SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1143 (9), Tuesday, February 7, 2006
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TITLE: Ustinov Criticizes Police And Military
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a broadside attack on corruption and incompetence in every so-called power agency but his own, Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov on Friday chastised police for covering up crimes, accused the Federal Anti-Drug Service of being an essentially redundant agency and said that the number of military officers who committed crimes last year would add up to two regiments.
Speaking at a meeting of prosecutors Friday, Ustinov said police officers nationwide had covered up more than 700 murders, 1,500 assaults and 80,000 property-related crimes.
“Not even the threat of sitting in the defendant’s cage stops police officers from covering up crimes,” Ustinov said, Interfax reported.
Ustinov said more than 3.5 million crimes were committed in Russia in 2005, a 25 percent jump from the previous year, and that the number of unsolved crimes had risen by one-third compared with 2004, reaching more than 1.6 million, including more than 5,000 manslaughters, RIA-Novosti reported.
Ustinov said it had “become the norm” with many investigators to “ignore” their responsibilities to conduct thorough investigations, Interfax reported.
President Vladimir Putin, who spoke at the start of the meeting, called the more than 70,000 unsolved disappearances of people in 2005 “a frightening number, one that is even frightening to say,” Interfax reported.
Ustinov also said crime was rising in the armed forces, and blamed the trend largely on officers. “You could form two regiments out of the number of officers that committed crimes last year,” Ustinov said, Interfax reported.
He said some 16,000 servicemen were charged with criminal offenses, and that 550 officers were punished for beating underlings, RIA-Novosti reported. 
Ustinov cited as an extreme example the New Year’s Eve attack on a young soldier at the Chelyabinsk Armor Academy, which led to the amputation of the man’s legs and genitals.
Ustinov said more than 1,000 servicemen had been charged with theft. “They stole enough money to buy three dozen modern tanks,” he said.
Turning to the Federal Drug Control Service, he said its army of 40,000 officials investigated only one-third of all drug-related crimes. “Other law-enforcement agencies have to do the rest,” he said.
The agency has uncovered only 124 incidents of illegal drug production and a little more than 3,000 cases of dealing and possession, Ustinov said.
Putin set up the agency in 2003, but it has courted controversy for, among other things, aggressively seeking out veterinarians who use ketamine, an anesthetic commonly used in pet operations but included on a list of illegal substances.
Lev Levinson, a lawyer and expert at the Human Rights Institute, welcomed Ustinov’s “harsh” criticism but said the Prosecutor General’s Office needed to implement better measures to battle corruption and incompetence within its own ranks.
“When it comes to overseeing the police, its quite good,” Levinson said of Ustinov’s office. “Commenting on the military, it’s more of an independent observer. But when it comes to its own people, it has difficulties remaining unbiased.”
The Prosecutor General’s Office is responsible for ensuring that other federal agencies comply with the law and for investigating cases of abuse.
Kommersant on Saturday ridiculed Ustinov for finding fault with other agencies but saying strikingly little about the work of his own agency during his speech, which lasted two hours.
In one of the few references to his office, Ustinov said: “The prosecutor’s office is probably the only federal agency where ordinary citizens can bring their troubles and everyday problems,” Kommersant reported.
In his sweeping remarks, Ustinov also said many Russians suffered from a lack of heating and electricity, that regional and local administrations did not allow small business to develop and that conditions in many prisons were unsatisfactory. He said Russia’s national idea rests on a love for the motherland, and quoted from the 19th-century historian Vasily Klyuchevsky and the 19th-century poet Nikolai Nekrasov as he wrapped up his speech, Kommersant reported.
Putin said at his annual news conference on Tuesday that he was currently listening to recordings of Klyuchevsky’s lectures while traveling by car.

TITLE: Iran Case Referred To UN
AUTHOR: By Paul Ames and Ali Akbar Dareini
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MUNICH, Germany —  The International Atomic Energy Agency agreed to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, but Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Sunday questioned whether any sanctions would bring Iran in line with international demands.
Twenty-seven of 35 member nations on the IAEA board, including Russia, voted on Saturday for Iran’s referral to the Security Council over fears it wants to produce nuclear arms.
Iran responded Sunday by announcing that had ended all voluntary cooperation with the IAEA, an action required under a law it passed last year.
Tehran also said an Iranian delegation would hold talks in Moscow on Feb. 16 regarding a Russian offer to enrich uranium on Russian soil as an alternative to Tehran’s nuclear program. The remarks were a reversal from Saturday, when a senior Iranian official said the offer was dead because of the IAEA vote. 
Ivanov repeated the offer Sunday, saying it would allow Iran to develop peaceful nuclear energy while imposing cast-iron guarantees that potential bomb-making material would be kept out of Iranian hands. 
“The fuel will be made elsewhere, then shipped under international controls and sent back as used fuel for recycling,” he told an international security conference in Munich. “There is no risk for anyone in this chain of events. I hope that Iran will accept this Russian proposal.”
Despite Russia’s IAEA vote to report Iran to the council, Ivanov questioned whether sanctions would be the best course to follow. “The case of Iraq shows that sanctions are not always effective. It’s a tricky thing,” he said. 
In general, however, “we’ve always said we’re against any country in the world to develop nuclear weapons,” he said. “We’re sticking to that.” 
For the moment, he said, the IAEA should continue its work keeping tabs on Iran’s program. 
“As long as they are inside Iran, at least we can get some picture of what is happening there,” he said.
He said Russia would decide on its position at the Security Council when it hears the report to be drawn up next month by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, who has posed Iran with list of questions. 
“We do expect answers to each question,” Ivanov said. 
The senior U.S. official at the Munich conference on Sunday said Washington was determined to build a wide global coalition and would work within the “international system” to put pressure on Iran, seeking to avoid divisions with major allies as during the run-up to the Iraq war. 
“Iran will try to divide us,” said Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. “It’s very important that we try to work together, send a common message.”
Zoellick said it was also important for the United States to get its message across to the Iranian people, acknowledging that mistakes were made in explaining American policy to Iraqis. 
Iran and the threat from Islamist terrorism dominated the annual Munich conference. 
On Saturday, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and European officials united in calling for diplomatic pressure on Iran, but Rumsfeld was quoted telling a German newspaper Sunday that the U.S. had not ruled out a military strike. 

n Ivanov, who is also deputy prime minister and tipped as a possible successor to President Vladimir Putin, came under fire at the conference from critics who accused the Kremlin of bullying its former Soviet neighbors, in particular by restricting energy supplies to Georgia and Ukraine or supporting the authoritarian leadership in Belarus. 
“We do not put pressure on our neighbors,” he insisted, saying Russia was simply applying market economy rules in hiking the price of natural gas exports. He stressed willingness to increase cooperation with the West in fighting terrorism, but complained of double standards.
“Attacks on military personnel of the coalition forces in Iraq are still unequivocally defined as a display of terrorism, and similar actions of militants in Russia are quite often presented as a display of the struggle of the Chechen people for their freedom and independence,” he said. 
Ivanov suggested that NATO cooperate with Russia and Central Asian nations to combat drugs trafficking out of Afghanistan. 
However, harking back to a Cold-War issue, he complained that NATO nations had delayed ratification of an arms control treaty. 
“We have seen distinct intentions of the NATO countries to continuously delay the ratification, and that worries us,” Ivanov said. NATO has linked the ratification of the treaties to the withdrawal of Russian troops from Moldova and Georgia.

TITLE: New Campaign Tackles HIV/AIDS Prejudice
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Stay Human, a major nationwide campaign aimed at battling a prejudice against HIV-positive people, arrived in St. Petersburg last week with advertisements calling for greater understanding among the general public. 
“HIV isn’t transmited via friendship,” is the motto of the campaign, which has been organized by a number of Russian humanitarian foundations, including the Russian Coordination Council for HIV-Positive People and local charity foundation Delo. The campaign will last for three months.
Yevgenia Alexeyeva, director of the Moscow-based Focus-Media Foundation and a co-organizer of the project, said she was astonished by the widespread misconceptions about HIV/AIDS in Russian society.
“We conducted a poll in ten regions of Russia just before the start of this campaign, and were stunned by the results,” Alexeyeva said. “Seventy percent of the poll’s participants believe that HIV can be transmitted through mosquito bites! Of course, this is not true.”
According to Alexeyeva’s research, 56 percent of respondents believe that HIV can be caught by kissing an infected person, and 40 percent said HIV can be transmited by coughing and sneezing. Over half of the poll’s participants are convinced that it is possible to get infected when you share an office/workplace with an HIV-positive person.
Alexander Rumyantsev, head of the St. Petersburg Humanitarian Foundation Delo which provides support to local HIV-positive people, said that, for many years, fear has been the only prevention measure against the disease in Russia.
“Scary articles and TV reports did much to reinforce the stigma,” he said. “And it will take years to get rid of it. But I am against breaking stereotypes fast. Breaking [stereotypes] is always traumatic. It’s best to keep up a continued, widespread but non-aggressive campaign.”
Until recently, most people infected with the HIV virus in Russia had little chance to get therapy, but the situation has changed dramatically this year.
President Vladimir Putin announced in September of last year that the 2006 federal AIDS budget would be 20 to 30 times higher than in 2005.
Russia has increased funding for HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs from 130 million rubles ($4.5 million) in 2004 — enough to treat just 600 patients — to 3 billion rubles ($140 million) this year. 
However, therapy alone can’t solve the problem. Even with more treatment being made available, not everyone is rushing to get help, experts say. Those who believe they may be infected know that once the diagnosis is confirmed, they will endure hatred and isolation that, in Russia, go hand in hand with the medical symptoms of the illness. Even when alarming symptoms occur and therapy becomes vital to their health, many people prefer not to be registered and postpone dealing with doctors. 
“The degree of discrimination is horrendous, even the doctors who inform you about the diagnosis or are supposed to give you therapy often act in the most unpleasant way,” said Alexander Volgin, head of the Northwestern branch of the Russian Coordination Council For HIV-Positive people. “When I was diagnosed with HIV in 2000, nobody even told me about the existence of therapy in principle.”
Volgin said doctors are often guilty of the same prejudices. “It is not uncommon for an ambulance to refuse to help HIV-positive people,” he said. “When they arrive on the scene and find out a patient has HIV, not all of them stay and provide medical assistance.”
The number of HIV infections per 100,000 people has nearly doubled in the past five years, from 121 in 2001 to 231 by the end of 2005, the Federal Service for the Supervision of Consumer Rights and Human Welfare said in a statement in December. Russia is facing gloomy forecasts from the international experts of the World Health Organization, who warn that up to one third of the country’s population may be wiped out by the virus within the next 50 years.
But the country’s chief sanitary doctor Gennady Onishchenko warns that not all the pessimistic forecasts are to be believed.
“In 1997, there were forecasts that in ten years’ time there will be between five and seven million HIV-positive people in Russia,” he said during an international conference on HIV/AIDS issues in Suzdal in October. “But now, according to the boldest unofficial estimates, there are not more than one million of them in the country. We have done better than the worst-case scenario and we are battling on.”
Since 2002, between 3,000 and 4,500 new cases have been registered annually in St. Petersburg. According to official statistics, 27,602 HIV cases were registered in the city between January 1987 and October 2005.
According to statistics for the whole of Russia, almost 50 percent of cases result from sexual contract. In St. Petersburg, however, the picture is different. Galina Volkova, an official with the St. Petersburg Center For AIDS Prevention, said 80 percent of new HIV cases registered in 2005 result from intravenous drug use. 
“The problem is becoming more localized,” Volkova said at a news conference in December. “[In 2004] only 65 percent of new registered cases were intravenous drug addicts.”

TITLE: NBP Seizes Military Office In Protest
AUTHOR: By Mansur Mirovalev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Activists from the radical National Bolshevik party briefly seized a room in a military registration and enlistment office in Moscow on Monday to protest conscription and abuse in the military ranks. 
About 15 young men barricaded themselves in the office, waving flags with communist symbols, threw leaflets out the windows and held up portraits of Andrei Sychev, the 18-year-old private who was beaten and tortured by fellow servicemen in the Ural Mountains region on the New Year’s Eve and had his legs and genitals amputated as a result. 
“The ministers and generals need an army of draftees. Russia needs an army of volunteers,” the leaflets said. Police detained the activists for holding an unauthorized protest, but released them after charging them with misdemeanors. 
The National Bolsheviks, led by the novelist Eduard Limonov, claim a total of about 17,000 members and are known for demonstrations and acts of protest, such as hanging banners criticizing President Vladimir Putin from the window of a hotel off Red Square. 
Authorities have increasingly cast the party as an extremist force and in November the Supreme Court banned the group as a political party. But it continues to exist and call itself a party. Analysts say in the absence of any other strong opposition groups, the authorities see the National Bolsheviks as a threat. 
The incident, which was exposed two weeks ago, fueled public anger over bullying that has plagued the nation’s demoralized and underfunded military and hurt the reputation of Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, widely seen as a potential successor to Putin in 2008 elections. 
Russia’s Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov told the upper house of parliament Monday that in 2005 about 6,000 people fell victims to military abuse, the RIA Novosti news agency reported. Over 2,600 servicemen were convicted last year on charges of abusing fellow soldiers, he said. 
Savenkov said that in an incident similar to that of Sychev, a conscript in the Siberian Irkutsk region fled his unit last month after being beaten by his sergeant and was hospitalized with hypothermia that could lead to amputations. He said the sergeant was detained.

TITLE: African Killed In Street Attack
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: A man from Mali was stabbed to death early Sunday, the head of an organization for Africans in the city said.
Aliu Tunkara, president of African Unity in St. Petersburg, said the victim had graduated from a medical school in St. Petersburg nine years ago but was jobless and had been living on the street. 
Tunkara said police told him the man was found dead, but the RIA-Novosti news agency, also citing police, said he died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital. Ekho-Moscow radio station reported that he had been attacked on Bolshoi Sampsonievsky Prospekt. 
The victim was identified as Dembele Mamutu, 38, RIA-Novosti reported. 
Police said he had been taken into custody for public intoxication several times in the past. 
Tunkara said the victim was married and had a child. 
St. Petersburg has seen numerous racially motivated attacks in recent months. 
A student from Cameroon was stabbed to death in St. Petersburg in December, and a Congolese student was killed in the city in September.

TITLE: Driver Gets Conviction For Crash
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A court sentenced a driver on Friday to four years in internal exile for his role in a car crash that killed Altai Governor Mikhail Yevdokimov.
Yevdokimov, the comedian turned governor of the Altai region, was killed in August 2005 when the car he was riding in smashed into a tree after colliding with the car driven by Oleg Shcherbinsky. 
Yevdokimov’s driver and bodyguard also were killed, and his wife was seriously injured.
A court in the village of Zonalnoye convicted Shcherbinsky of traffic violations leading to the death of two or more people and sentenced him to four years in a labor settlement where he will live independently but be required to remain under judicial monitoring. 
Shcherbinsky was making a left turn on a highway outside the regional capital, Barnaul, when the governor’s car was overtaking him from the left lane.
The court ruled that he should have yielded to the governor’s car, which prosecutors said was traveling no less than 149 kilometers per hour but the defense said was the speed was over 200 kilometers per hour, NTV television reported.
“Shcherbinsky committed criminal negligence. He had the possibility of avoiding a collision,” Judge Galina Shcheglovskaya said, RIA-Novosti reported.
Shcherbinsky, however, said the governor’s car was traveling so fast that he had no time to change his course.
The death of Yevdokimov, who rode a wave of discontent to election as governor but then came under sustained political attack for purported ineffectual leadership, provoked speculation that he could have fallen victim to a murder plot.
Some journalists and political analysts said Yevdokimov could have been targeted for assassination because of a dispute over corruption, possibly involving smuggling in the region, which borders Kazakhstan.

TITLE: High Hopes for Krasnaya Polyana’s Slopes
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — It has the support of President Vladimir Putin and a dream to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. 
The Krasnaya Polyana skiing development near Sochi promises to rival the Alps with quality slopes and lodgings for ski enthusiasts and serious competitors alike, said officials associated with Gazprom, Interros and other companies that are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the 62,000-hectare area.
Gazprom, the state-controlled gas monopoly, plans to open a resort with six ski lifts, more than a dozen slopes and several dozen cabins later this year. Vladimir Potanin’s Interros holding is to start construction of a $140 million ski center called Roza Hutor this summer. 
The $425 million Karusel resort, which is the brainchild of Nortgaz co-owner and Krasnodar Senator Farkhat Akhmedov, is to open its first ski lift this month.
“There are not very many quality ski resorts in Russia, and those among them that are financially successful are even fewer,” said Nikola Popov, general director of Roza Hutor. 
“Our ambition is to build an international-standard ski complex with prices cheaper than Europe’s,” he said.
The Kremlin has similar ambitions and is backing Krasnaya Polyana and Sochi for the 2014 Olympics. With an eye on the Games, the government last week approved a 327 billion ruble ($11.7 billion) plan to turn Sochi into a year-round mountain and Black Sea resort. 
More than half of the money will come from federal and regional coffers and go toward infrastructure such as electricity, communication and transportation. Outside investment is to cover the rest and will be spent on sports and tourism facilities.
Among the proposed projects are a 50-kilometer mini-metro system, a bobsled track and 14 other sports facilities that will accommodate 200,000 fans, new hotels, and a reconstruction of the main airport serving the area, in Alder.
The government believes that the annual flow of tourists to Sochi and the surrounding mountains would triple to 6 million by 2015.
If Russia wins the Olympics bid, it could collect an additional $1 billion to improve infrastructure from the International Olympic Committee and corporate sponsors of the Games. 
If the bid fails, the program’s $12 billion price tag would be halved.
Olympics aside, the government has another ambition: to make Sochi competitive with the Alps, the government says.
Putin, speaking at his annual news conference on Tuesday, promised to develop Sochi, saying that “the country needs a modern resort with developed infrastructure.”
Putin was shown on television swooping down the slopes at Krasnaya Polyana when he was acting president in February 2000. Some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen pledged at the time to make the area a Russian version of France’s famed Courchevel ski resort.
Potanin is a regular at Courchevel and celebrates his Jan. 3 birthday there nearly every year.
Potanin agreed to build Roza Hutor together with another Courchevel regular, Chelsea football owner and Chukotka Governor Roman Abramovich. But in 2003 the project nearly fell apart when Interros announced it was suspending the project indefinitely due to a conflict between its ideas for the resort and the government’s development plans.
The project was rekindled a year later and is now the proposed site for the Olympics skiing competition.
Roza Hutor is currently holding a tender for a chief contractor, and a winner is to be selected in March. Construction on the 429-hectare site is to start this summer and last four years. 
When finished, the ski center will offer 55 slopes and 15 ski lifts to up to 9,500 visitors per day.
Roza Hutor will not yet build accommodations, but it may review its plans once the center’s capacity reaches 7,000 people, Popov said.
Gazprom is more advanced in its development plans than any other investor. It has hired Samara-based firm Skado to equip the slopes and Turkish firm Hazinedaroglu to build accommodations on the 95-hectare area.
Skado began construction last spring, and is now completing six ski lifts on the Psekhako Ridge and 16 runs, said Alexander Rytsarev, head of design at Skado.
“We are now halfway finished. There will be six more lifts and 13 more runs,” Rytsarev said.
Gazprom has completed more than 30 cabins and is currently building three hotels for 950 guests, said Viktor Protsenko, the local administration’s chief architect, who is overseeing Krasnaya Polyana.
The resort also has a fenced-off three-story wooden guesthouse for official delegations that is built in the traditional Russian style. 
The resort has parking for 300 cars, its own power generator and its own gas pipeline, which stretches 60 kilometers from Adler.
A shopping and entertainment center is to be completed in 2008-2009, Protsenko said.
Gazprom refused to discuss the resort. A source familiar with the project said Gazprom allocated $170 million for construction last year.
Later this month, the Karusel resort will open its first ski lift, and it will be able to carry 2,400 skiers an hour. By 2012, Karusel is to have 20 ski lifts, slopes of a combined length of 70 kilometers, ski schools, and cabins, hotels and apartment blocks for 4,500 guests.
The only existing operator in Krasnaya Polyana, Alpika Servis, intends to invest $20 million into expanding its number of ski lifts from the existing five to an eventual 12 and stretching its slopes to a total of 50 kilometers, said its chairman, Pyotr Fedin. 
Demand is expected to be huge. Russia has about 2 million ski enthusiasts, and 150,000 to 200,000 of them are believed to go to Europe every year to ski, spending at least $1,000 each. 
“The growth is great. The number of Russian skiers in the French Alps jumped 41 percent” last winter, said Mikhail Musiyants, general director of Erzog, a tourist agency that specializes in ski resorts.
Musiyants said the key was to build ski lifts. “Once ski lifts are in place, people will rush there and then accommodation will catch up,” Musiyants said.
Boris Petrov, head of the Association of Mountain Ski Centers, was more skeptical. He expressed concern that the projects were being rushed ahead without adequate planning. “We need to first create a registry of mountains and evaluate whether they are fit for ski centers from environmental, economic and political points of view,” Petrov said.
But Protsenko, the Krasnaya Polyana architect, was not concerned. “When all these ski centers are in action, there will be demand for them all,” he said. “The lines are just crazy over the New Year’s holidays. And we’re talking about serious folks whose pockets are not empty.”

TITLE: McCain Urges Boycott of G8
TEXT: Bloomberg 
MUNICH — Leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations should boycott a summit hosted by Russia this year to protest President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic course, U.S. Senator John McCain said Saturday.
McCain, addressing a Munich conference on security policy, said Russia was “in pursuit of autocracy at home and abroad,” citing recent disputes with the Ukraine and Georgia on natural gas, planned missile sales to Iran and a clampdown on the media.
“Under Mr. Putin, Russia today is neither a democracy nor one of the world’s leading economies, and I seriously question whether the G8 leaders should attend the St. Petersburg summit’’ in July, McCain told the conference.
Other U.S. lawmakers have also questioned Russia’s membership in the G8. Putin defended Russia’s membership during his annual news conference last week, saying it was preventing the G8 from turning into “a gathering of fat cats.”

TITLE: NGO Head Found Guilty
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Nizhny Novgorod court on Friday found a journalist and activist who has campaigned against rights abuses in Chechnya guilty of inciting ethnic hatred, his colleagues said, a verdict he condemned as part of a state assault on nongovernmental organizations. 
Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, the head of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society in Nizhny Novgorod, was handed a two-year suspended sentence. He dismissed his conviction as politically motivated and vowed to appeal it in Russia and the European Court of Human Rights.
“This is part of a major assault on NGOs in Russia,” Dmitriyevsky said by telephone after the verdict, branding it “illegal and unfair.”
“I consider this case politically directed,” Dmitriyevsky said of the charges filed against him. 
For Human Rights denounced the verdict as “a continuation of the shameful practice of false accusations against human rights defenders and active opponents of the war in Chechnya.”
Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, said it created a climate of intimidation aimed at silencing rights activists who criticized the policies of President Vladimir Putin. 
Dmitriyevsky’s trial came amid tightening state control over NGOs. Putin last month signed a restrictive NGO law. 
The case against Dmitriyevsky was centered on two publications by the group’s newspaper, Pravozashchita, or Rights Defense, in 2004. The paper ran statements by then-Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov — who was killed last year by federal forces — urging the international community to help end the war in Chechnya, and by his envoy Akhmed Zakayev, calling on Russians not to vote for Putin and thus help end the conflict.

TITLE: Volume of Mortgages To More Than Double
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The annual number of mortgages granted to city residents is set to double in 2006, as growing competition and falling interest rates force banks to offer new, more attractive schemes to the consumer.  
During the last year local banks issued 5,000 mortgages of about $208.9 million total value, president of Association of Banks in the Northwest Vladimir Dzhikovich said at a press briefing last week.
City Hall gave a more prudent estimate, saying the largest city banks granted 4,384 mortgages of a total value of $152 million last year, RBK news agency reported.
Northwest Bank of Sberbank Rossii was the biggest lender, issuing 1,514 loans. Industrial and Construction Bank issued 473 loans, City Mortgage Bank — 495 loans. The next to follow were Delta Credit (391 loans), Raiffesen (218 loans) and Vneshtorgbank (204 loans).
This year the volume of mortgages is expected to double, city vice-governor Mikhail Oseyevsky said at a press briefing. Apart from a city mortgage program, there exist subsidizing programs and programs supporting state employees and young families, RBK quoted him as saying.
According to Igor Zhigunov, head of City Mortgage Bank in St. Petersburg, over the last year the average size of mortgage varied between $30,000 and $35,000, while in 2004 mortgages did not usually exceed $30,000.
Zhigunov indicated that the increase in national gold and monetary reserves, growth in real income and higher levels of investment into fixed capital were crucial preconditions to the development of mortgages.
Tatiana Khobotova, mortgage and consumer lending department head at Vneshtorgbank in St. Petersburg, considered the city hall’s forecast as “quite realistic.” 
She gave an even more optimistic short-term forecast.
“This year we expect the volume of mortgages issued in St. Petersburg to quadruple. Such a forecast is well founded. In 2005 the volume of mortgages granted by Vneshtorgbank in the city increased 3.5 times,” Khobotova said.
The St. Petersburg department of VTB issued 185 mortgages and about 80 consumer loans to finance the last fee in partake investments.
Another specialist confirmed the positive state of the market.
“In 2005 Russia faced rapid growth in mortgage lending, which was seen in growing competition, a fall in interest rates and the introduction of new, more attractive mortgage schemes,” said Lora Fainzilberg, managing director of bank operations department at Delta Credit.
Speaking about Delta Credit, Fainzilberg said the bank fully realized its development plan last year doubling its volume of mortgages. In 2005 Delta Credit issued 2,300 loans across Russia of a total value of about $113 million.
“Current trends allow us to forecast how the market for mortgages will develop in 2006,” Fainzilberg said.
Banks are increasingly focused on mortgages and have begun to introduce new options for their clients.
Market newcomers were also optimistic.
Alexander Ivanov, director of AKB Rus-Bank in St. Petersburg, said that doubling the volume of mortgages in the city is a feasible task.
In December Rus-Bank signed an agreement with City Mortgage Bank to cooperate in issuing mortgages. 
Since the beginning of the year the St. Petersburg branch of Rus-Bank launched a joint program with the city Agency for Mortgage Lending.
“Our branch is planning to issue mortgages worth a total of $2.8 million by the end of the year,” Ivanov said.

n 
To ensure its leading position in the mortgage market Northwest Bank of Sberbank Rossii opened a specialized office to manage its mortgage operations, the company said Friday in a statement.
“The specialized ‘Mortgage Center’ will allow citizens to get the whole range of services related to getting a mortgage within the framework of agreements with the bank partners — the leading construction companies of St. Petersburg and Moscow,” the statement said.

TITLE: Parks Target Mall Sites
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Moscow-based operators of indoor amusement parks, “Igromaks,” “Crazy Park” and “Star Galaxy” will establish a presence in St. Petersburg in 2006, business daily Vedomosti reported last Tuesday. According to the newspaper, Gulliver park, the city’s only equivalent park situated inside the shopping center of the same name, could see the arrival of competitors as early as March. 
Market insiders regard this new phenomenon as a “natural evolution of the trade format” and believe many more companies will arrive onto the city’s receptive market. In the view of experts, amusement parks may significantly improve the turnover of shopping centres that host them. The parks could increase the number of mall visitors by up to 20 percent, said Oleg Voitsekhovsky, managing director at the Russian Council of Shopping Centers. According to Oleg Spivak, director of Becar Consulting, if the location and size of a shopping center allows it to include an entertainment area, it should be done. Such a move should make shopping centers more competitive as the park and shopping area mutually support customer flows, Spivak said. As the trend gathers pace, some experts advise developers to pay more attention to financial and marketing strategies. “To put an amusement park into a shopping center “has become fashionable,” Voitsekhovsky said Friday in an emailed statement. “Many developers nowadays plan an entertainment area as a necessary component of a mall, but they don’t devote enough time examining its economics,” he said. “It is very hard to imagine that the average person will tumble down slides, fall about among plastic balls or go bowling more then once or twice a week,” he said. To make such parks profitable, owners should keep in mind a very distinct marketing strategy in terms of the venue’s location and its target audience, the expert added.

TITLE: State Seeks Control Of Diamonds
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government wants to gain majority control of diamond monopoly Alrosa by buying out employees’ stakes, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref was quoted as saying on Sunday. 
Alrosa has been seen by analysts as a potential nucleus for a state minerals company — with some company officials suggesting it could merge with Norilsk Nickel. 
President Vladimir Putin last week denied knowledge of plans to take over Norilsk, one of the world’s top nickel producers, but Gref’s comments are likely to spark talk that Alrosa could become a tool for a tougher Kremlin role in the economy. 
“An offer will be made for the purchase of shares from minority shareholders,” Gref was quoted by RIA-Novosti as telling reporters in India. Interfax added that Moscow wanted a controlling stake. 
RIA-Novosti said Moscow held 37 percent of the company, while the regional government in the Far East republic of Sakha holds 32 percent. Employees hold most of the rest, RIA-Novosti reported, and buying 13 percent from them would take Moscow’s stake above half. 
Investors have been on high alert for signs the Kremlin is tightening its grip on the economy following the collapse of Yukos and the sale of Sibneft to gas monopoly Gazprom last year.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Insurance Acquisition
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Rosno insurance company is completing acquisition of a controlling stake of the Medexpress insurance company from Franco Canadienne De Re and Mutzenbecher, Herter und Wand for an undisclosed sum, Rosno said Monday in a statement. Medexpress is a regional leader in additional health insurance. Its authorized capital stock is $4.27 million. After completing the deal Rosno will own 51 percent of Medexpress shares, while 35 percent will be owned by Northwest Telecom. 

Finn Takeover
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Tikkurila, a subsidiary of the Finnish chemical group Kemira, completed its acquisition of St. Petersburg-based paints producer Kraski Teks, in a deal worth $40 million, Tikkurila said Monday in a statement. Kraski Teks occupies 10 percent of the Russian market while Tikkurila holds about 9 percent.

TITLE: Shell Chief Identifies Next Generation of Investments
AUTHOR: By Marcel Bard
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It is only recently that Chris Finlayson and his wife completed their move to Moscow, though Finlayson was appointed head of Shell Russia in November of 2005. They came not from their motherland, the UK, as one might have assumed, but directly from Lagos, Nigeria, where Finlayson had been CEO of Shell Africa’s Exploration and Production since 2004. So the Finlaysons face yet another major cultural and climatic change – Chris Finlayson has already worked for Shell in countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Turkey, the UK, Brunei and Nigeria. A similarly dramatic change is waiting for Finlayson in his new management responsibilities – up until now he had been administering ‘developed portfolios’ of Shell’s business activities, whereas now he is participating in the ‘portfolio-creation process,’ i.e. bringing in new investment.
Finlayson was born in 1956 in Devon, southwest England, studied physics and geology at Manchester University and graduated with a First. On completing his studies he received offers from various different major energy companies, but in 1977 picked Shell as the better employer, not least because they would send him to work abroad. Moreover, the son of a school teacher was attracted by the company’s “high ethical and environmental standards,” and by the possibilities of career development. 
“Long term commitments to one company back in the 70s were quite common in Europe,” he said. And so it is that 29 years since leaving university Finlayson is still with Shell. He started as a petroleum engineer in the UK, then worked abroad before becoming in 1998 vice-managing director of Shell UK, in 2000 managing director of Shell Brunei, in 2003 managing director of Shell Nigeria, in 2004 CEO with Shell Africa, and now “country chairman with extended responsibilities” with Shell Russia. His experiences from working on different continents and in countries with different religions and cultures not only enriched his personality, as he mentioned, but also acquainted him with his future wife in 1982, a Scot who was then also working with Shell Brunei.
He left his latest post as head of Shell Africa after only one year in order to face the new challenges associated with his job in Russia. Because of the growing importance of Russia to Shell, the company restructured its business in the CIS, leaving the new chairman with much larger responsibilities than his predecessor. He will be representing Shell Russia across its whole range of business activities, from exploration to retail. 
“In the last nine to ten years I have been working in places where we have been the biggest operator, where we have already had an extremely strong and established position – the North Sea, Brunei, Nigeria,” he said. 
“Coming to Russia the challenge is different…we have some massive investments going on in Salym and Sakhalin – immediate challenges – but at the same time, we want more activities in Russia, we want more investments, we want more opportunities.” 
If the company’s main sources of income remain Europe and America — Russia, along with the Middle East, are very much the focus of Shell’s growth in the future. Russia is going to play a bigger part in Shell’s portfolio of assets and Chris Finlayson came here also to “be responsible for identifying the next generation of investments.”
“The mother of all projects,” as Shell managers refer to the Sakhalin-2-project, is by far the largest foreign direct investment into Russia, and one of the largest integrated oil- and gas-developments in the world. 
“This is the biggest single project certainly that Shell and, by most measures, that anybody has [undertaken],” said Finlayson, adding that “Sakhalin comprises five to six single world-class projects”. Offshore oil reserves on the Sakhalin sites of Piltun Astokh and Lunskoe are equivalent to more than a year of Russia’s current crude oil exports. At its current level global LNG-demand could be satisfied for the next four years by the 15-storey high and football-field large buildings, built off the cost of Sakhalin Island. 
Big projects such as Sakhalin are crucial if Shell is to develop more of the resources it has acquired in the northern territories.  
“This is what the big oil companies have to get right, because these are the opportunities of the future,” said also Ian Craig, CEO of the operating subsidiary Sakhalin Energy in which Shell holds a 55 percent stake, adding that “a lot of the key opportunities going forward are going to be in these sorts of environments.”
Looking at such environments, problems become manifest: the initial estimated cost of $10 billion is set to double, causing a reaction in Russia against the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) under which the project runs. 
“I would say that this is based on an incomplete understanding of the purposes and challenges of PSAs in Russia,” said Finlayson. In a PSA companies make all the investments, and therefore are allowed to make long-term investments over between 10 to 15 years without being affected by changes in tax. After a period of production in which the costs are recovered more revenue goes to the state – the higher the cost of investment, however, the longer the government will have to wait for its revenue. 
“PSAs were introduced by countries who wished to assert their sovereignty over their natural resource base on a stronger way.” 
“I am confident that if we could sit in this room and look back in 25 years time, and ask ‘Has Sakhalin-2 been good for the Russian federation?’ that we would not even have a conversation about it – of course it has been. We could all see that”.
“The Russian government has indicated that it will stand by the PSA, but we will have to justify the increases in cost.”
While working for Shell Nigeria, the company openly admitted that it inadvertently fed conflict, poverty and corruption through its oil activities. 
“We made that statement as a part of a report when I was in Nigeria,” but “we changed our practices [which had been applied for many years before] to try and get funds better distributed.”
Referring to Russian corruption, Finlayson added that “we believe that we can get our job done, without any suggestion that we will compromise on our business principles. It’s very clear: anybody who is found to be indulged in bribery or political payments will be fired.”
As well as the Sakhalin-project, Shell Russia has been operating the Salym oil-fields for 10 years now with its Russian partner, and is now negotiating entry into the Zapoljarnoe-gas-field, currently owned by Gazprom.
As for his ambitions at Shell in general and especially in Russia, Finlayson plans to fulfil his 3-year assignment in Moscow, making Shell the number one foreign energy company in Russia. Nevertheless he expects that his stay in Russia will be more depending on “the time of the Sakhalin project going” than on formal assignments. Being a loyal Shell-soldier for almost 30 years he does not openly admit any higher ambitions saying instead that he intends to “fulfil his job, and if they give me a higher one, fine – do it with the same energy and commitment.”
For relaxation Finlayson enjoys playing golf and going downhill-skiing with his wife and daughter. He is currently looking out for golfing possibilities around Moscow.

TITLE: Travel Fair Hints At Recovery
AUTHOR: By Nikita Savoyarov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Travel fairs are an integral part of the tourism business and Helsinki’s Matka fair is the industry’s largest Nordic event. The 20-year old fair, which this year took place from Jan.19 to Jan.22, is an important forum for over 1100 exhibitors from more than 50 countries.
In contrast to last year’s edition, at Matka 2006 the city of St. Petersburg was well represented. Two stands, one under the umbrella of the City Administration, another of travel industry professionals (mainly from St. Petersburg) were flying the city’s flag. One may consider the strong presence of the St. Petersburg’s administration as evidence of a recently approved program aimed at developing the city’s tourist industry. The plan was elaborated by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and sets a target of attracting 5 million foreign tourists a year over 5 years. Such an aim looks reasonable after it was revealed that last year the number of foreign visitors was down by 30 percent compared to 2004. 
Elena Pozdeeva, a leading expert of the city’s Committee for External Relations and Tourism spoke about the BCG program. Among the measures proposed is the creation of a new state agency, a city tourist office with the task of promoting St. Petersburg as an attractive international travel destination. It would be committed to coordinating and developing the tourist industry and promoting the city as a major international tourist attraction. It will be also be responsible for tourist safety — cooperation with the equivalent section of Berlin’s police force has already been established.
A new service, known as the Tourist Angel Service, is set to provide all-round assistance to foreign tourists visiting St. Petersburg. At the same time the role of the city’s tourist information center will be extended. 
Another new project is the creation of a City Convention Bureau.  As a member of the International Union of Congress Cities the aim is to expand the amount of congresses in the city. A joint seminar with the Finnish Tourism and Convention Bureau was held prior to Matka 2006 on 18 January, Pozdeeva said.
One of the major components of the travel industry is, of course, transport infrastructure. The last two years have seen the active development of the ferry companies Tallink (2004) and Silja Line (2004 and 2005), which organized regular sea connections with St. Petersburg. However, since mid-January Silja vacated this important market. According to press reports from December 2005 Silja was being lined up for acquisition by (Estonian) Tallink. Nina Peltola, manager of Tallink Finland, could confirm only general information about the renewal of a ferry connection with St. Petersburg. 
Increasing numbers of Russian tourists are starting trips (for business or leisure) from the multifunctional hub of Helsinki. With flights, ferry crossings and bus connections to Europe and rail links to other Nordic countries one can calculate the most profitable and convenient offer. 
Among Russian visitors at the fair was head of the St. Petersburg travel agency, “Balt Express Ltd,” Anatoly Novikov, who uses the Finnish company “Air Finland” to transfer customers from Russia to the Finnish cruiser “Christina Regina” operating around the Canary Islands. Now he has expanded this scheme to serve one of the world’s leading cruise ship companies in the Mediterranean. 
Going the other way is the budget airline “Germanwings,” which connects Helsinki with several cities in Germany. According to Marc-Christian Gerdes, the company’s manager for Northeast Europe, the purchase of 18 new airplanes will allow the launch this summer of a new connection between St. Petersburg and Germany, adding to their existing route from Moscow, Gerdes said.

TITLE: Pulkovo Split Opens Up Skies to Foreign Carriers
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Following the separation of state-owned Pulkovo’s airline and airport, international air carriers are finding it easier to negotiate extra flights and different time slots. Last week Finnair announced additional flights to St. Petersburg, bringing their weekly total of departures to the city to 10. British Airways said that the split would encourage changes in infrastructure and open up competition.
Russian airspace still remains heavily regulated by state authorities, whose policy is often heavily influenced by lobbying from national carriers. As a result, foreign air companies often complain that local airlines get better time slots and block international carriers from receiving additional flights.
The situation was even more complicated in St. Petersburg, where until recently the airport and airline were joined together as a single company, Pulkovo. However, following the process of merging the Pulkovo airline with the state airline Rossiya, the decision was made to split the airline and the airport into two independent companies. That gave hope to many foreign carriers for smoother negotiations with airport authorities.
The first result of this breakup could be seen this week as Finnair announced increasing the number of departures to St. Petersburg up from seven to 10 per week starting from May 2. 
Finnair vice-president Petteri Kostermaa, speaking in a telephone interview last week, said that after a long period of negotiation the new slots were approved by both airport and state authorities. 
Now on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays Finnair will have two departures to and from St. Petersburg. The company said the present flight schedule  was operating “under capacity.”
According to Kostermaa, an extra flight will allow business people to make a daily return trip to St. Petersburg (or Helsinki). Finnair can also now offer fast connections between Scandinavian destinations and from other European destinations to St. Petersburg. At the same time, an evening flight will provide good connections for Asian destinations (Finnair offers nine at the moment) for those travelling from St. Petersburg. Kostermaa said that at the moment about 75 percent of all passengers travelling from St. Petersburg to Helsinki (of which there were 100,000 people in 2005) are transit passengers, going to New-York (for which the morning flight provides a good connection) and other American or Asian destinations. The new flight is also set to provide good connections for expanding Asian traffic.
Still, taking into consideration the size of St. Petersburg and its proximity to Helsinki, Finnair thinks the ideal number of daily flights to St. Petersburg could be as many as four (as many as to Copenhagen, for example, while to Stockholm there are 12 a day).
“Of course, we’ll continue negotiations,” Kostermaa confirmed. 
Yet another international carrier, British Airways, has also shown interest in developing the St. Petersburg route.
“Russia is one of our best markets, and St. Peterbsurg and Moscow are among the top six destinations for British Airways on the whole,” said Andrew Hammans, BA regional commercial director for Eastern Europe, at a press briefing on Wednesday. 
Last year BA business from UK to Russia increased by 15 percent and to St. Petersburg by 17 percent, while sales at the St. Petersburg office went up by 37 percent, with the load factor at the moment being 70 percent.
Commenting on the question of additional flights, Hammans said that in St. Petersburg currently there’s not enough demand to put on new flights. Moreover, any additional flights have to be negotiated under UK-Russia bilateral agreements.
“We could add 20-30 seats a day, but we don’t have an aircraft,” he added.
Hammans was set to have a meeting with Russian carriers on Thursday to discuss the development of Russian routes for the coming season. 
“If it’s found that other carriers are open for additional business, I’d suggest we could expand the market in about a year,” he said. 
According to an air-service agreement between UK and Russia, two airlines from each country can operate on the route. From the British side, those are BA and Virgin Atlantic (making a non-stop flight over Russian territory to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Beijing). Interestingly, this tradition goes back to the 1950s, when any foreign airline flying from Europe to Asia over the territory of the Soviet Union had to have a permission to fly to Russia and had to stop in Moscow. The second Russian carrier, due to start operating on the St. Petersburg-London route could be either Transaero or Aeroflot. The former has recently relocated its head office and fleet of carriers to the city, while Aeroflot has applied for permission to fly from St. Petersburg to London, among many other worldwide destinations, but has been refused by the Federal Agency of Air Traffic. 
Still, at the moment, after the separation of Pulkovo airport and airline, BA thinks that “very little has changed.” 
“I am very happy that they have split. It allows the possibility for negotiations and opens up competition. Even though I don’t think that it will facilitate extra slots and flights, I do believe it will open up infrastructural changes, like self-service ticket machines and e-tickets,” Hammons also said.
He also confirmed that BA would be interested in an early morning slot (at the moment the aircraft leaves St. Petersburg in the afternoon), which could provide more accessible connections to other parts of the world. At present not more than 25 percent of all passengers flying from St. Petersburg travel farther than London.

TITLE: Report: Belarus To Buy Su-30Ks
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Belarus is to buy a set of Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets from India, which will make up the core of the country’s air force and which, after planned upgrades, will be more advanced than the fighters operated by Russia’s armed forces. Belarus will buy 18 advanced Su-30K fighters that India bought from Russia in the late 1990s, French defense magazine Air et Cosmos reported last week.
Jet maker Irkut Corp. in 1996 agreed to sell India the 18 Su-30K and 32 Su-30MKI — the latest modifications of the Sukhoi line. Originally, the first batch of 18 Su-30K jets was to be upgraded to the MKI version, but India decided to buy new Su-30MKIs instead, 
Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy head of Moscow-based Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, said Belarus needed the jets to counterbalance the 48 F-16s that Poland, its western neighbor and a NATO member, is buying from the United States’ Lockheed Martin to beef up its defense forces.  He estimated the Belarus deal to be worth $360 million.

TITLE: Don’t Throw Money at Strategic Industry
TEXT: Editorial
At his news conference last week, President Vladimir Putin said the country’s leadership was not planning a major renationalization of key industries.
Yet, the headlines tell us the opposite. The state itself or state-controlled companies either are planning to take control of several major enterprises or have already done so. In some cases, the object of the takeover functions in a different sector of the economy all together. And it is not only Gazprom that has noncore businesses that cost it more money than they will ever bring in. The most recent example of the state’s expansion plans is also the most stunning. The new top managers of AvtoVAZ, sent to Russia’s largest car maker from state arms dealer Rosoboronexport, announced Thursday that they plan to spend billions of dollars to introduce as many as 12 new models in the next five years.
The projected $5 billion investment would fall under a federal program for developing Russia’s car industry, which was drafted by Boris Alyoshin, head of the Federal Industry Agency, and apparently approved, at least in its preliminary form, by Putin.
With the bulk of the financing to come from federal coffers, all sorts of questions are raised about the wisdom of such an investment. AvtoVAZ may be doing better than other Russian manufacturers of “indigenous” cars, but it is still steadily losing market share as Russians become increasingly reluctant to buy cars that are of inferior quality to Korean, Japanese and European models but which have come to cost almost as much or even more than the cheapest foreign makes.
AvtoVAZ and other Russian car manufacturers have in the past successfully lobbied the federal government to keep import duties high to stave off competition from imports. Now, however, Russia is nearing entry into WTO, which means import duties over the long term can only go down. At the same time, the ruble has strengthened beyond the level that preceded the 1998 meltdown, making imports that much more attractive. What apparently has not decreased is Avto-VAZ’s lobbying power and the state’s desire to control whatever the Kremlin designates as a strategically important industry.
But rather than waste taxpayers’ money on what Russians would describe as “the invention of the bicycle,” the government should liberalize the passenger car industry in recognition of the fact that car production has no importance for national security. Those who already know how to make bicycles that are not only affordable but also reliable and safe should be allowed to do so.
AvtoVAZ was given years to master this task but failed miserably, and even huge state investment and a continuation of a protectionist policy would be unlikely to help in the longer term.
Those who think otherwise should bear in mind Romania’s effort to save one of its own strategic industries — pig farming. After years of import tariffs and state subsidies, the industry still died after failing to compete with foreign pork producers, and this story has become a case study of how not to make policy for future policymakers. If the government has a spare $5 billion to spend, let it spend it on retraining the workers in Tolyatti whose livelihood depends on AvtoVAZ. Or better yet, let it use the money to take care of the two traditional problems in Russia — by fixing roads (or other infrastructure where the market economy fails) and keeping federal coffers out of the reach of those who pose the other problem.

TITLE: Building Taste For Modernity
AUTHOR: By Anna Scherbakova
TEXT: Celebrity architects such as Norman Foster or Eric Van Egeraat could soon be working for St. Petersburg. Last week both of them proposed projects for a new commercial and recreational area on New Holland, an 8-hectare island in the center of the city. The complex of a dozen red-brick houses was built in the middle of the 18th century and has served as a naval store over the last few decades. 
As far back as I can remember City Hall has looked for a new function for New Holland. In the early 1990s authorities planned to convert the property into a hotel complex under the management of a well-known hotel operator but nothing came of it. Ten years later governor Vladimir Yakovlev lent the island to a local construction group whose CEO was known as his ally — again nothing happened. As well as the Navy, who felt very comfortable in the center of the city, there was another obstacle stopping the island from being put to commercial use. As an architectural site of federal significance it could not be privatized. And its real owner is not the city of St.Petersburg but the Russian Federation. 
Last year governor Valentina Matvienko proved her federal significance by evicting the Navy from New Holland. Then Smolny and the Federal Property Agency, which is headed by former St.Petersburg Property Committee chief Valery Nazarov, announced a tender for its development. According to the tender’s terms and conditions, the winner, who gets long-term lease of the island, should invest no less than $300 million into its reconstruction as a commercial and recreational area. The development, which is to include a 10,000 square meter Palace of Festivals and a large parking lot, should be completed within 7 years. The palace will probably be used by the Mariinsky Theater, whose head Valery Gergiev had previously eyed up New Holland’s potential. 
However, last week the three competing developers revealed their projects. Each team has a famous designer — alongside Foster and van Egeraat there is German architectural bureau Engel&Zimmermann that helped renovate the Reichstag in Berlin. Well known investors, such as Moscow developer Shalva Chigirinsky and the Scandinavian Ruric Fund, are backing the projects, which are worth from $320 to $540 million each. In terms of St.Petersburg this is a serious level of investment. The period of return could last up to ten years, according to local experts. No wonder local business could not swallow the island. There are no local participants in the contest, except subcontractors. It’s a pity that St. Petersburg companies are so lacking in wealth. It is more of a shame that they would never invite Foster or Egeraat even if they could. They all remember the local uproar that greeted the Eric Moos proposal for the Mariinsky’s second stage. It was ‘too modern for our city’ local architects had claimed. That gives a sense of this city. We are too old-fashioned and not very rich. I can not explain how these qualities are interconnected, but suppose that they are. So our tastes will be changed by a stranger’s wealth. The winner will be announced on February 14. Someone will have a nice Valentine’s Day present. 

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

TITLE: The Gazprom Challenge for Britain and the EU
TEXT: Financial Times

Britain is normally open territory for foreign bids and takeovers. But offensive government moves can occasionally be worrying, and one has to gulp at the prospect of Gazprom possibly bidding for Centrica, which has more than half the British retail gas market. This produced shivers of anticipation for Centrica shareholders, but also shivers of fear about the implications for competition and security of supply.
The prospect is certainly not immediate. The speculation was sparked by Gazprom managers who tend to be looser in their talk about takeover targets than executives of Western-listed companies can be. But it was plausible.
Gazprom’s stated aim is to supply 20 percent of the British gas market. It hardly needs to own a retail company to achieve this, but the fact is that Cen-trica is short of gas (having lost gas fields as part of liberalization) while Gazprom could scarcely be longer on gas. If the Russian company were to make a move on Centrica, it would be following waves of U.S., German and French companies buying British energy assets since liberalization.
But Gazprom is special. It is the old Soviet gas ministry turned into a company that is now under more effective Kremlin control than ever. Its recent behavior in Ukraine showed it to be an instrument of Russian state policy. It can be argued that if Gazprom were to pay several billions to acquire Centrica’s customers, it would have an additional reason always to keep them warm. But in normal circumstances (excluding the geopolitical factors to which, unfortunately, Gazprom is inherently prone), the relationship between gas producers and customers is closer and more cooperative than exists in, say, the oil trade. Long-term gas contracts and fixed pipelines usually create something like a marriage between supplier and consumer, compared with more flexible and promiscuous transactions that characterize the oil trade. So the extra security gain from Gazprom having an onshore stake in Britain might not be big. 
Any Gazprom-Centrica link would also recreate the vertical integration that energy liberalization in Britain was supposed to break up. Combining Britain’s largest retailer together with such a big producer would require burdensome regulation to monitor such practices as predatory pricing. These issues of competition and security of supply will have to figure prominently in the energy reviews that both the British government and the European Commission are currently conducting. Even if a Gazprom bid never materializes, other big energy producers with rising profits from a tight market could hit the acquisition trail to buy retailers. Before that, it would be wise to have thought through the implications of such bids.

This comment ran as an editorial in the Financial Times.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Ministers Seek Delay 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s energy and finance ministers asked a U.S. court to grant then more time to respond to charges brought against them by a group of minority shareholders Yukos shareholders, Kommersant reported Monday, citing the ministers’ lawyers.
The two ministers said they haven’t received documents notifying them of the case and want to have at least two months to respond once the Russian government receives the papers, Kommersant said.
U.S. shareholders said Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin were part of a coordinated attack on Yukos with the aim of taking it out of private ownership, the newspaper said.

Fyodorov Equity 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Boris Fyodorov, a former Russian finance minister, started a private equity fund to invest in non-state companies after Deutsche Bank AG bought United Financial Group, the investment bank he co-founded.
The $250 million fund is focused on “5,000 to 10,000” companies worth $10 million to $100 million that have no government ties, Fyodorov said. Target companies are likely to triple in value within five years, he said in an interview in Moscow last week. The fund already bought 46 percent of gold miner Sigma for $14 million and a quarter of online travel agent Kuda.ru for $13.6 million, said Fyodorov, who with acquaintances will put $50 million into the fund.

Usmanov Bid 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov has bid for Anglo American Plc’s 79 percent stake in Highveld Steel & Vanadium Corp., a spokeswoman for his Metalloinvest holding company said Monday.
“We’re interested and we’re on the shortlist but I don’t know anything about the size of the bid,” Yulia Mazanova said in a telephone interview from the company’s headquarters in Moscow.
South Africa’s Business Day Monday reported that Usmanov’s bid was more than $1 billion. 

G-8 Meeting
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — President Vladimir Putin will meet with the finance ministers from the Group of Eight in Moscow this week, the Kremlin said on its Web site.
Russia is hosting the G-8 meetings in Moscow and St.Petersburg this year. Putin, 53, has said he plans to make energy supply a main topic of the gatherings.
The eight finance ministers will meet on Feb. 11 in the Russian capital to discuss economic growth, oil markets and writing off the debt of poor nations, Interfax cited Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin as saying Monday.
The ministers want to discuss with Putin issues that will be the focus of the G-8 summit in July in St. Petersburg, Kudrin told the president at a cabinet meeting Monday, Interfax reported.

MegaFon Debt 
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — MegaFon, Russia’s third-largest cellular-phone operator, had its debt raised one level by Fitch Ratings, which cited the company’s improved financial performance.
Fitch increased its rating on St. Petersburg-based MegaFon’s debt to BB, two steps below investment grade, from BB-, the ratings company said Monday in an e-mailed statement. Fitch cited higher margins on the company’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization in making the upgrade.
“Although Megafon’s free cash flow was negative in 2005, it significantly narrowed as a percentage of revenue and earnings and is expected to almost break even in 2006,” Fitch said in the statement. 

Ukraine Oil Sale
SIMFEROPOL (Bloomberg) — Ukraine will seek at least $2 billion by auctioning licenses to extract oil and natural gas in the Black Sea, tapping into rising international demand for fuel to help fund the national budget.
Ukraine wants to raise money and cut its dependence on neighboring Russia by auctioning exploration licenses at the end of March, Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov said.
“We expect to get at least $2 billion as 12 companies have already expressed interest,’’ Yekhanurov said Sunday in Simferopol, Southern Ukraine, in remarks broadcast by Ukrainian TV channel 1+1 Studio.
“We may have another auction in October,” he said.

UGMK Investment 
YEKATERINBURG (Bloomberg) — Urals Mining and Metals Co. will invest more than $600 million in copper and zinc production this year, Interfax reported, citing Konstantin Plekhanov, technical director at UGMK, as the company is called.
Most of the money will be spent upgrading or completing existing facilities, and some may go toward a new zinc smelter in the Sverdlovsk region, the news service said. UGMK, based in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, is Russia’s biggest copper and zinc producer.

TITLE: Interros Gains Control Over Key Gold Deposit
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Solovyov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Interros, the parent firm of metals giant Norilsk Nickel, has won control of Russia’s second-largest gold deposit, Nezhdaninskoye, after buying out Celtic’s stake in it, the two firms said Friday.
London-listed Celtic Resources said in a statement that it had agreed to sell a 20 percent stake in South Verkhoyansk Mining Co., or SVMC, to Interros for $80 million. A news release from Interros cited the same stake and sum of the deal, but gave no details. Company officials could not be reached for comment.
SVMC is the license-holder of the Nezhdaninskoye mine in Sakha, Russia’s second largest and one of the biggest gold deposits in Eurasia.
Norilsk’s gold unit Polyus, the country’s No. 1 gold producer and the mine operator with 50 percent of its shares, had long sought control of the gold field, whose resource base is estimated at around 900 tons of gold under Russian accounting standards.
“The news that Celtic Resources had settled its ownership struggle with Polyus means it can now focus on business development,” Aton brokerage said in a research note.
Analysts said the deal was beneficial for both sides. “I think the price that Celtic got is extremely generous,” said Rob Edwards of Renaissance Capital.
Celtic said it expected to receive some $10 million as repayment of the principal of the debts owed by SVMC to Celtic. The company, holding a 20 percent stake, had been locked in a legal battle with Interros, disputing ownership rights for the remaining 30 percent by two offshore firms backing Interros.
Celtic said the $80 million for its 20 percent would be held in escrow and released to it “conditional upon the withdrawal of all legal actions by Celtic in relation to the ownership of Nezhdaninskoye, which is expected to occur by March 31, 2006.
“Consequently, Celtic believes that resolution of the disputed 30 percent interest in SVMC is best left to remaining SVMC shareholders and the third parties,” Celtic said.
Celtic said it still aimed “to grow into a significant gold mining company” and would build on the production base at the Suzdal and Zherek mines in Kazakhstan, as well as by way of new acquisitions in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. It did not elaborate.
Norilsk is controlled by Vladimir Potanin, head of the Interros industrial and banking group, and Norilsk CEO Mikhail Prokhorov. Interros plans to invest $1 billion on mining projects this year, with the emphasis on copper and titanium projects, CEO Andrei Klishas said, Bloomberg reported citing Interfax.

TITLE: Teaching Nationalists a New Trick
AUTHOR: By Leonid Ragozin
TEXT: The demand for nationalism, chauvinism and indeed racism is very high on the Russian political market these days. But will these sentiments forever hinder the country’s progress toward democracy and its rapprochement with the West? No, and in fact one day they may become the engine that drives Russia into political modernity.
The current Kremlin administration is very good at playing the nationalist card. Symbolic gestures like restoring the Soviet anthem or stating that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century play a huge role in sending President Vladimir Putin’s ratings soaring above all potential competitors. 
The nationalism in Russia is anti-Western since it is nourished by the bitterness that still remains from the defeat in the Cold War.
The logic of chauvinism dictates that the Kremlin should resist pro-Western revolutions in former Soviet republics and seek alliances with pretty much anybody who opposes American hegemony, be it China, Iran or Uzbekistan.
Moscow is busy rallying all former Soviet regimes that have so far escaped an orange revolution. Security chiefs from these countries meet to exchange thoughts on how to counter youth movements and NGOs.
Together with China, Russia is building the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which it portrays as the world’s largest regional alliance — even a potential counterweight to NATO in the new “multipolar” world.
Russia also aspires to becoming a full member of the Association of South East Asian Nations, or ASEAN. Putin traveled to Malaysia in December to speak at the first ASEAN summit.
Russia has been invited to attend meetings of the Organization of the Islamic Conference as an observer, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last Thursday that Russia intended to strengthen relations with Islamic countries.
In the Middle East, Russia defends Iran and Syria in much the same way as it defended Iraq when Saddam Hussein was still in charge.
But the kind of nationalism that requires forging ties with China and Middle Eastern regimes may sound a bit too postmodernist for the average Russian xenophobic nationalist. Because one day a new nationalist and indeed racist leader will come out and say: “Wait a minute, aren’t we white European Christians? Then why seek allies in the East, while our brethren are in the West?
“Perhaps it is better to abide by European rules (or pretend to) than to get swallowed up by Asia?”
A Russian nationalist hates the West as a countryside lad hates a privileged city kid. Russians often speak about their “higher spirituality” or “better education,” they accuse the West of invasions and betrayals, they proclaim that they are “Scythians and Asians with greedy slanting eyes” as Alexander Blok wrote in his famous poem, but all that is a bluff in order to hide the deep inferiority complex of a younger brother who can’t stand the success — as well as the arrogance and cynicism — of the older one. For the West is the only point of reference for all Russians, nationalist or liberal. Their understanding of modern Western society might be distorted, but they simply know nothing about their eastern or southern neighbors. A very small percentage of Russians has ever tried Chinese food or had Arab schoolmates and colleagues at work. And a large number of them would not like to have any such experiences for purely xenophobic reasons.
At the same time, a West-friendly nationalism can do wonders in Eastern Europe. It was the driving force in the anti-communist movement that brought about velvet revolutions in the late 1980s. In Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states, anti-Russian, essentially xenophobic rhetoric helped to unite the liberal minority with the apolitical majority — something that Russian liberals have so far failed to achieve.
Nationalism, with its anti-Russian sentiment, rallies the masses behind the liberal leaders of Ukraine and Georgia. Pure liberalism in these countries is still confined to the urban intelligentsia and is extremely weak. It appears weaker than nationalism even in the countries that have gone a long way down the democratic path, as shown by last year’s presidential election in Poland.
And the West is often quick to forgive its nationalist allies. The most notorious example is Franjo Tudjman’s regime, which conducted ethnic cleansings in Serb-populated areas of Croatia. But there is also the example of Latvia and Estonia, where up to a third of the population is still deprived of basic political rights because of their ethnic origin. 
Xenophobia derives from an inferiority complex. It gives someone a chance to say: “OK, I am a hopeless idiot, but you are a Jew [a Muslim, a Croat, a Chechen, a Hutu, etc.].” When this inferiority complex exists, xenophobia will always find an object, even if the choice is completely irrational. Eliminating xenophobia is an extremely difficult endeavor, and none of the Western countries can claim to have completely succeeded in doing this.
The West could help Russia become a better country by working with nationalist Russians and gradually transforming their xenophobia into a loathing of the world’s real evils, such as terrorism, poverty and inequality.
But there must be a real incentive. East European nationalists had it in the form of the prospect of joining the European Union and NATO. Perhaps while rightly using the whip, the West should think of a really significant carrot for Russia.

Leonid Ragozin is a producer for BBCRussian.com, the web site of the BBC Russian Service. The views expressed are his own.

TITLE: Let’s Hear It for the Birthday Boy
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: I wanted to avoid the subject of Boris Yeltsin’s birthday, believing that the topic was largely understood and there was little more to be said. The results of a poll on attitudes to the former president carried out by the Yuri Levada Center, however, demonstrated the vast extent of my naivety.
Only 9 percent of those questioned by the Levada Center were positive in their take on Russia’s first president. Negative attitudes were held by 55 percent, while 70 percent believe that Yeltsin did more harm than good for Russia. Only 13 percent believe the opposite to be true. 
Typically, Yeltsin is accused of impoverishing the majority of the population, ripping off the entire nation with his privatization program, destroying the USSR, destroying the economy (industry in particular), frittering the country’s status as a superpower away, and turning Russia into a Third World state. My response is to wonder how the majority of the Russian population can be so mistaken — in reality, they’ve earned the life that they have.
Let’s take a look around us. The United States is forever being plagued by tornadoes and hurricanes. In Europe, it’s either torrential floods and blazing fires or record-breaking frosts. The U.S. and Europe have little in the way of natural resources. Nevertheless, their populations live, in my opinion, well. Over here, we don’t have American hurricanes or European fires and floods, but we have vast amounts of oil and gas. It’s clear then, that the lives that we live here are the result of our conscious choices. 
Neither Yeltsin, Gorbachev, the Soviet authorities nor even President Vladimir Putin can seriously influence those choices. All of them, the leaders of our state, constitute one of the social institutes called upon to organize our lives. We ourselves make all the choices that affect and influence our lives — what sort of state we have, how it’s organized, who heads it, and what policies it pursues. 
Thus, President Putin himself admitted that he was giving away $5 billion in gas every year to Ukraine. Unlike Yeltsin, Putin boasts a 70 percent popularity rating, so we can assume that this must have been what the Russian public wanted. If we divide $5 billion by the 150 million inhabitants of Russia, we find that 70 percent voluntarily handed over 1,000 rubles ($35.40) each to Ukraine. Why give all this money away? The majority of those questioned in numerous surveys state that one of the priorities of state policy should be that our country is respected. The raising of the standard of living of Russians isn’t the key priority — we have to be respected in the international arena.
Thus, the elected president, instead of spending that money on pensions, wages and support for the population at large, annually handed it over to Ukraine in order that Russia be respected. Similarly, he’s also been generous to those that are close to him. Friendship is the key element for Putin, and that, no doubt, accounts for his enormous popularity. He has, essentially, given away $23 billion to his friends in the form of oil companies bought up by state enterprises that are run by his chums. He’s planning on passing a few coppers in the direction of his voters — $5 billion has been allocated to state employees within the framework of his national projects. The difference between those two sums speaks volumes about Putin’s priorities. Russians love the man, and that must mean that they’re happy to donate their money to his friends. So far, these donations amount to about 5,000 rubles ($177) per citizen, but it needn’t stop there.
I could go on. As far as the accusations directed at the birthday boy go, the bulk of them should be redirected towards the Russians themselves. The destruction of the USSR and the privatization program, for example, weren’t Yeltsin’s doing — the Russians forced him into it, largely through the deputies that they elected to the Russian Higher Council.
Some of the other accusations are slander, pure and simple, often based on non-existent facts. Take, for example, the impoverishment of the Russian people. In order to convince ourselves of the absurdity of this claim, it’s enough to do a before-and-after comparison of the contents of fridges and car parks and the furnishing of apartments across the country. Anyone who claims that any of those three areas were better during the Soviet era than they are now is simply lying. Even the Soviet bureaucracy was worse off than the majority of the Russian population today. And that’s without even mentioning the main achievement of the Yeltsin era — freedom.
To paraphrase the American philosopher Eric Hoffer, those that bite the hand that feeds usually lick the boots of those that beat them. The attitude of the majority of Russians to Yeltsin and Putin is a perfect example of Hoffer’s words of wisdom.

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: Motherhood Suits City’s Olympic Skater
AUTHOR: By Raf Casert
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HEERENVEEN, Netherlands – Motherhood is more often the death knell of a sporting career than a harbinger of Olympic medals.
Not for Svetlana Zhurova. 
The 34-year-old St. Petersburg native is the proud mother of 2-year-old Yaroslav and, frankly, has never skated faster in her life. 
She recently won the biggest title of her long career to prove it, and the new world sprint champion is a favorite for the 500- and 1,000-meter titles at the Turin Olympics. 
Her secret? 
“Maybe the baby changed my body. Who knows, but I think so,” she says in lilting English. 
Mentally, too, Yaroslav has had an impact on her. 
“It made me quieter mentally, and I am not so emotional as before. Because you are a mom, you have to be serious,” she says. 
Zhurova had been around for more than a dozen years but could not break free from the shadows of Canada’s Catriona Le May Doan and a slew of East German sprinters. Her only important title was the 1996 world title in the 500 sprint. 
She felt good that year, but a crash at the sprint world championships haunted her until recently and convinced her she’d been robbed of the best shot at a major title.
By the time the 2002 Olympics came around, she was inconspicuous at best, finishing seventh and 11th in the sprint events. A solid athlete, but one who was regarded as on the wane.
After the Salt Lake City Games, she and husband Artemy Chernenko, a tennis coach, decided to have a baby, seemingly making a definitive choice of love over medals. 
To their great joy, Yaroslav was born in November 2003.
Still, there always was that nagging feeling of work left unfinished.
“We said, ‘Maybe I’ll come back.”’
It was easier said than done, for reasons both practical and physical.
Men rarely have that problem: Wife gives birth, man goes back to training, baby taken care of by mother.
“It was a big discussion with my husband. OK, I have a baby. But I have a husband, too, who maybe will not want to stay alone at home. But he is a tennis coach and he understood me, and he believed that I could be very good this year. And he let me go.”
But there was Yaroslav, too, still needing to be pampered in every sense of the word if his mother was to take up competitive sports again.
Zhurova lives in a small town outside of St. Petersburg where social services and day care are hard to find. Fortunately, her sister Natalya stepped in and offered to care for Yaroslav while Zhurova was on the road.
“If she had said no, I would never be here,” Zhurova says.
Yet it took more than that.
In Heerenveen, she looked sharp, her face back to the chiseled features of a top athlete and her body a compact 67 kilograms, only 3 kilograms off her ideal competition weight of 64 kilograms.

TITLE: Chelsea Star Brightens Up Nations Cup
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAIRO — Chelsea striker Didier Drogba made the decisive penalty kick in an extraordinary shootout Saturday, sending the Ivory Coast past Cameroon and into the semifinals of the African Cup of Nations.
The Ivory Coast won 12-11 on penalty kicks after the teams played to a 0-0 tie in regulation and each scored in overtime. In the other quarterfinal in Port Said, Nigeria ousted defending champion Tunisia 6-5 on penalty kicks after a 1-1 tie following regulation and 30 minutes of overtime.
In Tuesday’s semifinals, it’s four-time champion Egypt vs. Senegal in Cairo and Ivory Coast vs. Nigeria in Alexandria.
Drogba scored after Samuel Eto’o put his penalty kick over the bar. All 11 players from both teams, including the goalkeepers, scored in the shootout, and they had to start again. Eto’o, the Barcelona striker who leads the tournament with five goals, shot high over the crossbar. Drogba then stepped in and scored.
Ivory Coast edged out Cameroon for a World Cup berth, although it lost both home and away to the Indomitable Lions. Cameroon, undefeated before Saturday’s game, was looking for its third African title in the last four tournaments.
In Port Said, goalkeeper Vincent Enyeama ended Tunisia’s reign as African champion. Enyeama stopped three Tunisian shots and scored once himself in the shootout.

TITLE: Pittsburgh Defeats Seattle in Super Bowl
AUTHOR: By Martin Burlund
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Pittsburgh Steelers came out victorious at the fortieth Super Bowl as the team outfoxed the Seattle Seahawks 21-10 at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan. 
The biggest night in U.S. sports saw Steelers’ wide receiver Hines Ward take the MVP award for catching a 43-yard touchdown pass from receiver Antwaan Randle El on Sunday.
The event drew an estimated 880 million television viewers worldwide but in St. Petersburg, Super Bowl XL only attracted a single fan to the Red Lion, a bar in central St. Petersburg that frequently shows sports on a big screen. 
The five hour marathon was broadcast live from Detroit from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. Monday. At Ford Field, meanwhile, noisy Seahawks and Steelers fans raised the roof of the indoor stadium when the teams took to the field.
Although Seattle had won more regular-season matches than the Steelers, many experts favored five-time victor Pittsburgh for the National Football League title. 
But being cast as the underdog seemed not to affect the Seahawks before the game. The Seahawks won the coin toss and boasted a fearless range of attacks that led to the first 3 points in the match as Josh Brown strolled in a 47 yard field goal.
Just four plays earlier Seattle’s Darell Jackson thought he had caught the ball for a touchdown but the referees called back the throw from Matt Hasselbeck.
Hasselbeck continued to move his team around the field unimpressed, but in the opposite end Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was unable to create much forward play in the first quarter. 
After only 18 minutes, Roethlisberger had two consecutive first downs, masterfully pushed his team up the field  himself and jumped to a touchdown. From then on the Seahawks struggled. 
After half time, an interception by Hines Ward from Hasselbeck’s hand sent the following play to Pittsburgh for a record-setting touchdown as Willie Parker rushed 75 yards to secure the Steelers a 13-3 lead.
Hasselbeck then displayed skill to pass a touchdown 16 yards to Jerramy Stevens. For the rest of the game, penalties plagued the Seahawks, giving Pittsburgh the chance to make a huge play. In a stream of conservative offensive plays, Roethlisberger passed to Parker, who passed on to Randle El, who threw a 43 yard touchdown.
Minutes past, as nervous plays slowly killed the Seahawks’ hope of a Super Bowl victory. Missing two out of three field goals, Josh Brown had to endure much of the finger-pointing after Seattle Seahawks recognized its defeat. 
Three seconds before the buzzer Roethlisberger kneeled to kill the last seconds and it was certain that Pittsburgh had won the Vince Lombardi trophy, with the roster earning themselves a Super Bowl ring.
The Seattle team could only leave the stadium in frustration unhappy about dubious referee decisions, lost balls and missed field goals, while the Pittsburghers popped the champagne and lifted the trophy.
“I can’t believe it. The stars lined up tonight,” the Associated Press reported fan Steve Kamnikar as saying as he joined other raucous and jubilant Steelers fans on the streets of downtown Pittsburgh on Sunday night to celebrate. 
“I love it,” said Kamnikar, who drove 8 1/2 hours in a snowstorm from Oglesby, Illinois, just to be in town for the game. “Let’s start another dynasty.”  
At the Hard Rock Cafe at Pittsburgh’s Station Square, fans cried and cheered as the game ended. 
But in the Red Lion in St. Petersburg, nobody was cheering.

TITLE: Russians Ready For Turin 2006
AUTHOR: By Greg Sandstrom
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Midway on its journey to the Summer Games, the Olympic flame comes to rest for 16 days in Turin, Italy on Friday at the 20th Winter Olympics. 
More than 2,400 top athletes from around the world will compete in 84 events and in 15 different sports for their chance at an Olympic medal. And, as the creed of the Olympics suggests, they will try their best to believe that “the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part.”
Russian hopes for medals in Turin are strongest in biathlon, figure skating, men’s hockey and cross-country skiing, with St. Petersburg native Svetlana Zhurova, the reigning 2006 world speed skating champion, in medal contention (see page 15).
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Olympic Movement promote sport, environment, culture and international goodwill, although the Games themselves have become highly commercialized. 
Italy last hosted the Winter Olympic Games in 1956 at Cortina. This year events and special villages for the athletes and coaches, spectators and media are located in Turin, Bardonecchia, Cesana-San Sicario, Pinerolo, Pragelato, Sauze D’Oulx and Sestriere.
The first Winter Olympics for sports on snow and ice was held in France in 1924, following in the tradition of Summer Olympics, which originated in Ancient Greece. The modern Olympic Games have been held for 110 years. 
Although predominantly attended by northern European nations and North Americans, the Winter Games now draws athletes from 85 countries. Several times smaller than its summer counterpart, an international flavor adds to the Winter Olympics’ appeal. 
The Soviet Union first entered the games in 1956, winning the most medals. The first medal by an athlete from the Southern hemisphere was won in 1992, with two gold medals picked up by Australians in 2002.
The all-time medal standings place Norway first, the Soviet Union second, and the United States in third place. 
Austria, Finland, Germany and Sweden have also fared well in the medal count. If East and West German teams had been combined throughout the event’s history, Germany would lead in overall medals, with the combined Russian, Soviet and Unified (1992) teams in second position.
Post-Soviet Russia has already climbed to 14th position in the all-time standings in the three Olympic Games since at Lillehammer, Norway in 1994.
At Nagano, Japan, the 1998 Winter Olympics were won by Germany (29 medals), Norway was runner-up (25), followed by Russia (18), Canada (15) and Austria (17).
At Salt Lake City in 2002 Germany again took first place (35 medals), followed by the U.S. in second (34), Norway in third (24), Russia in fourth (16), and Canada in fifth (17). 
The Russian Olympic Committee says it is aiming for at least 25 medals in the 2006 Turin Games.

TITLE: Hingis’ Comeback Stalled By ‘One Russian Too Many’
AUTHOR: By Alastair Himmer
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TOKYO — Yelena Dementyeva ended Martina Hingis’ bid for a first singles title since returning to tennis with a crushing 6-2, 6-0 win in the Pan Pacific Open final on Sunday. 
“It was probably one Russian too many,” smiled Hingis, who had beaten Maria Kirilenko and top seed Maria Sharapova en route to her first final in four comeback tournaments. 
“It used to be two Williams sisters and a [Lindsay] Davenport. Now there’s a whole army of Russians in the way. 
“I’m not looking for excuses. I tried a lot of things, but she always had a better answer. Today, she was just too good. If she plays like that all the time, she would have won Grand Slams.” 
Dementyeva had beaten Hingis 6-3, 6-1 in Filderstadt in October 2002 in what was the former world No. 1’s last match before ankle trouble forced her into early retirement. 
Hingis returned to the game last month, reaching the Australian Open quarterfinals and winning the mixed doubles crown with India’s Mahesh Bhupathi. 
Dementyeva suffered a surprise first-round exit in Melbourne, but the second seed had too much firepower for Hingis in Tokyo, ending her bid for a record fifth title in just 56 minutes. 
Hingis’s game unraveled as quickly as the “Swiss Miss” had destroyed Sharapova in the semifinals, Dementyeva picking her off from the baseline and making clever use of the lob. 
“Martina’s my favorite player, so I never expected to beat her like this,” Dementyeva said after winning her first tier-one title on the women’s WTA Tour. “I have never had a 6-0 second set, only against me, but I think the match was closer than the score.” 
Hingis, who thrashed defending champion Sharapova 6-3, 6-1 on Saturday, won the Pan Pacific Open in 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2002 — her last title before retiring. Her ranking is still set to rise to just outside the top 50 after reaching her seventh Tokyo final. Hingis will continue her return in Dubai and Doha later this month. 
Dementyeva, one of 11 Russians in the top 50, will climb from ninth to eighth as a result of her first tournament win since 2004, when she also reached two Grand Slam finals.