening Giancarlo Fisichella left him in the Japanese Grand Prix. 
“Fisichella was on the inside so I didn’t have much choice,” Raikkonen said. “I went to the outside to try to go around him and luckily I made it.” 
Raikkonen made the daring outside pass on the first turn on the final lap and held off Fisichella by 1.6 seconds Sunday, capping a surprising winning run from the 17th spot in the starting grid. 
“Just before my last pit stop I was able to go fast,” Raikkonen said. “I wasn’t too far behind and I thought I could get him. I was able to overtake him on the main straight. Luckily, I made it through.” 
The McLaren driver has seven victories this year, one more than season champion Fernando Alonso, and nine in his Formula One career. 
Alonso finished third, to help Renault reclaim the lead over McLaren in the constructors’ race. Renault has a 176-174 advantage heading into the final race of the season next week in Shanghai. 
After rain Saturday marred the top drivers’ qualifying laps, Alonso, Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya — who had won the last eight races between them — were in the final three rows on the starting grid Sunday. Raikkonen started 17th after he was penalized 10 spots for changing engines due to a mishap in practice. 
Montoya, who didn’t post a qualifying time because of the rain, slid off and crashed into the wall on the final turn of the first lap while attempting to get around Sauber’s Felipe Massa. 
Fisichella took over the lead on the 13th lap after pole-sitter Ralf Schumacher went in for fuel. Raikkonen was in sixth place by that time and passed Michael Schumacher by the 30th lap to go reach fourth, behind Fisichella, Jenson Button and Mark Webber. 
Fisichella, Button and Webber pitted to give Raikkonen the lead briefly at lap 41. Raikkonen stayed out longer and went in for fuel with eight laps to go at lap 45. When he came out he was only 5 seconds behind Fisichella with a faster car. 
“I knew they would stop before me and I had to push to gain time on them,” Raikkonen said. “With seven laps to go I went as quickly as I could.”
With five laps remaining, Fisichella’s lead was 3 seconds and shrinking, and with only two laps left, Raikkonen moved within a few car-lengths. 
Entering the final lap, Raikkonen moved alongside Fisichella. He maintained the momentum and made a darting move just before the first turn. 
“Kimi was flying,” said Fisichella, who held a 19-second lead at one point. “I had already seen him catching me in the middle of the straight and going on the left side. I am a little bit disappointed but I did my best and it was a good day for us because we took over the lead on the constructors championship.”
Webber, in a Williams, finished fourth, followed by Button in a BAR-Honda. David Coulthard of Red Bull was seventh, while seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher of Ferrari was seventh, ahead of brother Ralf.

TITLE: Sharapova Says She Wants To Play For Russia in the Fed Cup
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — World No.1 Maria Sharapova said Monday she wanted to play for Russia in the Fed Cup at some point in the future. 
The Florida-based 18-year-old has turned down invitations to play for the country of her birth in the past in order to concentrate on improving her singles ranking. 
Addressing reporters before the opening of the Kremlin Cup, Sharapova said: “I want to play for Russia, I definitely want to play for Russia in Fed Cup competition. 
“I just don’t know when I’ll be ready to make my Fed Cup debut.” 
Russia has won the women’s team tennis competition for the last two years without Sharapova’s participation. Last year she was involved in a public squabble with Anastasia Myskina, who led Russia to its 2004 Fed Cup win. 
Last week Myskina hinted that she might no longer play in the Fed Cup. 
Sharapova added: “I didn’t play [in the Fed Cup] this year because it would have been too tough for me but in the future yes, it’s definitely one of my big goals. 
“I also want to play in the Olympics and would love to represent Russia there as well.” 
Sharapova did not get a chance to play at last year’s Athens Olympics despite winning the Wimbledon title a month earlier because she was not ranked high enough at the time. 
A maximum four players from a single country could have played in the Olympics and Sharapova was not among Russia’s top four when the selection was made. 
Sharapova, who left Russia 11 years ago with her father to pursue her tennis career in the United States, arrived in Moscow last week and will make her Kremlin Cup debut on Wednesday. 
“I definitely feel Russian inside, even when I’m in America I feel Russian,” she said. “But coming here for the first time in years it made me feel even more so.”