SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1116 (82), Tuesday, October 25, 2005
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TITLE: Extremist Groups Brought To Justice
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Court proceedings in the notorious case of the murder of a nine-year old Tajik girl in February 2004 began Monday.
Eight defendants have been accused of the murder of Khursheda Sultonova, the Criminal Office at the City Court said in a telephone interview Monday.  The hearings are closed to the public as four of the defendants are minors.
The Criminal Office refused to give further comment on the case.
In February 2004 a group of youths attacked a Tajik family in a courtyard in the city center.  During the attack the girl was killed and her father and cousin were injured. 
According to the preliminary investigation, as yet unidentified individuals incited the defendants to carry out attacks on people of non-Slavic ethnicity.  The defendants, armed with at least three bats, then attacked the Tajik family, and one of the attackers was intent on murder, Interfax reported.
“Feeling hatred to people of non-Russian nationality and having a negative attitude towards them — that is, acting under motives of national hatred — the defendant, who had an intention to murder the girl, stabbed her at least seven times with a knife,” the state prosecutor said, according to Interfax.  
“The girl could not offer resistance due to her age and was helpless, and she died from those injuries,” he said.
The defendant charged with murder pleaded not guilty on Monday.
During preliminary hearings the court rejected his request that his previous confession be withdrawn. He said that the confession had been made under psychological and physical pressure. The other seven defendants are charged with hooliganism, Interfax reported.
The court had previously satisfied a request for a trial by jury made by one of the defendants.  Eighteen jury members were selected last week, with six of them being held in reserve.
The next hearing on the case is scheduled for Oct. 26, the office said.
In a related case, court proceedings centering on Mad Crowd, an extremist youth group, were postponed on Monday until November.
Six defendants in the case are charged with exciting racial and nationalist hatred and participating in five attacks carried out by the extremist group in 2002 and 2003.
One of the defendants in the case is charged with attempted murder.  It is alleged that during an attack on a group of Chinese students, the man used an awl to stab one of the students six times close to his heart. 
Two more members of the group, including Ruslan Melnik, who is believed to be one of the group’s organizer, are on international wanted lists. 
According to the police investigation into the case, Melnik was an assistant to Dmitry Bobrov, leader of the Shultz 88 group. A criminal case against this group is currently being heard in the city’s Leninsky district court. 
The crimes in the Schultz 88 case include an attack on the McDonald’s on Nevsky Prospekt in 2003, an assault on an Azerbaijani committed in a cafÎ in the Nevsky district, an attack on two Chinese students at the Dostoyevskaya metro station, and two attacks against Armenians at the Alexandrovskaya railway station, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Advert Spat Results In City Center Shoot-Out
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In the early hours of Friday morning, a lawyer fired a shot at staff from City Hall’s Center For Advertisement Monitoring as they were dismantling an illegally placed advertising console on Zagorodny Prospekt. 
The gunman, Grigory Solominsky, who has lost one court case against the center and is currently pursuing another, argued that the officials were acting in bad will and the city policy must be reversed as unfair and discriminating, Fontanka.ru reported. 
“Solominsky approached our staff aiming his gun at them, saying they couldn’t take the sign because it belongs to him,” said Tatyana Fadeyeva, the center’s spokeswoman, in a telephone interview on Monday. 
“He threatened unarmed people with a weapon, and then even fired his gun instead of showing legal documents confirming his rights,” Fadeyeva said. “We have reason to doubt his sanity, especially considering his history of filing endless complaints against us.”
Nobody was physically hurt during the incident, and in the absence of an official complaint from the Center, no criminal investigation of the shooting has been opened.
Grigory Solominsky is a St. Petersburg lawyer representing several local companies. He argues that the Center — a state body — is being illegally run as a commercial operation and as a result has no authority over private companies.
The St. Petersburg Center For Advertisement Monitoring and City Hall’s Committee For Architecture and Construction supervise the city’s street advertising market.
The city legislation stipulates that all advertisements installed on municipal land or property require official permission and require payment of a monthly fee. A medium-sized shop sign costs around $150 a month, while a large sign costs around $300 a month.
“City Hall gets a lot of protests, although not as violent as the last one, because many businessmen think that if they own a flat or an office in a building then the external wall of the entire building is their property as well, and they refuse to pay.” 
“If the building is municipal property, that isn’t the case, and we have to remove all the unregistered and unpaid for advertisements,” she said.
Advertising agencies have not been causing problems but some private companies have joined forces with private security firms to produce advertisements, put them up and protect them, Fadeyeva added. 
The center removes up to 600 illegal advertising signs and billboards every month.
On Oct. 31, the St. Petersburg City court will hold a first hearing in a case filed by Solominsky against City Hall. 
Both city officials and private entrepreneurs admit that the current legislation has no specific regulations on advertising placed on private property. Similarly, the city government’s mandate in the issue is only vaguely described.
Alexander Kadyrov, head of the Center, said its officials had not been intimidated by the shooting or the court cases. He accused Solominsky and the group of enterprises he represents of trying to find a loophole in the law to avoid paying the fee to the city budget. The problem will remain, however, as long as the law leaves room for varying interpretations. 
Solominsky could not be reached for comment on Monday.

TITLE: Farmers Start Getting Tough on Wild Birds
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MARINO, Moscow Region — The dozens of gray pigeons perched on a roof at Denis Adamsky’s poultry farm may be about to unwittingly pay the ultimate price to prevent the spread of the deadly bird flu.
“We have been scattering poisoned seeds about the farm,” Adamsky, director of Marinskaya Ptitsefabrika, said Sunday morning in the office at his egg-producing farm about 10 kilometers southwest of Moscow. “Pigeons die of that.”
The pigeons are attracted to a chicken-feed mixer at the farm, Adamsky said. If any of the pigeons were infected and their droppings got into the feed, the farm’s entire population of 1.5 million chickens would perish in three days, he said.
In that case, Moscow would lose 10 percent of its supply of chicken eggs, or 1 million eggs per day, Adamsky said, adding that he supplied them to many of the city’s stores and supermarkets, including Auchan and Sedmoi Kontinent. 
The effects could be more dangerous than the loss of eggs, however, because the deadly H5N1 virus, which officials say has caused the recent Russian bird flu cases, can pass directly to people. Since 2003, the virus — which first surfaced in Hong Kong in 1997 — has killed at least 61 people in Asia. 
The virus appears to spread through migratory birds but scientists fear that it could mutate into a form that passes from human to human and then trigger a pandemic.
Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology estimated that if a mutated form of avian flu were to develop, up to 1.5 million people in the city could die unless health officials developed a vaccine, Kommersant reported Friday.
The country’s latest outbreak of bird flu was reported at a village in the Chelyabinsk region on Saturday, where chicken, geese and turkeys have died on private farms, the Emergency Situations Ministry said, according to Interfax. 
Officials were monitoring the situation in the area and planned to immunize local residents against flu on Monday, the ministry said.
The country’s chief epidemiologist, Gennady Onishchenko, appeared on the “Zerkalo” news show on Rossia state television on Saturday to assure Russians that they were not at risk of infection from bird flu this winter. 
He said, however, that the government would have an experimental vaccine, based on the Chinese strain of the avian flu virus, ready later this month.
In an effort to quell fears that poultry products could pass on the infection, Onishchenko was shown putting two pieces of chicken shashlyk in his mouth on NTV’s evening news shows over the weekend. 
Onishchenko’s plan to eat chicken in front of the cameras drew criticism from Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday. “I don’t agree with those who make such pacifying speeches. ... On the contrary, we need a serious approach to this issue,” he said, Interfax reported.
Back at the Marinskaya farm, a few hundred meters from the Desna River, in addition to poisoning pigeons, some off-duty employees are trying to safeguard the farm by hunting waterfowl, Adamsky said.
For several weeks, state veterinarians have been inspecting the farm every day to test chickens for flu symptoms and work out how a possible outbreak would affect the staff, he said.
The farm is also continuing to carry out its usual preventive measures against infection, he added.
In compliance with government regulations, vehicles drive through a pool of disinfectant at the gate when they enter and leave the farm, and access to the henhouses is restricted, he said. 
No staff members are allowed into the enclosure where the henhouses are located except the egg collectors, two for each henhouse, and the repairmen, one for every two henhouses, he said.
A reporter was allowed only to walk a few steps past the checkpoint at the farm’s gate.
In Moscow, several politicians accused foreign — particularly U.S. — poultry exporters of exaggerating the threat posed by bird flu in an effort to win more business. 
“It’s a provocation by the Americans,” said Deputy Alexei Mitrofanov of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party in a speech to the State Duma on Friday, Rosbalt news agency reported.
Sergei Lisovsky, a Federation Council member who has a poultry business, said foreign competitors were trying to whip up media reports about bird flu in Russia to keep the country’s poultry business from growing, Interfax reported Thursday.
Adamsky supported the idea that the media were making too much of bird flu, but was in two minds about why. 
“It’s either that reporters like scandals, or it’s a war to carve up the market, mainly in favor of the Americans,” he said.
Adamsky added, however, that his farm had taken out an insurance policy against bird flu three months ago.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Celebrity Chat
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) The culture of celebrity in the U.S. and the complexities of slang are the subjects of two lectures in English this week at the American Corner cultural center.
Lecturer Carol Davis will on Tuesday discuss celebrities from a psychological and sociological point of view, and what happens when a celebrity makes a political statement.
On Thursday lecturer Sally Barrett will help listeners to learn American English slang such as “What up homies?”
The talks start at 5 p.m. at the American Corner in the Mayakovsky Library.

Zyuganov To Run
MOSCOW (SPT) — Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov indicated Monday that he would run for president in 2008, making him the second person to step into the race for the Kremlin.
“The party elected me leader, and as the leader I must carry out the party’s assignment to run for president,” Zyuganov said at a news conference where he presented Communist candidates for the upcoming Moscow City Duma elections. 
“If the party assigns me to run, I am ready to run,” Zyuganov said. 
Zyuganov did not run in the 2003 presidential elections.

TITLE: Poll Reveals City-Country Split
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Typical Russians are hardworking, long-suffering and resigned to their fates — at least if the participants in a recent sociological survey carried out both in St. Petersburg and the small provincial town of Krasnoturinsk in the Urals are to be believed.
Experts from St. Petersburg’s Institute For Comprehensive Sociology Research recently polled 200 locals and 200 residents of Krasnoturinsk asking a series of questions about Russian history, politics, identity and national character. The results of the research were presented Friday.
Zinaida Sikevich, a doctor of sociology and head of the Laboratory for Ethnic Sociology and Psychology at the Institute, said the survey hoped to identify what brings the Russian people together as a nation, what divides them and whether attitudes vary between a major city and the provinces.
St. Petersburgers are nostalgic for their imperial past, while inhabitants of Krasnoturinsk miss the Soviet era, the study shows.
“When asked to name the historical figures they are most proud of, St. Petersburgers talked a lot about generals and army commanders like Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov or Georgy Zhukov,” Sikevich said. “In contrast, in Krasnoturinsk, respondents are proud of Russian scientists, sportsmen or cultural luminaries.”
A third of respondents in Krasnoturinsk said the most shameful event in Russian history was the downfall of the USSR, while only 15 percent of the St. Petersburg group agreed with them.
Sikevich said she found it shocking that citizens of St. Petersburg, Russia’s self-proclaimed cultural capital, demonstrated such an obvious indifference to the country’s vast scientific and cultural achievements, preferring the successes of military campaigns.
Both cities agreed that the best qualities in Russian people are kindness, hospitality and openness. Generosity, however, was listed by only 6.5 percent of St. Petersburgers and 1.5 percent of respondents in Krasnoturinsk.
The vast majority of the survey’s participants said drinking and laziness are the major negative features of the Russian character, while Ilya Oblomov, the bone-idle central character from Ivan Goncharov’s classic 19th-century novel of the same name was named as the literary figure who best captures the Russian national character. 
On at least one point, St. Petersburg was able to live up to its self-proclaimed status of cultural capital. Only five percent of locals complained about “coarseness” in Russians, while in Krasnoturinsk it was mentioned by 26 percent of respondents.
Support for President Vladimir Putin was three times higher among the Krasnoturinsk population than in St. Petersburg, though the provincial town was far more negative on Chechnya: 38 percent of the poll’s participants said they were ashamed of the prolonged campaign, while only 19 percent of St. Petersburgers held the same opinion. Nevertheless, 14 percent of St. Petersburgers regard the war in Afghanistan as being one of the most shameful events in Russian history.
“The citizens of St. Petersburg are much more sensitive to the country’s foreign politics: they are proud of victorious campaigns and ashamed of lost wars,” Sikevich said. “In the Urals, which is much further away from foreign borders, foreign affairs don’t matter very much.”
Another surprising result of the research was that it indicated that people in Russia are more concerned about the chasm dividing the capital and provincial cities than they are about divisions resulting from financial inequality, political views, religion or social status.
“Most people in Krasnoturinsk described the regions as being alienated from the center,” Sikevich said. “They consider themselves to be neglected. This is what annoys them the most, rather than that other people are richer or have unorthodox political views or a different religion.”
Tatyana Chesnokova, chief editor of the Rosbalt news agency, who took part in a series of expeditions around Russian provincial cities, concurs with the findings of the research.
“Whenever we arrived in a new place, the locals greeted us by saying that they hadn’t seen the press —or a Moscow official — since the Soviet era,” Chesnokova said. “People who live in the Urals or further East refer to Moscow as ‘the mainland.’ That shows that they feel like they’re living on an island, and indicates how isolated they are.”

TITLE: Inspectors Considered Jumping From Trawler
AUTHOR: By Doug Mellgren
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: OSLO — The two Norwegian coast guard inspectors freed from a fleeing Russian fishing trawler said they considered jumping into Arctic ocean waters to escape. 
Richard Storaas, 38, and trainee Henning Thune, 19, spent five days aboard the Elektron as it fled a Norwegian coast guard cutter during a storm in the Barents Sea. 
Norway wanted to arrest the ship’s crew for fisheries violations, but the rusted trawler refused orders to follow the coast guard to port. The Elektron escaped into Russian territorial waters, where the two inspectors were returned on Thursday. 
The inspectors on Friday met reporters in Kirkenes, on Norway’s Arctic frontier with Russia, and said they had considered leaping into the frigid waters of the Barents because the Norwegian cutter KV Tromsoe was close enough to pick them up. 
“We had survival suits on the whole time,” Storaas told reporters. “There was the option of jumping overboard if the situation became difficult.”
The two were sent to board the Elektron on Oct. 15 for a routine inspection in waters near the Svalbard islands, some 500 kilometers north of the Norwegian mainland.
After the inspection, the Elektron was accused of catching undersized fish and using illegal equipment, and was ordered to follow the coast guard to a Norwegian port to face charges. 
On Sept. 16, the Elektron changed course and headed for Russia with the inspectors on board, leading to a showdown in waters that Norway claims jurisdiction over, an assertion Russia rejects. 
“We had it OK under the circumstances,” Storaas said in a separate interview with the Norwegian military magazine Forsvarsnett. “Even though they cursed us out a few times, they pretty much left us in peace.
“But it isn’t that great to sleep on the floor of the bridge of a ship that is not following orders,” he said. 
Storaas said they had expected to be transferred from the ship after 24 hours, which is standard procedure. He said only one crew member spoke a little English, so the Norwegians tried to figure out what was going on by reading their faces. He said the mood changed as the Russian crew listened to Russian news reports about the crisis. 
“They became very careful and were worried that it would seem like we had suffered on board,” Storaas said. 
It was also tough on the Russian crew, with Captain Valery Yarantsev suffering a heart attack after extreme stress and four days without sleep during the chase, Interfax reported. 
Gennady Stepakhno, president of the trawler’s owner, the Union of Northern Fishing Companies, told Interfax that the captain developed heart problems and was hospitalized on Thursday. 
“Yarantsev is now being treated at the cardiology intensive care unit of a Murmansk region hospital. He is in a grave condition,” Stepakhno said. 
The Elektron’s crew has been arrested by Russian border guards and could face Russian and Norwegian charges.

TITLE: Delta Capital Eyes Glasses Chain
AUTHOR: By Yevgenya Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Campanella, a St. Petersburg-based chain of optics salons, plans to spend $10 million on a nationwide expansion, launching at least 40 new stores in 2006, the company’s owner Alexander Slobozhan said Monday. 
The retailer will invest in shops in the mid-range price sector, with financial support from the Moscow-based Delta Private Equity Partners, Russia’s largest venture fund manager with two funds worth over $500 million in total.
Slobozhan said Delta Private Equity Partners, formerly known as Delta Capital, will buy a 49 percent stake in the glasses retailer and help to motivate the chain enlargement.
The venture fund will invest its capital in Campanella for three to five years, after which it has the option to resell the shares to a strategic, possibly foreign, investor, or to allow Campanella to buy back the stake, Slobozhan said.
Delta Private Equity Partners, or DPEP, confirmed on Monday their interest in the optics chain, but refused to disclose the sum of their investment. Earlier this month, DPEP vice-president Natalya Polishchuk said at a seminar in St. Petersburg that the fund manager usually invests between $5 million and $10 million in a company.
“The companies we invest in have to have a minimum annual revenue of $5 million,” Polishchuk said at a seminar organized by the U.S.-Russia Center for Entrepreneurship.
On Monday, Polishchuk said DPEP was considering Campanella “because they have the necessary experience in setting up and developing retail chains and are now ready for fast growth on a national scale.”
She said Campanella could become a market leader with a good financing model and growth strategy.
Alexander Molkov, director of Grant Thornton Trid audit and consultancy group, agreed. He rated $10 million to develop a retail chain as a substantial investment, which shows serious intentions for the project.
Campanella’s development plans are logical for a fragmented, immature market, Polishchuk said. Russia does not have a major nationwide glasses and optics salon chain, and no company in the sector can claim a strong leading position, market insiders said.
Mikhail Podushko, strategic development director at Comcon market research center, thinks the development of retail outlets in the family segment shows most promise at present.
“In Russia, the biggest growth of consumer activity falls within the category of middle to high-middle price range, which is actively developing given the current growth of disposable income,” Podushko said.

TITLE: Perekryostok to Organize Logistics Center Network
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Supermarket chain Perekryostok said it will build a logistics center in every major Russian city, with possible investment estimated at over $100 million, the company said Monday.
The chain expects to double the number of its stores — currently 117 nationwide — and this requires heavy investment into a distribution center network, said Vitaly Podolsky, financial director of Torgovy Dom Perekryostok, Interfax reported.
“Next year we will start searching for sites to rent or build our own distribution centers. Firstly they will open in St. Petersburg, Samara and Rostov-on-Don,” Podolsky said.
At present the chain’s supermarkets and hypermarkets are supplied from just one distribution center based in Moscow and directly from suppliers. 
Spending between $800 and $1,000 per square meter, Perekryostok will invest up to $25 million in each new logistic center. A 40,000 square meter center is planned for Moscow in the near future and regional centers will follow, Podolsky said.
The logistics project is going hand in hand with strong revenue growth and chain expansion. In the next three years, Perekryostok will open 120 to 150 new supermarkets and hypermarkets.
In St. Petersburg, Perekryostok will expand from six to 13 shops by the end of 2005, with 20 stores to be in operation by the summer of 2006.
Last year Perekryostok revenue reached $766 million, compared to $453 million in 2003. The chain forecasts $1.2 billion for this year.
Yelena Borodenko, consumer goods and retail analyst at Alfa Bank, said that opening its own distribution centers will firstly let the chain tackle Russia’s tough geography.
“St. Petersburg, Samara and Rostov-on-Don are remote locations demanding high logistic expenses from a retailer. Own distribution centers significantly decrease those expenses,” she said.
“Without an established logistic center network a retailer cannot benefit from low purchasing prices. Regional centers allow large purchase volumes, which secure discounts from suppliers,” said Konstantin Kovalyov, deputy director of Okhta Group development firm.
He said that increasing interest in warehouses has come from both retail and production companies. Kovalyov predicts the fast development of two types of logistic centers: private logistic centers serving a particular company, and general distributional centers providing warehouse services to several clients.
Pyatyorochka, the country’s leading supermarket chain in the economy-class segment, operates 650 shops in Russia, including 149 shops in St. Petersburg. The chain invested about $6 million in a 30,000 square meter logistic center that opened in St. Petersburg in 2002, local media reported.
Another St. Petersburg retailer Lenta will open a $20 million distribution center in the Leningrad Oblast in 2006, to serve the Northwest region.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Talosto buys Metelitsa
ST.PETERSBURG (SPT) — Talosto, the largest producer of frozen food in the Russian Northwest, will buy a Moscow-based frozen producer, Metelitsa, Interfax reported Monday.
Talosto’s share in the Russian ice-cream market, forecast to reach 6.5 percent in 2005, will now amount to 9 percent, which the company said will make it Russia’s largest ice-cream producer by sales volume, with an annual output of 60,000 tons of ice-cream.
The companies will merge their planning, purchasing, marketing and sales teams, while the Metelitsa brand is likely to remain, Interfax said.
 
New Port Projected
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A $2.5 million project for a new deep-water port in the Northwestern city of Arkhangelsk was put before local authorities on Monday, Interfax reported.
The plans, drawn up by St. Petersburg’s Lenmo research institute, propose building a port in the Dvinsky bay area of Arkhangelsk, which would support 75,000 ton ships, compared to the current facilities which only support 20,000 ton ships. This limit has made Arkhangelsk’s high level of sea transport facilities uncompetitive, a representative of the institute said.
The new port, which would not be completed until 2035, would have a capacity of 30 million tons, with an initial 5 million to 7 million tons planned for completion by 2015. It would allow the transshipment of oil and gas from the territory of Timano-Pechorskaya and also the oil reserves located in the republic of Komi, Interfax said.

Juice-Maker Profits
ST.PETERSBURG (SPT) — Troya-Ulta, a top five producer of juice and nectar, increased its net profits by 19 percent in the first six months of 2005, compared to the same period last year, Interfax reported Monday. Net profits reached 48.8 million rubles ($1.7 million).
The company’s gross profits also increased by 19 percent to 84.5 million rubles ($2.98 million), while earnings from the realization of juice products grew 14 percent to 979 million rubles.
The company’s brands include Dolka, Tvoya-Zolotaya, Nectarinka, Sokovichok, and Severnaya Yagoda.

TITLE: Sistema in Talks With Greece’s Intracom
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW (Reuters) — Russia’s Sistema is in acquisition talks with Greek IT company and telecoms equipment maker Intracom, online newspaper gazeta.ru quoted Sistema sources as saying on Monday. 
“We are in talks on possible partnership and cooperation,” head of investor relations at Sistema, Andrei Bliznyuk told Reuters. 
But gazeta.ru quoted a source familiar with the deal as saying Sistema planned to buy the shares from large shareholders and the deal was to be closed in November or December. 
Bliznyuk said it was Sistema’s technological branch, Scientific Centre Concern, which is carrying out the negotiations. 
“We are looking for different forms of cooperation,” said Scientific Centre Concern spokeswoman Yelena Sanarova. “But we are not going to buy Intracom SA.” 
In February this year, Sistema, whose biggest asset is Russia’s top mobile firm Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) , raised $1.5 billion to spend on the privatisation of the country’s national telecoms holding Svyazinvest.  
But Svyazinvest’s sale date is unclear. Sistema is now shopping around the world for telecoms and IT assets, including in Lebanon, Turkey and India. 
Sistema has said it wants to float Scientific Centre Concern in 2007. 
“The acquisition of Intracom ... if it takes place, will be in line with Sistema’s strategy on the IT-sector development, its IPO and raising the holding’s transparency on the whole better,” URALSIB investment bank said in a research note.

TITLE: Ice-cream Man Tells Business to Give Back
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Jerry Greenfield, the cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company, is in town this week to encourage Russia-based firms to channel part of their profits into socially responsible projects.
Greenfield, who founded Ben & Jerry’s with Ben Cohen in 1978, introduced Americans to the idea that a company might donate a percent of its earnings to support non-profit organizations.
“[Companies in Russia] are very interested in finding ways to be involved in the community,” Greenfield said in an interview Monday.  
As corporations in Russia are reaping profits on the back of a seven-year economic boom, they are beginning to think of ways to give something back to society, he said. 
Greenfield sits on the board of directors of the Vermont-based Institute for Sustainable Communities, ISC, which supports U.S. government-funded development projects in a dozen countries.
While acknowledging a greater interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) among companies in Russia, ISC president George Hamilton, said “the issue is how to mobilize all these resources.” 
In a country where most people until recently interpreted “charity” to mean a form of tax evasion, finding ways for corporate giving is still difficult. There is an established network of non-profits in Russia, but many companies still mistrust them, said Greenfield. 
Greenfield and Hamilton have already met with a dozen companies and secured a total commitment of $700,000 from aluminum firm SUAL, oil major TNK-BP, tech giant United Technologies and banker Citigroup. That money, along with a $1 million grant from USAID, is intended to jumpstart Russia’s own non-profit Fund for Sustainable Development.
Like ISC, the fund will promote such projects as energy saving technologies and youth programs, said Oleg Fokin, the fund’s executive director.
Greenfield bases his concept of a “values-driven” business on the idea that it is in a company’s own interest to appeal to the conscience of investors and consumers. But in Russia, CSR is still often seen as a result of political necessity.

TITLE: Top Bank Executive Accused of Stealing Shares
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina, Maria Levitov and Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The president of investment bank Renaissance Capital, Oleg Kiselyov, is facing fraud charges, his lawyer Alexander Asnis said Friday.
The investigation, which is being handled by the City Prosecutor’s Office and the Moscow city police, is related to an alleged attempt in the last year to steal shares in one of Russia’s biggest iron-ore producers, Mikhailovsky GOK.
“I have not read the charges, so I cannot comment on them,” Asnis said, adding he hoped to get access to the charges on Monday, having first learned about the case in media reports Friday.
Asnis said he eventually reached the investigator in charge of the case, Anton Golyshev, who confirmed that charges had been brought last Wednesday.
Kiselyov, who is currently undergoing medical treatment at an undisclosed location abroad, had also been unaware of the charges against him until Friday.
“The investigators have all my telephone numbers. I have not received a single call,” Kiselyov told Ekho Moskvy radio Saturday, speaking by telephone.
The City Prosecutor’s Office, which is leading the case, was not available to comment late Friday.
It was unclear Sunday if the charges would lead to an arrest warrant.
The prosecutor’s investigation centers on a series of events surrounding the alleged attempted theft of 97 percent of Mikhailovsky GOK, which until last year had been owned by Boris Ivanishvili through his Metalloinvest holding.
The sale of Mikhailovsky GOK, which was bought by metal moguls Alisher Usmanov and Vasily Anisimov for $1.6 billion, was held up by a dispute over ownership raised by the Bahamas-registered Colchester Group.
Colchester Group claimed it had bought the business in November 2004 for 3 million rubles ($106,000) but never received the shares, Vedomosti reported Friday.
In an attempt to block Usmanov and Anisimov’s purchase, Colchester had the disputed assets frozen by a Rostov regional court.
Colchester’s case came to nothing, allowing the freeze on the shares to be lifted, but the subsequent investigation led authorities to Kiselyov, Vedomosti reported.
A suspect in the case named Kiselyov as the person giving orders at the time the transaction was held up, the newspaper said.
There was no reaction Friday from Usmanov or Anisimov, who now own Mikhailovsky GOK. 
Prior to the charges, Kiselyov had been a witness in the investigation. 
Kiselyov had been chairman of Ivanishvili’s Metalloinvest in 2001-02.
Kiselyov, 52, belongs to a generation of businessmen that took advantage of the commercial opportunities that emerged when small private enterprises were allowed in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. He worked with billionaire Mikhail Fridman at the inception of what was to become Alfa Group and headed one of the conglomerate’s first businesses, Alfa-Eko, until 1992. 
In 2003, after resigning from the previous posts he had held, Kiselyov was appointed president of Renaissance Capital. 
Kiselyov on Saturday denied any wrongdoing.
“A friend of mine compared it to attempting to steal the Sistine Madonna,” he said Saturday. “It’s probably possible to steal it, but what next?” 
Speaking to Ekho Moskvy, he discussed what his associates thought was behind the charges.
“Many of my colleagues have suggested that I may become a victim not of ... political, but commercial, assault,” he said. 
The corporations that now run the country’s key industries — including oil, gas and metals — assumed their current form after years of bitter media and legal battles for control over assets.
“These are the remnants of the corporate wars of the late 1990s,” he said.
According to Kiselyov, investigators appeared to have been satisfied with his cooperation as a witness in the case. 
“I was treated in a kind manner,” he said, noting that no travel restrictions had been placed on him by investigators, who had been aware he was planning to receive medical treatment abroad.
Kiselyov said he intended to return to Russia once his treatment was over. It was not clear Sunday when that would be.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Pipeline Made Urgent
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — President Vladimir Putin has instructed Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to expedite plans for an $11.5 billion crude-oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, Vedomosti reported Monday. 
Putin sent Fradkov a letter telling him to resolve differences between various government bodies over the route and design of the link because the project has been “unjustly delayed,” the newspaper said, citing an unidentified senior Kremlin official. 
Resolution of those differences may enable Transneft, the state-run pipeline monopoly building the link, to start construction next year instead of 2007 as planned, the paper said. 

Eyes on North Korea
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom is interested in exploring seven oil and natural gas fields in North Korea, RIA TEK, a news service for the Industry and Energy Ministry, said Monday, citing Gazprom Deputy Chief Executive Alexander Medvedev.
Gazprom is examining plans to build a gas pipeline from Russia across North and South Korea, the online news service said.
Gazprom executives in January met North Korea officials and executives to discuss cooperation in oil and gas industry, the Russian company said Jan. 21.
Gazprom is reviewing options to build a gas pipeline either across China to South Korea or across North Korea to the south.

Gazprom in Portugal
LISBON (Bloomberg) — Gazprom is considering building an ethylene plant in Portugal’s Sines region, Jornal de Noticias reported, citing Portuguese Economy Minister Manuel Pinho, who spoke to reporters during a visit to Moscow. A study is still in very initial stages, the newspaper said. The plant would be built using exclusively Russian capital, the newspaper said.

Another MMK Dividend 
YEKATERINBURG  (Reuters) — The board of directors of steel major Magnitogorsk, or MMK, has recommended the company pay a nine-month dividend of 0.667 rubles ($0.023) per share, it said on Monday. 
MMK has never paid a nine-month dividend. One share has a nominal value of 1 ruble. MMK’s nine-month net profit grew slightly to 23.942 billion rubles from 23.866 billion rubles in the same 2004 period, to Russian Accounting Standards. 
MMK paid one of the biggest dividends for a Russian steel company in 2004 — 1.34 rubles per share, or a total of $508 million.

Sibur Rev Up 25%
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Sibur, the petrochemicals unit of state-controlled Gazprom, said nine-month sales climbed 25 percent as prices for the company’s products rose. 
Sales jumped to 75.2 billion rubles ($2.63 billion) from 60.4 billion rubles in the year earlier period, the company said Monday in a statement. 
Export sales rose 36 percent to 22.2 billion rubles. 
Sibur, the country’s largest petrochemicals maker, produces liquefied petroleum gases, plastics and polymers and more than half of Russia’s rubber. It also processes natural gas for transportation.

Aeroflot Buys Jets
PARIS (AP) — Airline Aeroflot has signed a contract with Airbus for the purchase of seven A321 airplanes, Airbus said Monday. Deliveries of the newly ordered aircraft are scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter of 2006, it said, as part of the airline’s medium-haul fleet modernization program. Aeroflot’s A321s will feature two-class cabin layouts seating 170 passengers, Airbus said.
Financial terms were not disclosed for the deal, worth $550 million at list prices. 
Aeroflot, which already has 18 Airbus planes in its fleet, plans to operate the new aircraft on its European and domestic networks, the Airbus statement said. 

Cattle Numbers Drop
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Cattle and pig numbers have fallen in the first nine months of the year compared with the same time last year, data from the State Statistics Service showed.
A service statement said the number of cattle had fallen by 6.9 percent to 23.2 million head year-on-year, while the number of pigs fell by 7.1 percent to 14.8 million. 
The number of sheep and goats rose by 1.9 percent to 19.1 million head.
Russia’s livestock population has been declining in the last few years due to rising costs and insufficient support by the state.

U.K.’s Boots Coming 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Boots, owner of the largest U.K. drugstore chain, will start selling its products in Russia next month, Vedomosti said, citing Artyom Bektemirov, chief executive of pharmacy chain 36.6, Boots’s Russian partner.
36.6 expects to start selling Boots’s Botanics, Natural Collection, Mediterranean and No. 7 cosmetics at some of its Moscow stores in November, Bektemirov told the daily newspaper. 36.6 will then begin introducing the brands at its stores in Russia’s regions, Vedomosti said.
The number of 36.6’s Russian stores that will sell Boots’s products and sales terms will be determined this week, the paper cited Bektemirov as saying. 

Firm Loves Russia
SINGAPORE (Reuters) — Singapore-listed instant-coffee manufacturer Food Empire Holdings plans to expand its distribution network in Eastern Europe and targets 15-20 percent revenue growth a year, the company’s chairman said on Monday.
“We already have a good penetration in the former Soviet countries like Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania,” said Food Empire’s chairman Tan Wang Cheow. 
Tan is confident Russia will still be the firm’s main growth driver. “Russia’s economy is doing well because of its oil and gas reserves. A more affluent people will translate into better business for the company,” he said.
The firm is also considering building a factory in Russia — its first outside Southeast Asia.

Perekryostok Bonds
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Food retailers Perekryostok plans a debut eurobond issue for up to $250 million in the second half of 2006, a company spokesman said on Monday.
According to data from investment bank Troika Dialog, Perekryostok has a 9 percent share of the market among Russia’s leading retail chains. As of May 2005, Perekryostok owned 107 stores in Russia.

Grain Harvest Near
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Russia has threshed 84.2 million tons of grain by bunker weight so far from 99 percent of the harvesting area, the Agriculture Ministry said on Monday. Gross grain crop rose by 2.2 million tons from the year ago volume.
Russia officially estimates this year’s grain crop to be no lower than last year’s 78 million tons by clean weight. Bunker weight is normally some 8 percent higher than clean weight, obtained after grain has been cleaned and dried.
A ministry statement said that by Monday Russia had threshed 50.5 million tons of wheat, or 2.8 million tons more than a year ago.

Ukraine Forecast Down
KIEV (Reuters) — Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuri Yekhanurov predicted on Monday that the economy would grow between 2.0 and 4.0 percent this year, the third cut in the government forecast so far this year. 
The previous forecast, unveiled a week ago by the economy minister, saw full-year growth of between 4.5 percent and 5.0 percent of gross domestic product in 2005 compared with 12.1 percent expansion last year.
The government and President Viktor Yushchenko had hoped for about 5 pct growth this year but this was before disappointing data earlier this month on foreign trade. Ukraine posted a trade deficit of $372.2 million in the first eight months of the year compared with a surplus of $2.96 billion in the year-ago period. 

WBD Bonds Plan
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Wimm-Bill-Dann said on Monday it plans to issue five-year ruble bonds for 3 billion rubles (about $100 million).
The Russian dairy and juice products maker said in a news release the bonds will be guaranteed by its subsidiary, Siberian Dairy Plant.
The issue is aimed at refinancing its current debt among other things, the company said.

TITLE: It Kills Birds, But Won’t Kill You
AUTHOR: By Wendy Orent
TEXT: It must seem like the sky is falling — that it’s about to rain chaos and death as the dreaded H5N1 avian flu appears to close in. 
Last spring, bird flu broke out in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. It spread to western China, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia in the summer. How did it travel half a continent?
Though maps of the outbreaks show the flu following roads, railway lines and national borders, many flu experts insist that migratory birds spread the virus across Asia. 
News reports make the threat seem even more ominous. In resurrecting the 1918 pandemic virus, the deadliest flu strain of all time, researchers recently learned that this strain was far deadlier than any other human virus — it killed mice, while normal human flu won’t even ruffle a mouse’s fur. They also found out that all of its genes came, directly or indirectly, from birds. Unlike the pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 version didn’t arise from a combination of bird and mammal genes. Instead, the bird genes evolved into a human virus that killed as many as 50 million people.
This means, breathless news reports tell us, that what happened in 1918 could happen again, this time with H5N1. 
But Peter Palese doesn’t think so. He is lab director at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where the technique that re-created the 1918 genes — known as reverse genetic engineering — was developed. He and associate Adolfo Garcia-Sastre contend that what the resurrected virus really shows is how supremely adapted it is — how well its parts fit together, how perfectly it works. The sublime malignance of the 1918 virus doesn’t lie in one part but rather in how the genes function together. 
Evolution shaped this virus to be a sleek, effective killing machine.
We don’t know what bird the genes came from originally, but all wild-bird viruses are mild. They have to be: Sick birds don’t fly far, and dead birds don’t fly at all. 
In nature, flu viruses in birds are intestinal diseases. Through feces, flu particles are deposited in water, where another duck or goose picks them up, gets infected and spreads the virus in turn. Wild-bird flu depends on mobile hosts to spread. If flu strains kill their hosts in the wild, the lethal versions will vanish. This is why evolution pushes wild-bird strains toward mildness.
To think that the 1918 flu started out as a harmless intestinal bird virus that jumped directly from its wild host into human beings and immediately turned into an explosive respiratory killer is to believe that hippos fly. Evolution doesn’t work that way. The flu’s genes came from birds, but it’s what they did when they got into humans that matters.
Somehow, somewhere, the mysterious gene collection that made up the 1918 killer influenza acquired its adaptive and lethal abilities in people. Most influenza viruses are respiratory and require mobile human hosts, who become viral distribution machines. You might be miserable with the flu, but you’re still able to walk around, shake hands, sneeze on your keyboard and talk to colleagues with a halo of virus around you.
But the 1918 pandemic strain was different. According to evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald of the University of Louisville, its lethality evolved in the trenches, the trucks, the trains and the hospitals of World War I. The packed chicken farms of Asia are a close parallel. 
We don’t know what will happen to H5N1 as it moves through Europe. It is certain, though, that the longer it lives in wild birds, the more likely it is to become mild, at least for its wild-bird hosts. 
The flu virus, like everything in life, is subject to evolution. Lethal diseases don’t fall out of the sky. They evolve in the context of a host and its living conditions. There is no sign, so far, that H5N1 is turning into a human disease, effectively spreading from person to person. Even if it does, it will need a Western Front to make it something extraordinary.

Wendy Orent is the author of “Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease.” She contributed this comment to the Los Angeles Times, where it first appeared.

TITLE: Getting Rid of Gridlock
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: If St. Petersburg were to have as many automobiles per square kilometer as any major Western European city, then driving through town would be virtually impossible. The roads are already jam packed. The root cause of this situation was summed up by Governor Valentina Matviyenko at a recent session of the city government: “We have a ‘Directorate for the organization of transport flows in St. Petersburg’, but there’s no actual organization of that transport flow.”
Matviyenko has hit the nail on the head — the city has no dedicated body seriously working on this task, a body where the buck would stop as far as easing up the gridlock is concerned, and a body that would have all the necessary powers to carry out that task. At present, neither the above-mentioned directorate, nor the transport police (GIBDD) fit the bill.  In fact, the same can be said of the whole of Russia. 
This extraordinary situation, almost unparalleled in any other civilized nation, results from the fact that such a body, or even such a function, isn’t demanded or even envisaged by the federal legislation. All there is, in fact, is a law “On the safety of transport flows,” which says that the provision of safety is, in part, carried out through the organization of transport flows. 
Thus, according to our legislation, directing traffic is merely a means to an end — providing security and safety on the roads. That doesn’t involve making trips through the city any faster, or trying to reduce traffic jams, or even doing anything to help citizens find parking places near their homes, places of work, shops, theaters or anywhere else they might need or want to go. Traffic flow exclusively concerns stopping cars crashing into one another or into pedestrians. 
The transport police, of course, does to some extent organize these traffic flows, simply because it’s a dirty job and someone has to do it. As their main function is to ensure safety, however, they have a vested interest in huge traffic jams and cars moving at little more than a walking pace. And they’ve already got too much on their plates to worry about parking or working out effective diversions to get us round streets that are being repaired and the like. 
In order to solve this problem, we have to split up the concepts of “safety” and “the organization of transport flows.” And, in splitting up these responsibilities, certain bodies have to be given responsibility for them (perhaps even the above-mentioned directorate), and all the powers necessary to carry out the work involved. And those powers, clearly, have to be taken from the transport police. That’s entirely possible, as the federal law mentioned above allows for the mandates of the Internal Affairs Ministry to be passed over to subjects of the Federation. Matviyenko could come to an agreement with the Ministry on the transfer of the powers of the transport police where they concern “the regulation of transport flows, including regulation through the use of technical resources and automated systems,” and so on.
This would unavoidably alter the status of the transport police — from an organization that makes all the decisions on the regulation of transport flows (the putting up of signs, traffic lights, their operation, etc), it would be turned into a body merely controlling and overseeing issues concerning safety, although ultimate responsibility for that safety would lie with the city authorities. The status of the transport police would match, say, that of the fire inspectorate or the sanitation authorities — neither of them have ultimate responsibility for fire or sanitary security at enterprises, they merely ensure that standards are kept to and agree construction plans.
There shouldn’t be any problems with this splitting up of responsibilities and mandates, as Sergei Bugrov, the head of the transport police for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast is in agreement with the scheme laid out above. In an interview with our publication he maintained: “The carrying out of concrete tasks is the work of other administrative organs. We will inspect their work from the point of view of safety.”
If the current situation is allowed to continue, when the number of cars per square kilometer begins to approach that of Western European cities, St. Petersburg will be turned into one continuous traffic jam stretching across the length and breadth of the city. The traffic police will be happy, as no one will ever have a chance to get up enough speed to get into a crash. But does safety have to come at this price?

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: An Offer Never Refused
TEXT: Some of the far-fetched fables we cover as breaking news could easily serve as a plot for a novel, perhaps even of the fantasy genre. Recently, another tall story of this kind made it into the press. A wealthy businessman, Vladimir Kogan, is selling his main asset, a large and prosperous bank, in order to become a state employee. Presumably, he was expecting to be made CEO of one of the state-owned banks, be given a seat in the White House, or even the Federation Council. Instead, he was offered the job of running one of the most complex construction sites in the region — the dam which, it is hoped, will keep St. Petersburg afloat. This behemoth of a construction was launched over twenty years ago and, despite works having been interrupted in the early 90s due to a lack of financing, many of its managers have already carved off their piece of the pie. In 2004, however, President Vladimir Putin promised that the dam would be completed by 2008. And someone has to take responsibility for the job.
Sic transit gloria mundi! How the mighty have fallen, you might think, imagining this refined banker and boardroom executive donning his hardhat and barking orders at teams of laborers, with several levels of authority supervising his activities and watching his every step. Kogan’s colleagues discuss his new appointment with an air of sarcasm, predicting the end of his career. But none of them suggests that the job offer made to the banker could have been refused. There are people, the experts tell us, who make offers you can’t refuse. 
Such offers are becoming an important factor in business. “He was asked to participate in the deal” — comments like this often appear on the business pages of our newspapers. Take Telecominvest, which works in the telecommunications sector and is based in St. Petersburg. The company bought the weekly magazine Ogonyok, and one expert explained that the company was asked to, with a wink and a nod in the direction of the Kremlin. For a company which produces the bulk of its earnings by operating mobile-phone networks, getting involved in the risky business of publishing seems like an odd choice. But if people who have an interest in the media landscape for the next few years are asking for a few million bucks, why not help out?
It was the same reasoning that led oil giant Surgutneftegaz to become a shareholder in RenTV, the last national independent television channel. The returns in the oil business can’t be compared with profitability in the media sector, but this is a strategic field for the people that matter, so let’s help out.
Several years ago, businesses were asked to contribute towards the renovation of the Konstantinovsky Palace, currently Putin’s Petersburg residency in the city. Businesses made donations to a fund which financed the repair works, which cost over $200 million and were completed for the city’s 300th anniversary. 
Another fund was launched by St. Petersburg’s governor a couple of years ago in order to renovate Oranienbaum Palace. This is a part of business’s social responsibility, the authorities told us. To me, a donation to the fund looks akin to a ticket that businesses have to purchase in order to establish good relations with Smolny. They don’t even go to the effort of publicizing their support for this fund. 
In other words, the role of the state in the economy is growing, and loyal companies agree to fulfill orders given out from the other side of the wall. But what do you really get for giving your assistance and loyalty? Well, at the very least, you get a job on a construction site, building a monumental dam. Don’t forget your hardhat.

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

TITLE: Flop Sweat
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: Having railed at the wanton criminality of the Bush faction for so long, this column naturally partakes of the general glee arising from the looming possibility of genuine, grade-A grand jury indictments for some of the gang’s top thugs. 
Of course, we all know that the fix is in: If anyone in the White House is actually indicted and convicted for the high crime of exposing the identity of an undercover agent — in wartime, no less — they will certainly be pardoned when George W. Bush finally limps away from the steaming, stinking, blood-soaked ruin of his presidency. Nobody will do any hard time; in the end, the whole sick crew will simply pass through the golden revolving door into the lifetime gravy train of corporate grease and right-wing lecture-circuit glory.
Still, it is heartening to see the fever-sweat of fear popping out on the brows of these swaggering world-shakers, third-rate goons and half-wit cranks posing as great statesmen, if only for a little while. Fear has always been their weapon of choice: They’ve used it to foment aggressive war, to crush political opposition, to manipulate the electorate and to mask their own incompetence, corruption and greed. Now they’re getting a taste of it themselves — and they can’t take it. 
You can see it in their darting eyes, the twitches and fidgets: the fear, the nagging worry that perhaps, just perhaps, they haven’t got it all nailed down this time; that perhaps, just perhaps, the law is something more than a fancy cane to beat the poor with; that it might, just might, apply to them as well. The sight of Bush’s porky puppetmaster, Karl Rove, tottering out of his fourth grand jury appearance last week, with the shadow of manacles dangling before his pinched, bloated face, was an image to warm the cockles of every American patriot’s heart.
But this schadenfreude, however tasty and effervescent, is no substitute for the strong meat of justice. And even in the unlikely — not to say inconceivable — event that the entire pack of jackals gets herded into the hoosegow for the agent-outing conspiracy, it will not bring back the innocent dead murdered at their command. It will not restore the shattered families writhing in the pits of grief and loss, from Baghdad to Burbank. It will not be recompense for the pointless sacrifice of soldiers and reservists sent on a criminal errand, plunged into a brutal and brutalizing hell — for nothing, for a chimera, for ideological lunacy, for the enrichment of cats already so fat they can barely stand up and waddle to the dish for another slurp of cream.
Not unless every one of the war conspirators and their chief minions — Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Condi Rice, Scooter Libby, Andrew Card, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Karen Hughes, John Yoo, Zalmay Khalilzad, George Tenet, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, Stephen Hadley, Jerry Bremer, Nicholas Calio, Richard Perle, Tony Blair and all the rest — were lined up in a public square with the entrails of their victims draped around their necks would anything approaching justice be done. But as Shakespeare told us long ago, “in the corrupted currents of this world, offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice, and oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself buys out the law.”
For while official Washington strains to read the special prosecutor’s tea leaves, Bush’s war crime grinds on. Last weekend saw the “passage” of the much-ballyhooed Iraqi constitution — a desperately thrown-together rigamarole that quietly preserves the special privileges for Bush’s business cronies imposed by the former satrap, Bremer, while exacerbating the violent ethnic rivalries that Bush has unleashed across the tortured land. 
This “victory for democracy” — achieved, in typical Bushist fashion, through outrageously rigged vote counts, as The New York Times reports — is in fact a blueprint for disaster. The Kurds will accelerate their U.S.-backed “ethnic cleansing” of the oil-rich north, while the Iranian-backed Shiite militias in the oil-rich south will accelerate their already murderous imposition of Talibanic religious rule. The once-dominant Sunni Arab minority, now marginalized and impoverished, will swell the ranks of the growing insurgency, as Baghdad and the nation’s central provinces plunge further into Somali-style anarchy. Terrorist freebooters, set loose in one of the world’s most strategic locations by Bush’s destruction of the Iraqi state, will thrive in the chaos. 
With no chance for the deliberately enfeebled central Iraqi government to take responsibility for the nation’s security, U.S. forces will remain knee-deep in the quagmire, killing and being killed without rhyme or reason — or hope of escape. Indeed, Bush is already signaling “a longer, broader conflict” in his speeches on the war, The New York Times reports. There is no “exit strategy” because Bush has never intended to leave. The installation of a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq has been the war conspirators’ loudly proclaimed goal for many years, long before Bush was shoehorned into power — as we have noted here incessantly since 2002, citing chapter and verse from their own publications.
This is why they lied their way into war, this is why they outed a CIA agent whose husband exposed one of their lies: to pursue their dream of “global dominance,” of endless war profiteering and oil baksheesh. The prosecutor might give them a pinch, but the damage is already done: The dead will stay dead, the maimed will stay maimed, the tortured will never escape their nightmares. And the killing, the wounding and torment will go on.

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

TITLE: Davydenko Favorite at St. Petersburg Open
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: French Open semifinalist Nikolai Davydenko will be hoping for a home crowd boost at this week’s St. Petersburg Open after a disappointing third-round finish at the Madrid Masters on Thursday.
The Russian No. 1 seed is scheduled to face unseeded Lukas Dlouhy of the Czech Republic in the first round of the week-long ATP tournament at the city’s Sportivny Konsertny Kompleks.
Sixth-seeded Jarkko Nieminen of Finland was to play Robin Vik of the Czech Republic and Swedish qualifier Jonas Bjorkman, a former world No. 4, was up against France’s Florent Serra in opening play Monday.
Russia’s defending champion, Mikhail Youzhny, seeded fourth, is also competing in a field that includes world No. 17 Thomas Johannsson of Sweden, world No. 25 Nicolas Kiefer of Germany, world No. 32 Max Mirnyi of Belarus, and world No. 38 Greg Rusedski of Great Britain.
Former U.S. Open and Wimbledon finalist Mark Philippoussis was given a wild card into the main draw.
A runner-up in 2002, Youzhny became the third Russian to win the St. Petersburg Open in its 10-year history after Yevgeny Kafelnikov in 1995 and Marat Safin, who scored back-to-back titles in 2000 and 2001.
Australian Open champion Safin pulled out of this year’s tournament on Oct. 15, saying he wanted to fully recover from a knee injury ahead of the season-ending Masters Cup in Shanghai next month. The news came too late for tournament organizers who have used Safin’s image in a publicity blitz around St. Petersburg.
But the injury-prone star said on his web site Thursday that he nevertheless hoped to come to St. Petersburg this week “for an autograph session — for the local fans.”
In the ATP world rankings released Monday, Safin slipped to fifth, sandwiched between Australian Lleyton Hewitt in fourth, and Andre Agassi in sixth.
Davydenko also fell one place, to eighth, behind Argentina’s Guillermo Coria. Roger Federer remains world No. 1.

TITLE: White Sox 2 Games From World Series History
AUTHOR: By Emily Kaiser
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: CHICAGO Illinois — The Houston Astros have three games to prove just how tough they are to beat at home as the World Series heads to Texas for the first time ever, with the Chicago White Sox on top 2-0 in the best-of-seven contest. 
The Astros have a lot working in their favor for Game 3 on Tuesday — a noisy home crowd, the hottest pitcher on the team taking the mound, and a return to National League rules where teams cannot use a designated hitter to bat for the pitcher.
But they will have to claw their way back from a big deficit against a White Sox team that can also pitch, play good defense and run the bases aggressively — all hallmarks of a National League team.
The White Sox, in their first World Series since 1959 and looking to win their first championship since 1917, won seven of nine regular season interleague games played in NL parks, so the team can adapt to that style of play.
Houston is playing in its first Fall Classic in the franchise’s 44-year history, and the state of Texas has never hosted a World Series game.
Chicago prevailed in a roller-coaster Game 2 on Sunday that featured a grand slam, a blown save and a walk-off home run by a batter who didn’t hit a single homer in the regular season.
Astros manager Phil Garner was clearly frustrated after the loss, and eager to head back home to Houston where the team has been playing well with its retractable roof closed to maximize crowd noise.
“I’m upset,” he said. “I’d like to win a ball game.”
He will send 20-game winner Roy Oswalt to the mound on Tuesday, hoping he can pick up where he left off in the National League Championship Series.
Oswalt, who won the decisive Game 6 against the St. Louis Cardinals last week, is 3-0 in the postseason with a stingy 2.11 earned run average.
“We’ll make the moves we always make,” Garner said. “We’ll pinch-hit, we’ll double-switch, we’ll defensively make moves.”
The White Sox, who will counter with 18-game winner Jon Garland, have made only a handful of offensive substitutions in the entire postseason. 
But Manager Ozzie Guillen has some experience with NL strategy, having played for the Atlanta Braves and coached the Florida Marlins. He regularly grilled Braves manager Bobby Cox on tactics when he was a player there.
“I’m not going to change anything,” Guillen said. “We play real well. Hopefully we’ll keep it up back in Houston.”
The White Sox had just enough luck to go along with timely hitting in Sunday’s dramatic win. Houston got on the board early with a home run by Morgan Ensberg, but Chicago answered with two in the bottom of the second.
Houston came back to take a 4-2 lead on a two-out, two-run double by Lance Berkman, which looked like it might be enough to send the series back to Houston even at one game apiece.
But White Sox first-baseman Paul Konerko hit a grand slam in the 7th to put Chicago up 6-4, following a questionable umpiring call. The home plate umpire ruled that batter Jermaine Dye was hit by a pitch, loading the bases for Konerko who hit the first pitch he saw over the left field wall. 
Dye later acknowledged that the ball hit his bat. 
White Sox closer Bobby Jenks, who had mowed down Astros hitters with a 100 miles per hour fastball on Saturday, gave up two runs in the top of the 9th to tie the game. 
But left-fielder Scott Podsednik, a speedster known for stealing bases rather than hitting for power, smacked a walk-off home run to give the White Sox a huge win. It was his second home run of the postseason after hitting none during the regular season. 
It was also the second time in the playoffs that Astros closer Brad Lidge had given up a game-winning homer. But Garner said he won’t hesitate to put Lidge back in. 
“He’s my closer. He’s our go-to guy. He’s going to be fine. He’ll do just fine,” Garner said.

TITLE: Sports Watch
TEXT: Zenit Loses Ground
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — FC Zenit St. Petersburg lost 0-2 to FC Moscow on Sunday to fall seven points behind leaders CSKA Moscow, with only three matches of the season remaining. 
 In other games at the weekend, CSKA Moscow won 1-0 at Amkar Perm to move closer to dethroning champions Lokomotiv Moscow, who drew 0-0 with bottom team Alania Vladikavkaz. 
Lokomotiv trail CSKA by two points with three games remaining, after letting slip a 10-point lead in the last six matches, scoring just one goal in five draws and a defeat. 
Brazilian midfielder Daniel Carvalho struck for CSKA, who are hoping to reverse the outcome of last year’s race, when Lokomotiv snatched the title from their grasp. 
Third-placed Spartak Moscow stayed four points off the pace after a spectacular long-range effort by Maksim Kalinichenko gave them a 1-0 home win over city rivals Torpedo. 
 
Olazabal Back on Form
SON SERVERA, Mallorca (AP) — Jose Maria Olazabal won his first title in nearly four years, Sunday, shooting a final round 4-under-par 66 to capture the Mallorca Classic by five strokes. 
Olazabal, who finished on 10-under 270, is the third Spaniard in a row to win the European tour event. 
Sergio Garcia won last year and Miguel Angel Jimenez in 2003. 
Garcia also closed with a 66 and shared second place at 275 with Spain’s Jose Manuel Lara (68) and England’s Paul Broadhurst (70). 
Olazabal moves into the top five on the European points list as automatic qualifiers for the Ryder Cup team next year. 
He has played six times between 1987-99 but has missed out the last two times. 
“It’s always a goal,” the two-time Masters champion said. “Watching it on television, you want to be there.” 
 
‘Hermannator’ Record
SOELDEN, Austria (AP) — Hermann Maier edged Bode Miller to capture the season-opening giant slalom Sunday and overtake Alberto Tomba to occupy second place on the all-time World Cup victory list. 
“This is a big joy for me,” said Maier, who injured his knee while training in New Zealand recently. 
“I was sitting in second place and watching Bode’s run and I thought to myself, second place will be great,” he said.
“Then I saw his time was in red and I knew I had won. I flipped out.” 
Maier’s 51st World Cup victory sent him ahead of Italy’s Tomba. Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark leads with 86, all in slalom and giant slalom. 
This was Maier’s first World Cup giant slalom win since nearly losing a leg in a motorcycle accident four years ago, although he won the world giant slalom title last year. 
“To be on the podium is already a big achievement,” Maier said. 
“But it’s incredible to win this race.” 
The former Olympic and world champion covered the two runs in 2 minutes, 17.60 seconds, rallying from fifth place after the first leg. 
Miller, the reigning overall champion, won the first leg and finished 0.07 seconds behind the Austrian.

TITLE: All’s Fair In Love and Business
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Before, it was enough to associate business with war, to call the open market a ‘field,’ competition a ‘battle,’ and each event a ‘launch.’ The only problem for the companies was how to convince staff — the rank and file — to follow into action, to fight for the corporate cause. 
Then came the great answer: Use religion. Welcome to the world of corporate mantra!
Were Napoleon alive today, he’d hardly be in the military business, unless the focus was on the business part. Like many authoritarian leaders, Napoleon was said to have developed a tough character to compensate for being short, and his energy engaged the troops to follow him with an almost fanatical loyalty.
Experts say that modern company owners seek to repeat some of the older military and religion’s management methods to instill their business with similar success. Putting aside business strategy, financial ruling and other traditional shareholder prerogatives, zealous company bosses try to control everything from choosing the color of the cups that their employees drink from to outright corporate brainwashing.
“The goal must be reached by any means,” begins one business mantra.
“Our team has inner knowledge. It is impossible to steal this knowledge or to disclose it to enemies. In attempting to do so the person loses the [inner] knowledge and his own efficiency.”
The quotes you are reading are not the religious dogmas of a sect or lines taken from a science-fiction novel. The above is an extract from “The Employee Passport,” a corporate instruction manual produced this year by the country’s largest supermarket chain Pyatyorochka for its employees.
The document, which had been leaked to several web sites this summer, suggested that staff of the economy-class retailer steer clear of “sly enemies, who gradually try to destruct our Pyramid of Correspondence,” should those “enemies” be too hard to “overwhelm.”
“Owners often influence corporate culture in Russian companies,” said Oksana Pochtivaya, operations manager at Ancor recruitment agency.
She warned against overly keen corporate slogans as something that may have just the opposite effect to what is intended.
“Charismatic leaders think values that help them to succeed should be transferred to employees. But the result could be quite the opposite to retaining the staff,” she said.

HOLY SMOKIN’
The proliferation of corporate religion has not been restricted to large corporations. Cases when an owner of a small or a medium-sized company tries to involve his employees in more than his business are not rare. Be it extra-curriculum yoga, philosophy or religion, staff are expected to follow.
The head of one city-based printing plant regularly practices a kind of a hajj, a religious pilgrimage, two sources confirmed to The St. Petersburg Times.
The plant’s employees have often been transported to Orthodox Christian holy places, such as Valaam and Volkhov, regardless of the staff members’ own religious denominations, one former employee of the plant told The St. Petersburg Times on condition of anonymity.
In the last six months, many employees from accountants to print workers to managers have left the company. “For many, leaving the company was triggered by its bad financial performance. But religious propaganda was the real reason,” the former employee said.
The plant, the name of which is known to The St. Petersburg Times, made gaining employment much easier for Orthodox Christians, regardless of professional qualifications. The factory also invested massive sums into printing a series of religious calendars and post cards, which did not turn in profits, partly because the religious theme prevented the products from being widely advertised, the former staff member said.
Religious trips had left several employees in a state of shock, he added.
“There was no direct pressure on [any staff member], but you had problems with managers and the company’s attitude toward you changed if you avoided going on such trips,” the former employee said.

JUMP TO IT!
Testing the devotion of employees does not always involve religion directly. An online community for managers, E-xecutive.ru, lists among corporate eccentricities the case of one St. Petersburg company director, who — being a master of sports — organized a parachute jump for all employees to celebrate his own birthday.
The web site reports that not feeling in a position to refuse, the company’s managers started composing letters of resignation.
On the other hand, the director of ROST group, a company that specializes in investment and development, introduced material incentives for employees who practice the Chinese relaxation method quigong, give up smoking or in any other way attempt to make their lifestyle healthier.

SHOW ME THE SIGN
Some company owners embody their taste into corporate symbols.
The logo of St. Petersburg’s PTK fuel retailing chain has undergone a number of transformations in recent years due to the watchful — and temperamental — eye of its owners.
A former employee of PTK, Vlada Tsaryova, said that the company’s owners tended to call their own public relations and marketing department on frequent occasions.
Every time they drove past a PTK gas station and decided that there was something wrong with the color or composition of the brand name, the owners immediately called for a redesign, Tsaryova said. Consequently, several variations of the PTK logo can be seen around the city, she said.

SPOONWORK ORANGE
For some companies the design of their business is as much a part of the corporate mentality as the approach to staff. The owners of Chainaya Lozhka (Tea Spoon) fast-food restaurant chain introduced the orange color as its corporate centerfold and composed a restaurant interior style to fit.
“Orange is a bright color that attracts people to enter the cafe. Once the clients are in and seated, however, the color is rather unsettling, so the client wants to leave quickly,” said Boris Krupkin, co-founder and co-owner of Chainaya Lozhka.
“For the company brand we created our own version of a Russian style that we call neofuturism. With it we are saying that we are not simply Russians, but modern Russians. We take the history and culture of our forefathers, but with it make a modern product,” Krupkin said.
Since opening three years ago, the chain has decorated its office headquarters in the corporate color, including painting walls and ordering orange computers.
Chainaya Lozhka’s owner said he borrowed its staff management methods from McDonalds, “with the addition of the soul.” Speaking at a U.S.-Russia Center for Entrepreneurship seminar in St. Petersburg earlier this month, Krupkin said that from the start his company had been organized to embody a truly unifying element, that went beyond merely retaining the same uniforms, displays and menus from shop to shop.
“Without a corporate religion you’ll never build a major chain,” Krupkin said. “A person needs to know for whose sake he goes into battle, for who he’s presenting a piece of his soul — for who he’s frying the pancakes,” he said.
“Companies like Pyatyorochka have been quick to set a kind of corporate religion for their workers. I won’t say if it’s good or bad — it exists,” he said.

TITLE: WHICH? Recuiter: The Inside Guide
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In some things in life, size is everything. But not when it comes to choosing your recruitment agency, it seems. While some industry players claim that in recruitment Big means Big Possibilities, others point to the “hand-picking” approach of smaller agencies as more careful and precise.
The question is: What size of recruitment agency are you looking for — Small, Large, or Efficient?

The choice of which recruitment company to use is often governed by the client needs. The major difference between recruiters working on the Russian market is not even their size, but their strategic approach, said Yury Mikhailov, managing partner of Consort recruitment agency.
“The bigger ones aim at continuous expansion of their business, targeting a variety of businesses, invariably selling their services left, right and across the board. Meanwhile, smaller agencies most often cater to a niche, looking after the more discerning clients,” Mikhailov said.
The two approaches logically result in two different types of service.
“It’s like hand assembly versus conveyer belt technology. Small firms practice a more thorough and a personal approach towards applicants and clients. However, they need more time to complete the task,” said Yelena Lavina, head of public affairs at THI Group recruitment.
With larger agencies spending more on advertising, the small-size recruiters can also offer lower prices, said Yury Ivanov, general director of Arkadia++ recruitment firm, which specializes in finding IT specialists.
Oksana Pochtivaya, operations manager at Ancor, one of the top two biggest recruitment companies in Russia and in St. Petersburg, agrees in part.
Small agencies can sometimes be more flexible in terms of price, recruitment procedure and client choice, while “a large recruiter, concerned about its reputation, could decline working with small, unfamiliar clients,” Pochtivaya said.
When it comes to mass employment, especially for industrial enterprises, or staff hunting in several sectors at once, however, smaller firms rarely win over the recruitment industry’s major players, since they simply lack resources.
“Every single recruiter has a limit to their abilities, they cannot conduct more than, say, 10 interviews a day. But if you are opening a hypermarket and need 300 employees, a small agency would not deal with it in time,” Lavina said.
The flexibility that comes when dealing with a larger agency extends further. Clients seeking multiple services value larger agencies since “they cover all levels of staff recruiting from seasonal workers to top managers operating practically in all business areas,” Pochtivaya said.
Ivanov added that larger search companies expand their operations to include additional services like financial assessment and leasing, which can offer a more all-in-one package.
The universal approach falls down, however, when it comes to fast decision-making. The corporate hierarchy of large firms makes “question of accepting the order and terms of contract [that] could be settled within a day less likely to find quick solutions,” Ivanov said.
However there are also intrinsic differences between large and small companies.
Mikhailov believes that “instead of the three to five best professionals found by a small recruiter, the larger agency presents 10 mediocre candidates.”
Larger agencies “send more resumes, rather than carefully select the candidates,” while smaller search firms combine elements of direct search with database selection, which Mikhailov said leaves “time to think the search through and agree with the client on the best approach, timeframe, and expected results.”
Though large factory enterprises have little option but to pick a recruiter that can manage the size of the order, small and medium-sized businesses tend to look for a staffing agency with clear specializations, disregarding the agency’s size.
“The most effective are recruiting companies that specialize in tourism,” said Natalia Yesakova, personnel director of Continent Express, a corporate tourism firm.
“They might be not very large, but they’re “active,” with experience in recruiting staff for the tourism sector,” she said.
As well as the industrial sector, Yesakova said larger recruiters are often employed for finance and IT staff searches.
All the different factors fall out of the window, however, when the client is faced with an actual person, the recruitment officer.
Anastasia Kaslina, an expert with Begin Group, an education and recruitment market research and analytical agency, said one recruiter can decisively influence a job search more than agency size and reputation.
“The quality of recruiting depends on the professionalism of a particular specialist, who can move between companies. Only a few agencies have developed their own methods guaranteeing a consistently high results regardless of a recruiter’s personality,” Kaslina said.
Ancor’s Pochtivaya added that larger agencies also practice personnel training to guarantee the professional level of their staff.
And yet, at the end of the day, the choice of recruitment agency sometimes goes on chance, or even the client wishing to “stick with the devil he knows,” Kaslina said.

TITLE: The Salary is Not Enough!
AUTHOR: By Yevgenya Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: No matter whether the reduction in price is real or not, people like to buy things on sale. The element of “an extra,” of “a bonus” rarely fails to attract. On the St. Petersburg labor market, where employers are growing tired of constantly raising salaries, the “extras” are becoming a company’s best staff-magnet. And the magnets are getting more and more colorful.

It’s an employee’s market in St. Petersburg at present, says Anna Yegorova, the coordinator of the Salary Survey Project, which was carried out by Ancor recruitment agency this fall. “The employers are in a rather difficult situation.”
To constantly raise staff salaries would make business unprofitable, adds Oksana Andronova, a key account manager at Kelly Services recruitment company. So, “companies aspire to find other motivational methods,” such as additions to the social package, among other bonuses, she said.

SHOW ME THE BONUS!
From payment for gym membership to company shares at a reduced price, some companies will offer everything imaginable to attract and retain key staff, said Yelena Semenikhina, a client service manager at Alfa Personnel. 
Salary “bonuses” include no-limit mobile phone expenses, full medical coverage, including dentist fees and life insurance, non-state pensions, a luxury car with driver for 24/7 disposal, and paid-for vacation tours.
“The [perks] are nothing extraordinary in themselves, but altogether they constitute an approach that reads: The company will solve ALL your problems — you will not think about anything apart from the job. It’s a “Come and work for us” message. And I have to say, this approach works,” Semenikhina said.
In terms of value, the cost of various compensations and bonuses can constitute from 20 percent to 50 percent of the base salary — up to 80 percent for sales positions, Yegorova said. 
And Russian companies tend to be more creative and generous, recruiters said.
A St. Petersburg-based engineering company, which asked not to be named, said that it does not state any bonuses in its employment contracts. That is not to say that there are no treats for the staff.
The company regularly organizes out-of-office activities for the personnel, often with a seasonal flavor. Remembering past glories, employees recollected trips that involved mountain skiing in Austria, climbing the Kilimanjaro mountain range, and beach holidays in Egypt.
Meanwhile StarSoft Development Labs, an IT outsourcing company with 350 staff operating in St. Petersburg, has thought up a way to combine extra financial perks with real and needed action to solve the prolem of there being few available IT staff in the city.
The company introduced the practice of offering employees a “referral bonus,” which StarSoft claims has helped find staff quickly.
“Referral bonus is an opportunity for any StarSoft employee to receive a monetary compensation for bringing a good professional to our company. Therefore, every member of staff can become the company’s paid recruiter,” Nikolai Puntikov, the CEO of StarSoft, said in a statement.
Other innovations by Russian firms include a so-called thirteenth salary (a monthly salary sum paid as a premium on top of the December pay), New Year’s and birthday bonuses, and the enterprise’s own products (in the case of manufacturing companies), says Olga Andreyeva, business development manager at Coleman Services.

AN ‘EXTRA’ PROBLEM
The problem with all the novelty compensations is their non-systematic, “haphazard” appearance, said Yury Mikhailov, managing partner of Consort Petersburg staffing consultancy. Russian companies, often managed by their owners, do not really care enough about the staff’s motivation to plan out the bonuses, he said.
“The compensation packages in Western companies are more structured, sometimes offering options as a means of enticing staff to perform better and appreciate the fact that the company’s financial performance and stock exchange indicators will directly affect their stock options and affluence,” Mikhkailov said.
Ancor’s Yegorova agreed, saying that the system of compensations and benefits in Russian companies “is often developed spontaneously.” The lesser planning of Russian companies can, however, lead to faster career growth, Mikhailov said, since “in Western firms this process is carefully managed through several stages [that span] years.”

TITLE: Outsourcing: Friend or Foe?
AUTHOR: By Yevgenya Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Outsourcing — a global trend to delegate the non-core functions of a business to other organizations — seems to be having a hard time acclimatizing in Russia. Employers don’t fully understand it. Recruiters struggle to educate the employers. And the labor force just doesn’t want to enlist as outsourcing staff. Has the trend a lasting Russian reality?

Despite being one of the latest buzz-words on the Russian labor market, outsourcing has won little understanding as an actual concept. The result has been a difficulty in attracting job-seekers to enlist as outsourcing staff, since “for most candidates it just sounds like temporary work,” said Maria Margulis, director of the leasing branch office of Ancor recruitment agency in St. Petersburg.
However, the idea that employers use outsourcing only to find temporary staff — largely true in the West — is a misconception when applied to companies in Russia, said Marina Varzar, a senior staffing specialist with Motorola in St. Petersburg. 
Varzar said Motorola, one of the city’s biggest employers in the information technology industry, uses outsourcing as an extra motivation tool and also as a way of solving the corporation’s complicated employment procedures.
Major companies in the Russian IT sector say they use the outsourcing service not only to cover extra staff needs during temporary projects. The service also allows for a temporary solution when taking on new employees. 
“We need to submit job applications to our head offices abroad for approval. It is a lengthy procedure and often we are not able to wait to fill the position,” a PR manager of one  major IT firm said, asking to remain anonymous.
Although registered through a recruitment agency, rather than the company, outsourcing staff work just like normal employees. “They have a regular daily routine and report to the same manager as their colleagues, who have a [direct] contract with Motorola,” Varzar said. The only difference would be what is entered in their labor book.
“Even though we register a worker with a recruitment agency — our human resource provider — we are looking for long-term cooperation with this worker. And as soon as a permanent position opens up, Motorola transfers the candidate onto its company books,” Varzar said. The fact of the transfer itself can be seen as “an additional promotion” and can stimulate worker motivation, she added.
From a legal standpoint, experts say the worker hardly loses out. Outsourcing contract restrictions are nominal and can be easily overcome, said Nikolai Chegayev, deputy director of Manpower recruitment agency in St. Petersburg, which specializes in outsourcing.
“From a legal point of view, outsourcing staff are not losing anything. On the contrary, if a company is not able to employ a worker [on a regular contract], it often practices the use of a so-called urgent contract, a dogovor-podryad, which does not guarantee the person full social security,” Chegayev said.
Neither does a person lose out in terms of having a true employment record, recruiters said. “Later, as a rule, outsourcing workers will write the real place of work on their resumes. This can also be supported with letters of recommendations and what’s written in the labor book does not play a great role,” Chegayev said.
Margulis agreed, but noted that the significance of the labor book varied. “For instance, labor records are not of great importance for students as they are mostly oriented on temporary jobs. Final-year students, however, want to work in the area of their professional specialization, so a permanent contract could be more interesting for them even with a lower salary,” she said.
Unclear labor books or work records that list a frequent change of employer can put a potential candidate at risk of being seen as unstable. Meanwhile, the compensation packages of outsourcing staff sometimes lacks medical insurance, among other perks added to the wage.
“If a prospective worker changes jobs often, an employer might feel suspicious,” Varzar said, explaining that “often” is taken to mean: swapping employers every two years.
“If in the West it is common practice to change jobs every year or two, this tendency is not very accepted in Russia. People [in the West] consciously chose frequent job changes to capitalize on the absence of long-term responsibilities, and on gaining the experience that can be later sold to another organization,” she said.
“However, this is not in the nature of Russian mentality, where people regard social guarantees and stability much higher,” she said.

TITLE: The Fortunate Dismissal
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A CEO of a large corporation enters the meeting room and hears the verdict of the company’s board. “You’re fired. And here is your $30 million,” says one of the directors.
Sounds like fiction, like a perversion of “The Apprentice” reality show? But, it is not. In May this year Forbes published a list of CEOs notably familiar with the procedure.

Harry Stonecipher was fired from Boeing on March 6, 2005, gaining a $44 million one-time payout in the process. Scott Livengood of Krispy Kreme, fired on Jan. 18, 2005, received $32.7 million. Motorola terminated Christopher Galvin’s contract on Sept. 19, 2003 paying him $29.1 million. And Carly Fiorina, ousted from Hewlett Packard on Feb. 10, 2005, pocketed approximately $21 million.
Or, how about Dick Grasso, former head of the New York Stock Exchange? The executive topped the list of sums paid out after a dismissal after having $140 million transferred into his account while he packed up his desk and made his way to the door, Forbes reported.

WHAT FOR?
In business slang, those happy occasions are called “golden parachutes,” which stands for lucrative benefits given to key executives when a company is taken over by another firm, resulting in the loss of their job.
The purpose of the golden parachute is to discourage an unwanted takeover attempt. It is also said to ensure the loyalty of top managers when a chance of a takeover rears its head.
The “parachute package” could include a severance payment, stock options, bonuses, pension proceeds and insurance. A western manager usually expects the equivalent of a two-year salary to be packed inside the parachute for soft landing, although in some cases it may reach a five-year salary figure.
In Russia, official statistics on the subject, as well as lists of ousted CEOs, are hard to find.
“The theme is extremely secret and problematic. Information on workforce markets, wages and other compensation terms comes only from rumors, talking to friends and business partners,” said Anastasia Kaslina, an expert with education and recruitment research agency Begin Group.
“Arrangements to prevent a takeover are normal for global companies. In Russia there are no local global companies, while foreign ones are only represented by relatively small branches,” said Olga Chebotkova, partner at Top Hunt International in St. Petersburg.
According to Finam investment bank information, in 1995 the golden parachute scheme was installed at the Krasny Oktyabr confectionery plant for top managers and several other key employees, in order to prevent a takeover of the factory by the Menatep group.
Unified Energy Systems, currently undergoing reorganization, currently provides golden parachutes for regional energy companies’ directors, said Mikhail Kuznetsov, head of the mergers and acquisitions department at Finam.

HIDDEN VALUE
“In reality, golden parachutes are used quite often, especially in the banking and finance sector, in large companies with turnover of more than $300 million. But this rarely gets publicity — such schemes are not always welcomed by shareholders and investors,” Kuznetsov said.
Golden parachutes are often used by production companies based in large, real estate investors, as well as firms operating in the energy, alcohol, development, natural resources, and media sectors, he said.
Despite secrecy, reports in the national media alleged that Dmitry Skarga, former director of Sovkomflot, was paid $1 million after his pre-term dismissal.
Boris Jordan, who oversaw the transition of the NTV television channel from Media-Most to Gazprom-Media holding received a $10 million golden parachute, according to Finam information.
In Russia, parachute payments start from $300,000, with the average being $1.5 million. European managers, meanwhile, usually earn about $2.5 million. The difference comes from the fact that in Russia mid-size companies are more likely to use the golden parachute scheme, Kuznetsov said.
On top of the money, managers get guaranties of employment in other firms since “Soviet nomenclature traditions are still popular with public authorities and large companies,” the Finam expert said.

QUESTIONABLE LANDING
Oleg Petrov, personnel management director at Silovye Mashiny (Power Machines) confirmed that the holding has agreements with top managers for higher payouts that include “shares options and bonuses, the size of which depends on the class and specification of the specialist.”
However, Petrov said he viewed such agreements as “a disputable tool in retaining valued managers. It incurs additional pressure and liabilities on the company. If the company can work without golden parachutes, it should avoid them.”
The golden parachute scheme is fairly rare in Russia, Petrov said, because “no employer wants to carry such serious liabilities.” It is mainly put in place by companies that experience a “serious deficit of qualified managers,” he said.
Finam’s Kuznetsov, however, said that golden parachutes are winning universal popularity. “Parachutes decrease an invader’s interest in a company,” although they cannot prevent a determined hostile takeover, he said.
Whether a golden parachute can increase employee loyalty also remains doubtful. Given the deficit of qualified workforce in Russia, a good manager is not afraid of being fired and does not need a parachute, Kuznetsov said.
“[With a parachute scheme] loyalty could increase, but not for the most valued specialists,” he warned.
The scheme could even have the reverse effect. In Europe, employees awarded with a parachute at times provoke their own dismissal.
“Dismissals on account of external reasons are rare. It is always an emergency situation, which is solved confidentially between top managers and the company,” Chebotkova said.

TITLE: When the Resume Lie is Uncovered
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Resumes have their own language. 
A “summer internship” often means studious coffee-making. “Basic German” means you can say your name with a German accent. “Good computer skills” — you like sending e-cards. But how often are resumes checked? And what happens if the “facts” are uncovered?

“We don’t check all the information on a resume in detail, right from the very beginning,” said Olga Andreyeva, business development manager at Coleman Services recruitment agency.
“This is not only because of the huge amount of work it would entail, but also so as not to undermine the position of those applicants currently in employment,” she said.
The difficulty in checking every detail on every submitted resume has encouraged many job applicants to be bolder yet more selective on paper than they might have been otherwise.
One fourth of all resumes in the U.K. contain false information concerning age, the Charity People public organization reported in a recent survey. A significant number of those surveyed felt that job applicants today need to conceal their true age for fear of discrimination.
In Russia only 3.5 percent of employers set strict age limits for jobs, according to data gathered by recruitment industry research agency Begin Group. Meanwhile, factors such as work experience, qualifications, and personal characteristics take prime importance in the selection process.
In order to identify falsities in an applicant’s resume and reference letters, recruitment agencies and the human resources departments of companies are required to review the information at different levels.
Most agencies say they check basic information such as the degree, city registration and employment records, which are available at the initial stage of the selection process.
Other points can usually be checked during the job interviews or verified confidentially through a few phone calls to companies the job applicant has had some dealings with, recruiters said.
In certain industries the limited circle of specialists means that “many people know each other and it’s not easy to conceal something anyway,” Andreyeva said.
In many Western companies operating in Russia, as well as in large Russian companies, after a general verification, there follows a series of final security checks.
“We had several cases when an applicant, who at first sight suited all company requirements, was rejected after a security check,” said the general director of EMG Professionals in St. Petersburg, Olga Andreyeva. “Although in such cases recruitment agencies do not usually get an explanation from the client companies, it often means that the rejected applicant had a previous criminal conviction and was a risk for the company.”

TITLE: Fund to Give City’s Deprived Youth a Royal Lesson
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Finding a job as a young graduate or as a school-leaver in St. Petersburg is not easy, despite there being more job offers than applicants. All companies want experience, not just a degree. But how much harder is it for young people from  so-called “difficult backgrounds,” such as the disabled or those from orphanages, to find a job? A U.K.-based charity says it may have the solution.

In spring 2005, a British non-profit organization the International Business Leaders Forum, in partnership with the St. Petersburg NGO Development Center, launched a two-year project called New Life Scenarios for Russian youth.
The project aimed to improve the quality of job and career information and consulting available to young people in St. Petersburg.
“We’d like to introduce the partnership approach and unite efforts of not-for-profit, business and the state, to jointly solve the psychological and practical problems young people today are having in obtaining a job,” said Yelena Korf, Russian representative of the International Business Leaders Forum, or IBLF.
“In particular, we want to reach young people from non-privileged backgrounds,” Korf, who is based in St. Petersburg, said. 
Working together with the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast authorities, as well as businesses in the region, IBLF will initially set up special courses for those involved in helping young people find employment: Staff at job centers, university careers advisors, and members of youth organizations.
The project’s first wave will take on 30 participants next spring. By fall next year, the charity hopes to enroll 100 people on the courses and expand the opportunity to a wider range of applicants. These could be university students interested in helping pass on the project’s know-how to other young people.
“At the moment staff at job centers or careers service centers are not altogether confident in how to approach their task,” Korf said. By offering places on the course to them first of all, IBLF will seek to “install an infrastructure of knowledge.”
“We hope that those who passed the course will later train and advise others,” Korf said. “I know some great students at the St. Petersburg State University of Finances and Economics who combine study with working as trainers at nonprofit organizations.”
IBLF’s project, sponsored by a two-year, 300,000-euro ($359,000) grant from Tacis, a European Union initiative to aid development in Eastern Europe, will split its course into a week of study and three one-week placements in different sectors: commercial, public, and non-profit.
An intensive one week of studying will include psychological training and advice on how to approach job-hunting and how to set up a business, as well as seminars on self-assessment.
Korf hopes local business people will be interested in volunteering to  share their knowledge and experience with young people to promote business as being socially aware.
Irina Galiyeva, public relations manager at Japan Tobacco International, or JTI, which operates a large factory on the edge of St. Petersburg, said businesses will be interested in supporting such schemes.
“It could be interesting to companies like Coca Cola, which work on image and marketing among the younger audience,” Galiyeva said. “The company may not gain new workers or managers, but in promoting training programs for young people from deprived backgrounds, a corporation can show itself to be a socially responsible business.”
With the legal age for smoking set at 18, tobacco firms with large local factories like JTI or Phillip Morris are restricted in their work with young people. However, JTI takes on 20 fresh graduates each year as interns, which can lead to future employment.
The company is one of many in the region to offer trainee and management trainee experience, which Yury Mikhailov, managing partner of Consort Petersburg recruitment agency, says play a major role in banking on the future loyalty of young people.
It is not just youngsters from deprived backgrounds, but also university graduates who are sometimes unaware of real job needs and expectations, and work experience and internships help to bridge the knowledge gap. The Association of the Personnel Search Consultants in the Northwest even felt the need this year to produce “The Young Specialist Guide,” a book to help young people take their first steps on the labor market, sold in most major bookstores in the city.
But such publications, no matter how practical, may never reach youths from deprived backgrounds.
“Through the IBLF project we show the deprived youth another way,” Korf said. “Instead of entering a university, they can gain vocational qualification and go to work at a major factory and enjoy a good standard of living and salary. At present, the youths don’t know that such opportunities exist.”

TITLE: Beyond the paycheck: how coaching can help you keep you workforce (happy)
AUTHOR: By Margarita Gokun Silver
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Margarita Gokun Silver, President of the Global Coach Center
We are all familiar with the situation: a company enters a market, hires well-qualified people, invests time and resources in training, gets accustomed to their expertise, and then … then, it begins to lose them. It happens to almost every organization, it happens more often than managers like, and it’s been happening regularly in St. Petersburg.
In fact, this has become such a problem in the city, some companies located near to each other, have come to an informal agreement not to hire the others’ staff.     
So how can a company retain its employees? Compensation is the obvious answer, but it is neither the only one, nor the perfect one. Money, after all, isn’t everything. A department manager of a prestigious and well-paying organization has lost three staff in the last six months. There may be several reasons, among them a sign the manager keeps above her desk: “You are entitled to ***my*** opinion.”
This manager runs her department through a culture of fear, but presuming you would actually like your staff to stay – what options are there? One popular approach of recent years has been the coaching approach. It sets as its aims to increase individual performance, to stimulate a creative office atmosphere and effective teamwork. So, how does it work?
There are five interconnected tenets that identify the coaching approach and each one is focused on emphasizing and harnessing the unique potential of every individual.
(1) The coaching approach assumes all people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. That is, the potential of each employee to achieve great heights already exists within them and only a small “nudge” is needed to help the employee on their way. If each person has the answer within themselves, the manager no longer needs to micromanage, or have all the answers. Instead, the company promotes personal discovery and self-responsibility for each task.  
(2) The second tenet is “safe space,” an environment which does not support judgments or condescending attitude; it’s the space where the exchange of ideas and opinions is encouraged and ***no one gets to be wrong.*** An opinion is just an opinion and an idea is just an idea. The employee needs to feel comfortable to approach the manager, needs to feel that they won’t be put down, laughed at, disregarded, or degraded.
This is the opposite to establishing an atmosphere of fear, where other opinions don’t matter and creativity is frowned upon. In a climate of fear there is a limit on trust, one of the most important characteristic of a “safe space” at a workplace. 
(3) The third tenet is powerful communications, a concept which consists of five elements: alliance building, compelling questions, three levels of listening, value farming, and objective feedback. The idea is to base language on curiosity and respect to people. A manager needs to ***know*** his staff to understand what they are capable of. What are their goals, motivations, values? This becomes even more important when working in diverse and cross-cultural environments.
(4) The fourth is logistical, for it sets in place a structure and a process for individual development. The structure contains SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timed) and the process is grounded in accountability.
(5) And the last, but not the least, is leadership development. With a coaching approach managers support their staff to grow and stretch their capabilities. With such support staff create, build, and “play” thus acquiring a high-level of self-confidence and mastery, which with time translates directly into leadership potential. Employees stay not only due to job satisfaction, but an understanding that they are on the way to becoming leaders themselves.
***Margarita Gokun Silver is the president of Global Coaching Center, a life and executive coaching company with offices in Washington, DC and St Petersburg, Russia.***
website: www.GlobalCoachCenter.com

TITLE: The Feng Shui of the Office
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In the U.S. one third of company losses related to employee absences are due to illness health caused by poor working conditions, according to a report by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

One way to alleviate this problem that has gained in popularity in the West over the last decade has come from the Chinese teaching of Feng Shui, a 3,000 year old practice of placement and arrangement of space to achieve harmony with the environment, based on Taoist principles.
Modern experts in the field say the use of Feng Shui could also greatly increase the comfort of a modern office, which as a result would boost the company’s work output and profits.

IT’S HIP TO BE SQUARE
According to Feng Shui’s modern interpretation, an office must be rectangular or square in shape, should not face any sharp, arrow-like objects, or be located in the shadow of an overhanging multi-storied building.
Marina Andreyeva, manager of a Feng Shui center in St. Petersburg, says it’s better for male directors to have their offices in the northwestern corner of a building, while the southwestern corner is more suitable for their female counterparts.
The best place for the sales, marketing, and advertisement departments is in the southwestern or southern part of the office, whereas accountants and economists, who frequently write reports, could work more efficiently in a southeastern corner of the office.
The director’s office, as the most important place in the building, needs to be carefully chosen so that it does not accumulate negative energy, says Natalya Pravdina, an expert in positive thinking and psychology, and an author of best-selling books on Feng Shui.
“The perfect placement for a top manager’s office is on the middle floor of a building, as far as possible from the entrance and not in the region of the toilet,” Pravdina said.
An office room should not have too many windows, unless they are covered with horizontal blinds. The best place for the director to sit would be behind a wall and not in front of the door, Pravdina said. A director’s office should have a large armchair and desk, both of which symbolize authority, power, and protection.
The stereotypical director from American movies, who sits in his penthouse with a row of skyscrapers seen through the windows behind his back, in fact lacks support and can easily lose not only his temper but the whole business, according to Pravdina’s interpretation of Feng Shui rules.

PICTURE THE MONEY
Pravdina says that Feng Shui, as a science, has its own laws; misused items, even those that are imbued with positive energy — but in the wrong place — could cause damage. For example, in a typical photo of mountains placed above a row of chairs would charge the atmosphere with extra energy.
On the other hand, a similarly placed picture of a waterfall would put a damper on business plans, although in Feng Shui water symbolizes metal and money. Nonetheless, Pravdina insists that a small fountain or an aquarium in the southeastern part of the office, alongside the figure of a turtle or a crystal on the director’s desk, are among company must-haves.
Applied Feng Shui principles read that every office desk must be clean and tidy, since any form of chaos accumulates negative energy that disables all working processes.
 Although rooms without windows are hard places in which to work, more daylight lamps and nice plants can save the situation.

ERGONOMICALLY TERRIFIC
Besides the building layout, an ergonomically sound workspace is equally vital. Ergonomics, a science that integrates several different sciences such as anatomy, demographics, physiology, and human psychology in order to create an optimum school and working environment, has been widely used for offices all over the world, although it is not much applied in Russia.
“Unfortunately, many Russian employers consider their office workers’ health a private matter, unless it directly affects a working process,” says Dmitry Simkin, a specialist in treating diseases of the spine and an author of training programs on ergonomics in the office.
Such a negligent attitude on the part of employers is repaid in the form of losses in productivity and quality of work, said Simkin.
As a doctor of osteopathy, Simkin thinks that one of the main problems in modern offices is the way most employees sit at the computer. Low back pain, cervical stiffness, frozen shoulders, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other health problems, as well as loss of sight, could be easily prevented by using some uncomplicated ergonomic rules that “help to reduce the level of professional illnesses in between 20 percent and 80 of cases, and [can] increase labor productivity by more than 20 percent,” Simkin said.
Although managers often believe ergonomic furniture to be expensive, sometimes just a common orthopedic pillow is laid on a standard office chair, or a simple re-tuning of the computer screen can make a worker feel more comfortable.
Using back pillows and special footrests for tall people reduces muscle tension and facilitates the working process. “In such a pose a human body is as well balanced as a spaceman in the state of weightlessness,” Simkin said. It’s only the proper combination of tuning and orientation of all furniture and office equipment that enables a worker to maintain a rational posture throughout the day, he said.
The modern science of ergonomics and the Chinese teachings of Feng Shui may not have gained widespread professional popularity in Russia, but recruitment industry experts say the situation is changing.
“More applicants think that a comfortable office environment and well-equipped workspace are among the crucial factors they consider when choosing a job,” said Lidia Treivis, public relations manager for recruitment industry research company Begin Group.
Meanwhile, Feng Shui consultants say the popularity of the teaching is becoming popular for Russians looking to improve the arrangements of their house. Familiarity with such non-traditional principles could yet bring it closer to the office, although Simkin says the growing trend needs government support.
“The U.S. government started a special program in ergonomics development over six years ago, but no one knows when it will happen in Russia,” Simkin said.

TITLE: How to be … A Magazine editor
AUTHOR: By Yevgenya Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Glamour, nightly parties and wild creativity — that’s the stereotypical image of the magazine industry that attracts many a young pen to glossy pages, but does the reality live up to it? Natalya Dudi, chief editor of Cosmopolitan-Petersburg, tells all.

When Dudi began her magazine career at Cosmopolitan-Petersburg four years ago she already had many years experience of working in radio, broadcasting on the popular station Europa Plus.
Despite familiarity with mass audiences, one thing about editorship she says she learned very quickly: "You have to work hard!"
As the editor-in-chief of the St. Petersburg edition of Cosmopolitan, the No. 1 selling magazine for women in Russia, Dudi says her job requires more than being professionally glamorous.
“It’s not just about being the face of the company. Apart from generating ideas, as a chief editor you have to know all the technological processes of a magazine and be a good organizer, since you are organizing everyone — from photographers to writers,” she said.

Networking
Being able to meet people and connect easily is also a vital editorial skill. Dudi says she managed to reach her present position precisely because she happened to be at the right place with the right people.
“The publishing house knew me already, since I was a contributor to the magazine at the time. I had also worked with the publishers while employed as a press-attache at a radio station,” Dudi said.
Being familiar with the magazine, knowing the city, having contacts and an idea of the publishing market also contributed to getting the job at Cosmopolitan, Dudi adds.

The right format
Sticking to a certain way of writing, to a style and particular topics, in other words — adapting to a “format,” is of paramount importance if one is to succeed in the magazine industry. “You have to play by the market rules and you’d better love it,” Dudi says.
For young writers, the Cosmopolitan editor suggests finding a publication that directly suits the person’s interests. This can minimize the feeling that a writer is “constrained” to writing within a particular framework.
“When I came to work at Cosmopolitan, straight away I was given an explanation of our format. The company regards its style as a law by which to abide,” Dudi said.
“And no matter how beautiful, talented  or great [an article] is, it just won’t be published, unless it fits with the format,” she said.
The rules of the industry are certainly strict, as perhaps for most jobs in media, as well as other professions.
“But, once you’ve found your vocation, you are the happiest person in the world,” Dudi said.