SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1190 (56), Friday, July 28, 2006
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TITLE: Chavez Slams U.S., Signs Arms Deals
AUTHOR: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez slammed the United States as the “biggest threat” to the world on Thursday, as he finalized up to $3 billion in Russian arms deals that have provoked Washington’s ire.
Chavez, a constant critic of Washington, praised President Vladimir Putin for defying a U.S. arms blockade and hit out at Washington for its foreign policy.
“The biggest threat which exists in the world is the empire of the United States,” Chavez said while unveiling a bust of 19th-century South American liberation hero Simon Bolivar at a Moscow library. 
“It is a senseless, blind, stupid giant which doesn’t understand the world, doesn’t understand human rights, doesn’t understand anything about humanity, culture and consciousness,” Chavez said.
The head of Russia’s state arms-trading agency said that Russia signed contracts with Venezuela for 24 military planes and 53 helicopters, the Interfax news agency reported.
The comments by Sergei Chemezov, director-general of Rosoboronexport, were reported as being made on the sidelines of a Kremlin meeting between Putin and Chavez.
The report did not specify what model planes or helicopters had been sold, but cited Chemezov as saying arms deals worth more than $3 billion had been signed with Venezuela over the past 18 months.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said last week that Chavez was expected to sign an agreement to purchase Su-30 fighter jets from Russia during his visit. It was not immediately clear whether the contracts Chemezov was cited as reporting included that contract.
Neither Putin nor Chavez made any statements about an arms contract to journalists at their meeting.
Putin, after talks with Chavez, said he “welcomes the intentions of Venezuela to occupy a place in the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member,” Itar-Tass news agency reported.
“The positions of Russia and Venezuela on the majority of international problems are close or coincide,” said a senior Kremlin official, who asked not to be identified.
Washington has banned U.S. arms manufacturers from selling to Chavez. The United States says the populist leader, who proclaims socialist ideals to unite South America against U.S. influence, is destabilizing the region.
U.S. officials said they hoped to talk Russia out of the arms deals. Senior Kremlin officials say they see no reason to take advice from the United States.
The Kremlin official said Chavez would discuss energy with Putin. Russia, not an OPEC member, is the world’s biggest natural gas producer and the world’s second largest oil exporter. 
“Venezuela for us is a natural partner,” Putin said at the start of the meeting with Chavez. “I am very happy our companies are working to find joint solutions in the energy sector.”
The deal to buy Sukhoi-30 jets was worth nearly $1.5 billion, when all the necessary armaments and support technology was included, Vedomosti said, citing a source in the Russian aerospace industry.
It also cited an unidentified Russian Defense Ministry source as saying that Venezuela would buy short-range TOR-M1 tactical surface-to-air missiles. Russia’s plans to sell Iran the same missiles have angered Washington.
Chavez is on a world tour that has included meetings with U.S. foes such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko. He will also visit Iran.
(AP, Reuters)

TITLE: Court Condemns Russia in Chechnya Case
AUTHOR: By Gilbert Reilhac
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: STRASBOURG, France — In a landmark ruling on Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights found Russia had violated the “right to life” of a young Chechen who disappeared after a Russian general ordered him shot.
In the first ruling of its kind on a disappearance case in Chechnya, the court also ruled Russia had violated a ban on arbitrary detention and failed to provide an effective remedy due to the failings of the official Russian investigation into the disappearance of Khadzimurat Yandiyev.
He disappeared in February 2000, aged 25, after being filmed in the company of a Russian general ordering him to be taken away and “rubbed out.” 
His body has never been found but lawyers for his mother Fatima Bazorkina said the general’s words made his fate clear.
“This is a landmark judgement with major importance for the hundreds of other Chechen disappearance cases still pending before the Court,” said Ole Solvang, executive director of Russian Justice Initiative, in a statement released in Moscow.
The independent rights group, which gives legal advice to Chechens and others, initiated the case in Strasbourg.
It quoted Bazorkina as saying: “I now hope that the Russian authorities will make a serious effort to establish the truth about my son’s fate and bring to justice those responsible.”
The Strasbourg-based court ruled she had suffered inhumane treatment because of the uncertainty surrounding her son’s fate and ordered Moscow to pay her 35,000 euros ($44,567) in compensation.
Bazorkina said she last saw her son on television in footage broadcast on CNN. Bearded and injured, the young man was arguing with a Russian general after soldiers demanded his documents.
“Get him the heck out of here,” CNN had the general shouting, though the Russian words audible behind the English translation showed he used far cruder language.
“Rub him out, kill him, damn it. That’s your entire order. Get him over there. Rub him out. Shoot him,” he said in Russian.
Lawyers for Russia told the court the comments did not constitute a real order and reflected “an emotional reaction by an officer”. 
Bazorkina looked for her son in the detention centers where Russian troops kept suspected fighters. After she saw the video of her son being abused by Russian troops she appealed to prosecutors, who opened a criminal case in July 2001, 17 months after his disappearance.
In February 2004, they closed it again, citing lack of evidence. Human rights lawyers say that was wilful obstruction.
Russian rights groups estimate there have been 3,000-5,000 disappearances in Chechnya since Russian troops moved to crush the breakaway region’s self-declared independence in 1999.
They say Russian troops have used abduction, rape and torture as weapons there and that the government has done too little to punish those responsible.
Officials say they take the problem seriously but General Alexander Baranov, the man who appeared to be ordering Yandiyev’s execution, has not been prosecuted and in fact now commands all troops in southern Russia.
Thursday’s judgement becomes final after three months, or earlier if the parties say they have no intention of asking for the case to be referred to the superior Grand Chamber.

TITLE: Consulates Score Badly With Russian Clients
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg tops the list of the most difficult diplomatic missions in town for Russians obtaining travel visas according to a survey of local travel agencies conducted this month by the North-Western branch of the Russian Tourism Industry Union (RST).
RST members evaluated the city’s foreign consulates on a diverse range of criteria, including cooperativeness, flexibility, interest in Russian clients, efficient contact with tour operators, willingness to reach a compromise, understanding and attitude.
Almost 20 percent of those who apply are denied a visa to America at the U.S. consulate.
“After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, visa procedures have been brutalized,” reads the survey. “During a face-to-face interview with an immigration officer each applicant has to prove that they are not potential immigrants. Many Russians find the procedure humiliating, and there is nothing a tour operator can do in these circumstances to make it easier for the applicant.” The consulates of Germany, Thailand, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Latvia were also mentioned as among the most problematic diplomatic missions in the city for Russians needing to use their services. 
Lyudmila, a retired seamstress who declined to give her last name because she is concerned about applying for U.S. visas in the future, has been unable on several occasions to visit her daughter who resides in the U.S.
“My daughter has lived in the U.S. for eight years now, and I used to travel there without problems but at some point I was denied a visa,” she said. “We had to meet up in Europe, but these were short meetings because we could not stay for long. During my visits to the States I was able to stay for a month or more because I am retired.”
Because she was denied a visa once, Lyudmila said she felt too embarrassed and scared to reapply for a U.S. visa for some time. But last year she submitted an application — and received a visa. 
“I was very happy and relieved to get it but the process of waiting had been so stressful that I got sick. It was like the fear of failing an exam but much, much stronger,” Lyudmila said.
Consulates that earned the highest marks and praise in the RST report were the diplomatic missions of Bulgaria, the U.K., Sweden, Japan, Switzerland, Cyprus, Austria, Hungary and Greece. 
“Staff at the Bulgarian consulate are very responsive, and they even work overtime in the most intense peak of the summer season,” the RST report says. Bulgaria is a popular vacation destination for Russians.
The granting of visas is a mutually sensitive and painful issue between Russia and most countries. Foreigners who need visas to travel to Russia often have a long list of complaints about obtaining them from Russian missions abroad that includes high fees, delays and overly-bureacratic procedures. Russian consulates in some countries are known for inefficiency and have been known to apply hidden extra charges at the last minute.
The issue was raised with President Vladimir Putin during a webcast earlier this month. When he was asked about the obstacles of getting a visa to travel to Russia, Putin thanked Mike Hetley in the Cayman Islands for the question because he said it gave him a chance to publicly formulate the Russian government’s position and turned the issue around, demonstrating awareness of the sorts of problems that Russian citizens come across when they turn to foreign embassies.
“It’s degrading because when a young lady is refused entry visas to the United States because they tell her that we’re refusing you a visa because you’re going to engage in prostitution there,” Putin said. “That’s degrading — that’s an insult really.” 
Visa issues are decided on the basis of reciprocity between countries, Putin said. 
“So Russia is prepared to abolish visas on a mutual basis with European countries and everybody else,” he added. “But these questions have to be addressed to Paris, Berlin, Brussels and other European capitals. We believe that after the collapse of the Berlin wall, there shouldn’t be any new barriers that would restrict people’s travel — at least within Europe.” 
For the time being, however, travel-minded Russians rely on their own resources. To some, the easiest way is to obtain new citizenship.
Mariinsky Theater opera diva Anna Netrebko, who was granted Austrian citizenship this week, told The St. Petersburg Times the main motive behind her decision was the humiliating, never-ending process of visa applications and the limitations it puts on her international career.
The singer, who is a huge star in Austria and Germany and regularly performs in Salzburg and Vienna, was granted fast-track Austrian citizenship for “her special merits as one of the world’s most distinguished singers,” the Austrian government said in media reports Tuesday. Under ordinary circumstances, gaining Austrian citizenship takes at least 10 years. Netrebko will keep her Russian passport.
“We all go through this undeserved humiliation — and [the Mariinsky’s artistic director] Valery Gergiev duly submits his application to be reviewed [like everyone else], until people get the chance to get a second citizenship and decide to go for it,” Netrebko said in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in May. “It is not a question of being disloyal to your home country. It just helps to make our hectic and pressurized lives a little bit less stressful.” 
Natalya Maleva of the St. Petersburg branch of French tour operator CGTT Voyages said foreign consulates’ cautiousness is not entirely groundless, and some Russians contribute to a negative image of them abroad.
“You used to be able to travel to Venice [in Italy, which generally requires Russians to have an Italian visa] on a boat from Dubrovnik [in Croatia] without a visa but this opportunity has recently been revoked — and only for the Russians,” she said. “It means one thing: that our compatriots started to exploit this option as an escape route, to buy a Croatia package, travel easily to Venice and never come back.”

TITLE: Jury Clears Four Suspects of Race Murder
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg City Court acquitted suspected murderers of an African student Tuesday in a second controversial ruling on racist killings this year, sending mixed messages to the public and leading Governor Valentina Matviyenko to question the efficacy of jury trials.
Around 50 supporters of the four suspects in the courtroom applauded the ruling for several minutes, and a few shouted “Thank you!” and “Way to go!” Interfax reported. Others commended the jury and the defense counsel for a job well done. 
But Matviyenko on Wednesday went public to condemn the jury and challenged prosecutors to take the case further.
“The work was done very professionally, and the suspects’ guilt was proven,” said Matviyenko who said she had followed the investigation very closely.
“People end up [on a jury] unprepared from a legal standpoint, and their decisions very often are made on an emotional level,” she said.
While prosecutors are planning to appeal to the Supreme Court, the defense lawyers have vowed to sue the state for “moral damage” to the four young men on trial from May 24 for murdering Congolese student, Roland Epassak, 29, in September. 
Epassak’s murder was the first of at least six murders with suspected racial motives that have rocked St. Petersburg. The latest case was the killing of Senegalese  student Lampsar Samba in April.
Another jury in the same court on March 22 cleared seven young men of murder charges in the stabbing death of a 9-year-old Tajik girl, Khursheda Sultanova, finding them guilty instead of hooliganism. The eighth suspect was cleared of all charges. 
“What do you expect me to say about [Tuesday’s] ruling?After all I’m healing two  wounds in me... the loss of my daughter and of the culprits being let free,” Khursheda’s father Yunus Sultanov, who was seriously injured in the same street attack, said by telephone on Thursday.
Kim Kuayate, a friend of Epassak, echoed Sultanov’s view saying, “Of course, I’ve been expecting that kind of decision from the very beginning.”
“The trial went by at an unusually supersonic speed, on one hand motivated by the G8 Summit and on the other, interrupted by the same summit,” said Kuayate, adding that “it was a pre-planned ruling that had to wait for the completion of the summit in order to conceal the failures of Russian justice.” 
The latest verdict shows that ordinary people do not see racism as a problem, said Desire Deffo, a leader of the the St. Petersburg African Union organization.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” he said by telephone Wednesday. After Tuesday’s verdict, Prosecutor Dmitry Mazurov called the jurors “simple folk” who were unable to objectively evaluate evidence.
“Evidence for them is a bloody knife with fingerprints on it,” Mazurov said in comments broadcast on Rossia state television late Tuesday.
As evidence, prosecutors had presented the student’s clothes, on which they said fibers from the suspects’ clothing had been found.
However, the suspected murder weapons — a knife and a rock — remain missing, and no bloodstains were found on the suspects’ clothes.
Epassak, 29, was attacked by four young men on the night of Sept. 9 near the building where he lived, prosecutors said.
The attackers struck him on the head with a rock and then began punching and kicking him. After Epassak fell to the ground, they continued beating him and stabbed him several times, including in the throat.
One of the four defendants, Andrei Gerasimov, was accused of stabbing Epassak at least seven times. The other suspects were Yury Gromov, Andrei Olenev and Dmitry Orlov. The suspects are 19 to 26 years old.
Epassak died from the stab wounds three days later in hospital. Prosecutors initially said the attack was not racially motivated, angering members of the African and Asian communities and prompting hundreds of them to march in St. Petersburg the day after Epassak died. The attack was eventually classified as a hate crime.
The suspects were detained in late September, and city prosecutors later announced they had admitted to killing Epassak.
All four, however, declared their innocence in their July 20 closing statements to the St. Petersburg City Court. They denied having racist sentiments and noted that the suspected murder weapons had never been found, Strana.ru reported. They also pointed out that no blood had been found on their clothes. 
Olenev, who pleaded not guilty, made a statement that clearly incriminated him but which the jury appeared to ignore.
He said it would have been impossible for him to throw a rock with his left arm directly at Epassak’s forehead because “at that moment Epassak was surrounded by Gromov, Gerasimov and Orlov,” according to Regnum.ru.
A woman who answered the phone at the Congolese Embassy in Moscow said no one was available to comment.
Proponents of judicial reform say prosecutors and investigators often put together slipshod cases and lack the professionalism needed to fight their cases before juries.
Since 1993, when jury trials were reinstated after a break of more than seven decades, the acquittal rate has been much higher for defendants tried by jury than by judges. Last year, every sixth person tried by a jury was acquitted, while only 3.6 percent of those tried by judges were cleared, according to statistics provided by the Supreme Court. In previous years, the difference was even greater.
Nineteen people have died in racially motivated attacks this year, a group that monitors extremist activity said Wednesday. Another 166 people have suffered injuries in attacks in 22 regions, the Sova Center said, Ekho Moskvy reported.
Most of the attacks took place in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and they are becoming increasingly vicious, it said.

Staff Writer Carl Shreck contributed to this report.

TITLE: Yukos Turns Down Gazprom Bid
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Yukos said Wednesday that it was rejecting a bid by Gazprom to buy up assets ahead of an Aug. 1 bankruptcy hearing likely to finish off the ailing oil firm. 
“The bankruptcy process is moving forward at a great pace and the management is now of the belief that it would be inappropriate and without benefit to the company for any last-minute deals to be struck,” Yukos spokeswoman Claire Davidson said by e-mail.
Gazprom executives had been seeking to buy Yukos’ 20 percent stake in Gazprom Neft, which Yukos values at $4 billion, and unspecified other assets, Davidson said.
The decision to reject the bid came just one day after Yukos’ creditors, presided over by the court-appointed temporary manager Eduard Rebgun, voted to liquidate the company. This apparently ended a battle for survival that began with the arrest of its majority owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in October 2003.
The Moscow Arbitration Court is expected to rubberstamp the vote in hearings next week, starting a liquidation that is likely to see Yukos’ remaining assets snapped up by state energy companies.
Khodorkovsky, who spent his 1,000th day in prison Saturday, was unaware of the decision to sell off the remains of his company, said his lawyer, Anton Drel. Khodorkovsky was more concerned with mundane matters such as where his next meal was coming from, Drel said.
“He has not asked about this and not one of his lawyers has raised the issue with him,” Drel said. “He is more interested in the daily conditions at the prison colony.”
Khodorkovsky is being held in a prison camp in the Chita region. Last year, he was sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion.
An assistant for Leonid Nevzlin, Khodorkovsky’s top lieutenant, said it was “symbolic” that the creditors had made their decision on the same day as prosecutors had called for former Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin to be given a life sentence on charges of murder and attempted murder.
“Pichugin is the person with whom the whole Yukos case started,” said Eric Wolfe by telephone from Israel, where Nevzlin fled in 2003, fearing arrest. “Apparently the Kremlin decided to end Yukos together with Pichugin.”
Pichugin was arrested in the summer of 2003, the first in a series of arrests that included Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev. Pichugin is serving a sentence of 20 years after being convicted of two murders and several attempted murders. He is currently on trial for a string of other killings and assassination attempts.
Pichugin has denied his guilt, as has Nevzlin, who has been charged in absentia with ordering the killings. On Wednesday, lawyers for Pichugin presented their final arguments in the Moscow City Court.
It was not clear if Gazprom and Rosneft would now battle over Yukos’ remains — or strike a deal behind closed doors. In a sign that Gazprom was eager to snap up Yukos assets ahead of the bankruptcy hearings, it sent executives to London this week to hammer out a deal to buy Yukos’ stake in Gazprom Neft and other assets, Davidson said.
Davidson declined to confirm a report in Wednesday’s Vedomosti that Gazprom was also seeking to acquire Yukos’ 49 percent stake in Slovakian pipeline firm Transpetrol and majority stakes in Yukos’ Angarsk refinery and Arctic Gaz.
A Gazprom spokesman confirmed Gazprom was seeking other assets but declined to name them. Gazprom executives have said the gas giant is interested in acquiring Yukos’ second biggest oil unit, Tomskneft.
Steven Dashevsky, head of research at Aton brokerage, said it was more likely Yukos’ assets had already been divvied up. “This is going to be decided internally by the powers-that-be,” he said.

TITLE: EuroPartner Certification To Fall ‘Barbaric’ Loggers
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: EuroPartner has become the first Russian company accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) for the provision of forestry certificates. Experts hope that voluntary certification will help the nation’s timber companies compete on the world market and at the same time greatly reduce illegal forestry.
At the moment, between 10 percent and 15 percent of forest in Russia is illegally cut down, said Karen Gukasyan, deputy head of perspective development and law enforcement at the Federal Forestry Agency at a round table at Rosbalt on Tuesday. The methods used are “barbaric,” without any attempt to recultivate the land, he said.
“The system of certification allows control over the quality of the timber, its source, cutting methods, shipment and tax payments. It will decrease the amount of illegal cutting and increase tax payments to the federal budget,” Gukasyan said.
Certification is economically quite reasonable for timber firms. “Many countries prohibit the import of uncertified timber. Unless we introduce certification, Russian firms will have only limited access to the world market,” Gukasyan said.
“An absence of certification means a reduction in prices and increased pressure on Russian companies, forcing them out of the market. Certification allows them to compete equally with the Baltic states,” said Mikhail Knysh, EuroPartner CEO.
After joining the WTO Russia will face new certification requirements, including that related to forestry, Knysh said. Certification demands include: protection of the environment and the rights of the local population; regular payment of taxes and wages; protecting the rights of employees, including considerable social security; and the observation of collective agreements.
A certificate is valid for five years. Once a year auditors check if the company is fulfilling all these requirements.
At present around 80 million hectares of forest are certified worldwide. In Russia about 10 million hectares are certified, which puts the country third after Canada and Sweden, said Andrei Ptichnokov, director of FSC in Russia.
However 10 million hectares is only two percent of all forest in Russia, the experts said. So far 15 audit companies have been accredited by the FSC, none of them Russian. In Russia five branches of foreign audit companies have provided certificates, Ptichnikov said.
According to Knysh, Russian auditors are cheaper and they are also quicker since local specialists are more familiar with the circumstances and legislation.
In Russia certification usually costs between three cents and 14 cents per hectare, he said.
Dmitry Chuiko, director for communications with state and municipal authorities at Ilim Pulp timber company, estimated annual corporate spending on certification at seven cents per hectare.
Apart from benefits, certification entails considerable expenses related to auditing, the training of personnel and the acquisition of equipment and materials, Chuiko said.
“It bears with it a considerable risk. If you announced your intention to get certified and then failed in your bid, it would be a serious blow for the company, for its image and market standing,” he said.
Ilim Pulp initiated the process of certification in 2003 and only recently succeeded in getting certified. At the moment Ilim Pulp has certificates for three million hectares of forest and 1.6 million hectares are under consideration.
80 percent of company products are for export, Chuiko said, which was the main reason for certification. He confirmed that foreign buyers are increasingly demanding certified forest when signing contracts. Knysh added that foreign investors and lenders have also started requesting such certificates.
Andrei Gosudarev, chairman of the Timber Companies Union in the Leningrad Oblast, saw certification as being beneficial for the internal market. 150 companies rent forest in Leningrad Oblast but only half of them are members of the union — the other half are unwilling to take up such a responsibility, Gosudarev said. “The sooner we introduce certification — the sooner we will get rid of companies who abuse the law,” he said.

TITLE: Insurance Firm Seeks Medical Assistance
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Rosgosstrakh insurance company has announced its intention to expand into medical services. One out of seven of the new clinics will be opened in St. Petersburg, Interfax-AFI reported Tuesday.
“Last year we made a strategic decision to go into the compulsory health insurance business, plus we started constructing medical and prophylactic clinics,” Interfax-AFI quoted Rosgosstrakh CEO Danil Khachaturov as saying.
The clinics will be created in St. Petersburg, Stavropol, Rostov, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Samara and Ufa.
Holders of Rosgosstrakh voluntary health insurance policies will be entitled to medical treatment in the new clinics, which will not affect the policy price. The clinics will also provide medical examinations for purchasers of life insurance.
Despite the seeming contradiction between selling insurance policies and taking them as a payment for medical services, it is common practice.
“Another insurance company, Medekspress, has its own medical center on Gorokhovaya street. There are also similar precedents in other businesses. Leasing companies in Russia are often established and financed by the same banks. Thus, both the banking and leasing business of such financial groups develops,” said Igor Gorchakov, associate at Baker & McKenzie in St. Petersburg.
“The same is true for Rosgosstrakh plans — since the medical centers will render services to the holders of Rosgosstrakh policies, this should facilitate the growth of the Rosgosstrakh insurance business. The group will also gain additional income from rendering medical services,” he said.
At the moment Rosgosstrakh is looking for a building of around 2,000 to 3,000 square meters total area in St. Petersburg. The company is considering either acquiring then renting an existing building or constructing a new one, Interfax reported.
Boris Yushenkov, general director of Colliers International in St. Petersburg, saw acquisition as the more rational option because business centers do not usually allow the leasing of such areas, and Rosgosstrakh “is hardly likely to open a large clinic in a business center.”
Yushenkov estimated the purchase of a building to cost between $2 million and $10 million or more, depending on its location and condition, and reconstruction costs — between $1 million and $3 million.
However he indicated a lack of such large buildings. 
“The majority of downtown buildings are protected architectural monuments, which could considerably complicate reconstruction,” Yushenkov added.
“Separate buildings of 2,000 to 3,000 square meters total area are very popular among investors. However, with all the options — buying, constructing and renting — there should not be any particular problem with finding a location,” said Igor Luchkov, director of assessment and analysis department at Becar real estate agency.
He estimated construction costs at between $900 and $1,500 per square meter, depending on technical equipment. Buying land and a building, which requires partial replanning, minor repairs and equipping, costs between $1,400 and $2,000 per square meter, depending on location.
The rental for a building in good condition varies between $18 and $35 per square meter per month, Luchkov said.
“Downtown there is a deficit of buildings situated on the main roads and those with their own territory. But many buildings that are worth considering could be found behind, set further back from the road. Outside the city center any building is available. It’s only a matter of price,” Luchkov said.

TITLE: So You Say You Want a Revolution
AUTHOR: By Anatol Lieven
TEXT: When, in 2004, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, coming on the heels of a rigged presidential election, seemed to put that country on the path to join the West, it was top news in the U.S. media and the stuff of countless emotional commentaries. Many of them focused on the iniquity of Russia, which had backed the existing Ukrainian regime.
Since then, the events of 2004 have proved to be no revolution at all, in the sense of a fundamental change in the Ukrainian state. The Orange coalition split, economic growth declined drastically, reform stagnated and in free and fair parliamentary elections this March, the pro-Russian grouping led by the ousted candidate of 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, emerged as the largest party. After months of political chaos, including hooliganism by both sides in the Ukrainian parliament, Yanukovych will now probably lead a coalition government under the presidency of his rival, Viktor Yushchenko.
These developments have barely been reported by most of the U.S. media, however, let alone commented on. This silence marks a response to ideological and geopolitical embarrassment of which the old Soviet media might have been proud. It also misses an opportunity to conduct a searching public debate on U.S. and Western strategy in the former Soviet Union.
Developments in and concerning Ukraine have contradicted an important assumption on which U.S. and, to a lesser extent, European strategies have been based. They have demonstrated that the processes the West has encouraged in Central Europe and the Baltic states cannot be extended seamlessly to the other former Soviet states. Societies, economies and national identities and affinities are very different; links to Russia are closer; and both the United States and the European Union are weaker than they appeared to be a few years ago.
The failure of the Orange Revolution is, in many ways, a great pity for Ukraine. Irrespective of whether Ukraine can join Western institutions, westernizing reform is a good thing in itself and should be pursued. But the latest developments have also saved Ukraine, Europe and, indeed, the United States from a great danger. That danger was the prospect of early NATO enlargement to Ukraine, which until a few weeks ago was being pushed by powerful forces in Washington. This strategy is dead for the foreseeable future and we urgently need to develop an alternative one.
The danger from NATO expansion was threefold: the certainty of Russian retaliation; the opposition of a large majority of Ukrainians, especially in the Russian-speaking east and south; and the fact that NATO membership was not going to be backed up by membership in the EU, thereby anchoring that country in the West.
At a conference on Ukraine in Rome this June, a majority of EU officials and West European diplomats declared EU membership for Ukraine to be an impossibility. Several expressed profound skepticism that even enhanced partnership would amount to anything serious. The reason was Ukraine’s lack of development, but equally important was the revolt of West European electorates against further EU enlargement and its costs to the West European taxpayer. This in turn reflects the faltering West European economic growth of recent years. The engine of EU enlargement, which did most of the heavy lifting when it came to bringing other former communist states into the West, is close to the limits of its strength.
We may regret these new circumstances, but we should also treat them as an opportunity for new thought. We have tended to treat as truly legitimate and democratic only those Ukrainian politicians who lead their country away from Russia — whether their electorate wants it or not. 
The divided affinities of Ukrainians are not a problem for us to solve, but a deeply rooted historical and democratic reality. The West and Russia should agree not to inflame one or other Ukrainian grouping in order to avoid violent clashes and regional destabilization.
For Russia, this means not intervening in Ukraine’s democratic process. For the West, it means not trying to draw Ukraine into an anti-Russian alliance. Neither side should try to claim exclusive economic influence. If we are sensible, the result will be a Ukraine that is free, independent, neutral, open to international investment and economically tied to both Russia and the West. By all the standards of Ukrainian history, that would be a wonderful fate.

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. This comment was published in the Financial Times.

TITLE: The Finances of Disinformation
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: State television has been trumpeting the arrival in Russia of “the well-known Israeli human rights activist Yuly Nudelman,” who is voluntarily helping the Prosecutor General’s Office secure the extradition of Yukos co-owner Leonid Nevzlin from Israel.
I have no doubt that Russia will do everything it can to secure the extradition of Nevzlin. You can’t really justify the structure of the regime on claims that former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky wanted to replace Vladimir Putin atop the so-called power vertical and that Nevzlin wants to kill him, without demanding Israel hand Nevzlin over. I also have no doubt that the Israelis will not give him up. The Russian judicial system just can’t compete in the West.
So this is not the interesting question. The interesting question is: Why Nudelman?
Nudelman is a qualified doctor who emigrated to Israel and who no longer practices medicine. His first book was about Israeli doctors being murderers in lab coats. If Nudelman was motivated by a desire for revenge when he described all these horrors, he was sorely disappointed. His book did not produce a scandal. In fact, it made no impact at all.
Nudelman next tried to make a career in politics, but he fared little better than he had in medicine, so he wrote a book about a more successful politician of Russian descent — Natan Sharansky. This time the book was noticed: An Israeli court found Nudelman guilty of libel and ordered him to pay a whopping fine of 1 million shekels ($224,000). There is no reason to suspect that Nudelman wrote the Sharansky book as a Russian agent. He wrote whatever he felt like. For example, he wrote that Sharansky never spent any time in the camps.
There are strange people everywhere. In Russia, there is a female fan club for Shamil Basayev. They even have a web site. And in theory, Iranian television could do a report on these women and say there are people in Russia who look up to Basayev. But apart from Iranian television, these women are of interest only to psychiatrists.
Couldn’t they find a better “volunteer” to make the case for extraditing Nevzlin than the author of “Sharansky Unmasked”?
Unfortunately, the choice of partners like Nudelman is the rule rather than the exception. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Kremlin-sponsored youth movement Nashi has hired homeless people in the United States to prove that average Americans side with the Kremlin in battling the Chechen terrorists. 
Russia is also trying to overthrow Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili with the help of Igor Giorgadze, the former KGB boss in Georgia who was exposed as taking direct orders from Russia’s special services in an attempt to blow up then-Georgian President Eduard Shevardnaze in 1995. Giorgadze is no Nudelman, of course. He is a fearless and interesting man. As was, for example, Ramon Mercader, the Mexican who murdered Trotsky with an ice pick through the skull in 1940. But it would have been hard to get Mercader elected as president of Mexico.
In the 1970s, the KGB’s favorite operation was to seek out a person with deviant behavior, or wait for one to pop up. A local paper would run an article about Charles Hyder, for example, the American astrophysicist who staged a 218-day hunger strike outside the White House in the mid-1980s to protest the arms race. KGB operatives on the ground would report back to Moscow that the foreign press was writing about Hyder’s hunger strike. And that the U.S. regime seemed to be on the brink of collapse. In this way, the KGB went from being a mechanism for collecting information about foreign countries to an instrument for passing disinformation to the Soviet leadership. The higher-ups were pleased to learn that Hyder was on a hunger strike and that imperialism was breathing its last.
As we know, it wasn’t imperialism that collapsed.
In some sense it could seem that Nudelman and Giorgadze are just the latest incarnations of Hyder. But in point of fact the object of the exercise has changed drastically. No one made any money on Hyder. At the heart of the current regime is an attempt to turn a profit on everything the state does, including deception of the leadership.
The more marginal the person you get involved with and the less hope there is that his actions will be successful, the easier it is to pocket the money and put failure down to enemy machinations. 

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: Butterfly man
AUTHOR: By Alexander Osipovich
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Art and science combined in the life of Vladimir Nabokov, according to an exhibition based on his butterfly collection.
Just over a century ago, in June 1906, a 7-year-old Vladimir Nabokov caught his first butterfly.
Although he eventually gained worldwide fame as a writer — especially after the publication in 1955 of his scandalous best-selling novel “Lolita” — he also maintained a lifelong passion for lepidopterology, the branch of entomology that focuses on moths and butterflies.
Sometimes he was even dismissive of literature in favor of his scientific pursuits. “I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum,” he told an interviewer in 1964.
Some scholars of Nabokov’s writing have regarded his entomology work as part of a carefully devised effort to shape his public image. Andrew Field, his first biographer, called it “an elaborate literary pose.”
But those who play down the seriousness of Nabokov’s interest in butterflies tend to overlook that he did work as an obscure curator of lepidoptera for seven years. From 1941 to 1948 he was a part-time research fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, reorganizing its butterfly collection and publishing several well-received scientific papers.
Now Dmitry Sokolenko, 29, is trying to reconcile the two Nabokovs. Sokolenko has organized an exhibition in the Vladimir Nabokov Museum here that explores the links between the author’s art and his science. Titled “The Nabokov Code,” a riff on “The Da Vinci Code,” it juxtaposes quotations from Nabokov’s books with images of butterfly parts.
The images, taken under a microscope, are the sort of thing that Nabokov would have seen every day while researching lepidoptera at Harvard. The quotations, meanwhile, are filled with allusions to insects. Sokolenko organized the show to advance his hypothesis: that Nabokov’s meticulous, masterly prose style grew out of his love of science.
“When you do what Nabokov did, when you shift your focus from entomology to literature, you hold onto all the methods and research tools that you’ve been using for years,” Sokolenko said in an interview just before the exhibition opened on July 3. “I think that his painstaking attention to detail could only have come from his profession, from what he was doing in entomology.”
Sokolenko is no stranger to science: he is a microbiologist. Reared in a family of engineers, he grew up in Obninsk, a town in central Russia and a major hub for nuclear research during the Soviet era. 
After moving to St. Petersburg and earning a degree in biology, he took a job at the National Photography Center, a government-supported organization that helps the city’s numerous museums preserve their aging photography collections. Two years ago he organized a semi-educational, semi-artistic show of photographs featuring harmful microbes.
By coincidence, Sokolenko’s workplace is on the same street as the Vladimir Nabokov Museum, in the house where Nabokov lived until being forced into exile by the Bolshevik Revolution. Sokolenko first became hooked on Nabokov when he read “The Defense,” a novel about a chess player gradually driven insane by his obsession with the game. Last October he began volunteering at the museum, where he learned about Nabokov’s research at Harvard.
“Suddenly, I saw a completely different Nabokov, in the context of his entomological activities,” he said. “At some point I came to understand that Nabokov the writer had emerged under the influence of Nabokov the biologist.”
Hoping to share his insight with nonscientists, Sokolenko undertook the project that eventually became “The Nabokov Code.” He followed in Nabokov’s footsteps, photographing butterflies mentioned in his novels or studied as part of his entomological research. 
The exhibition includes only one image with no direct connection to Nabokov: the highly magnified eye of a fruit fly.
The eye is juxtaposed with a quotation from “Nikolai Gogol,” one of Nabokov’s best-known works of literary criticism: “The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.”
Sokolenko’s exhibition comes at a time when Nabokov’s reputation is on an upswing in the rarefied world of lepidopterology. During his lifetime some lepidopterists, perhaps jealous of his literary fame, carped about his lack of formal training. Still, his work at Harvard, reclassifying the Lycaeides genus, earned him a mention in Alexander B. Klots’s 1951 “Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America,” an achievement that reportedly delighted Nabokov, prompting him to boast about it even many years later.
More recently, a pair of writers took a fresh look at Nabokov’s research in the 1999 book “Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius” (Zoland Books). The book’s authors, Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates, an editor at The New York Times, examined Nabokov’s efforts to classify a large and diverse group of butterflies now called the Latin American Polyommatini, which were little-studied until the 1980s. 
Johnson, a lepidopterist, spent five seasons trapping butterflies in a rain forest in the Dominican Republic; as he tried to put them in a taxonomic framework, he realized that Nabokov had already done the job in a paper published in 1945. He and his colleagues named several new species after Nabokov’s characters, including a Peruvian butterfly that was christened “Madeleinea lolita.”
Sokolenko faces an uphill battle when he tries to convince scholars of literature that, as he puts it, Nabokov’s “fantastic disposition for systemization could only have come from biology.” Before they went on display here, the images in “The Nabokov Code” were shown at an international Nabokov conference in France. The philologists there, Sokolenko grumbled, perceived them as “works of art” rather than evidence for the importance of science in Nabokov’s writing.
With luck, Sokolenko will have more chances to prove his point. He hopes the exhibition will travel to the United States and Germany after it closes here at the end of the month; he is currently in talks with potential sponsors.

TITLE: Culture vulture
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The host of an arts news bulletin on local television discusses cultural life in St. Petersburg.
For the last three years the cultural status of St. Petersburg has been verified not only by the variety of cultural events held in the city but, also, by a special TV news program VESTI-Culture hosted by Anna Fradkina that is broadcast four days a week, Tuesday to Friday, at 2:30 p.m. on RTR, a state controlled channel. 
Although since the beginning of June, the program has taken a summer break, it will be back next month. Fradkina stays abreast of the city’s cultural events and is eager to share her opinions on cultural life in St. Petersburg. VESTI-Culture promotes all aspects of arts and entertainment in the city.
“It’s always hard to choose among the variety of cultural events held here,” said Fradkina. “That is why we try to put in the program only the most interesting news. There is no need and time (the program lasts for eight minutes) to talk about anything less exciting.” 
Fradkina likes to be provided with  information about the upcoming cultural events long in advance so it helps to be part of the cultural bureaucracy. She says it is often more interesting to cover the creative process than to talk only about its outcome, especially when the event  has already taken place. 
“We try to show the audience what they can’t see in the theater or exhibition hall. We usually talk about how the show or painting was ‘cooked,’ and it can often be breathtaking,” she said. 
Having widely covered new theater performances, Fradkina said that, in her opinion, Russia has been invaded by experimentalism. 
“It seems to me that directors are not interested in classical theater anymore. They often overuse the experiments and, subsequently, lack the most important thing — emotional contact with the audience,” said Fradkina. “People perceive the performance as some mechanical series of actions on the stage — something falls down, water is spilled, the set is folded up in an unusual way or a naked actor appears. These are very fashionable elements in modern performances. But they hardly get an emotional response.”
Fradkina, however, also thinks that some new approaches to  classical forms can be interesting, and both performances staged in the experimental and classical genres have their audience. 
But among the most unacceptable things in the theater for Fradkina is the use of obscene language on the stage. 
“I just do not like to hear in the theater the swear words I hear everyday in the streets. I strongly believe that it is possible to express the same emotions by other means,” she said. “True art should enrich people’s inner world and not descend to the low level of raree shows in order to satisfy some ignorant tastes and ignoble human emotions.”
Lack of theater buildings on the city’s outskirts is also a  serious problem in Fradkina’s opinion. She thinks it would be better if the Mariinsky Theater’s yet-to-be-built new building, Mariinsky II, was located in a newer city region rather than in the historical center of St. Petersburg. 
“It often takes lots of time and energy for people who live on the city’s outskirts to go to the theater. The construction of new theater buildings outside the city center can both contribute to people’s cultural enlightenment and give a home to several theater groups that do not have their own permanent stages at the moment,” said Fradkina.
Having been a TV presenter for many years, Fradkina never forgets about the creative element of her work. 
“For me, it’s a one-man show. When you are on camera, you should have sparkling eyes and speak confidently. The main aim is not only to inform but also get people interested in the news we present,” she said.
With no other cultural news program in Russia, VESTI-Culture is  beamed into peoples’ homes outside the city as well. The program promotes St. Petersburg to Moscow and regions all around Russia since many of its items are broadcast monthly in an all-Russian version of VESTI and news programs on the national state-controlled Culture channel.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: With yet more rock bands showing well-paid loyalty to the Kremlin, a person whose songs were definitive of the Russian rock revolution of the 1980s has spoken against collaborating with the increasingly undemocratic regime. 
As 5,000 so-called “commissars” of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi gathered in its camp on Lake Seliger in the Tver Oblast for free meals, free concerts and some heavy indoctrination (as they did last year), more bands held out their hands to take the Kremlin oil rubles.
Although it was mainly Moscow-based pop and rock acts such as BI-2 and Zemfira last year, this Monday saw St. Petersburg’s own stadium punk rockers Korol i Shut and pop-rock group Vyacheslav Butusov and U-Piter performing for Nashi activists, with local bands Multfilmy and Kukryniksy having performed at the camp’s opening night on July 18.
Butusov shot to fame in the mid-1980s with Nautilus Pompilius, whose songs, written in collaboration with lyricist Ilya Kormiltsev, he still performs. Kormiltsev, who runs a radical publishing house, Ultra Kultura, in Moscow, reacted strongly to his former colleague’s visit to the Nashi camp.
“I am against the lyrics that I wrote being performed in the context of political events such as Seliger 2006,” wrote Kormiltsev in his blog on Livejournal.com.
“Being a conscious opponent of the political system set up in modern [Russia], I don’t want hired rednecks having fun on tax payers’ money to hear poems that I wrote with my heart and blood.”
Kormiltsev’s songs, which made Nautilus Pompilius famous, often spoke out against totalitarianism.
Nashi is reportedly a brainchild of Vyacheslav Surkov, the influential deputy head of the presidential administration who is often described as the Kremlin’s “gray cardinal.” Surkov secretly met with a group of Russian rock musicians including Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov, Zemfira Ramazanova and Leningrad’s Sergei Shnurov in Moscow last year, approximately at the same time that Nashi was being organized, no less covertly. 
To some, the meeting, which participants were reluctant to speak about afterwards, clearly  brought some of them material benefits, as Vladimir Shakhrin, the frontman of rock band Chaif who was present at the meeting, revealed this week.
In an interview with the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper, Shakhrin was asked what had changed in his life since the meeting with Surkov.
“To be honest, I didn’t quite understand why we were meeting at all, nothing has changed in my personal life at all,” said Shakhrin.
“But for those who initiated the meeting there were some changes; [Agata Kristi’s] Vadik Samoilov got his own studio and an office in central Moscow, [Chaif’s] manager Dima Groisman received rooms for his management agency as well [...], while Borya Grebenshchikov got the opportunity to host a show at Radio Rossii.”

TITLE: Built of atoms
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An outstanding figure of the Russian Avant-Garde, Pavel Filonov, is honored by a long-awaited retrospective at the State Russian Museum that opened its doors last week.  
Unlike many of his contemporaries in the first half of the 20th century, Filonov today remains as fabulous a figure as his “analytical” method is esoteric. 
After being declared taboo following the rejection of the Avant-Garde by the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, the rediscovery of Filonov began only during the 1980s; this new exhibition is only his second large retrospective. This is a gripping show because the Russian Museum holds the largest collection of the artist’s legacy, only a portion of which is on display — 85 paintings and 75 graphic works — some of which are being shown for the first time.
Filonov’s relative anonymity does not correspond with the high originality and inventiveness of his approach which dosen’t fit into any handy classification. Born in Moscow in 1883, Filonov took shape as an artist in St. Petersburg, where he moved in 1897. Partly self-trained, by the 1910s he had become a remarkable figure on the art scene, working as a painter, decorator and illustrator. Like the key artists of the Avant-Garde, he was the author of several theoretical compositions and the founder of his own school of “Analytical Art.” 
Filonov believed that the artist, while composing a painting, should proceed from particular details to the general image, and bit by bit, using “atoms,” fill the surface of the canvas. Within this rational and linear manner, the image is built with color “atoms” — small dabs — like an organic form. “Form is made by persistent line. Every line must be made. Every atom must be made,” Filonov said. In the most mature works the artist preferred a static realistic image of either men, animals or plants imbued with dynamic biological processes and reactions, and an openness to “genetic modification.” 
Filonov summarized the time-consuming, laborious painting method with the neologism sdelannost (“madeness,” from the perfective form of the Russian verb delat, meaning “to make” or “to do”). For Filonov, this was the only professional criterion by which to evaluate a piece of art: by its “finishedness.” 
This term, in a more arbitrary way, could be applied to the well thought-out and inventive design of the Russian Museum’s exhibition itself. Themes of universal flowering and putrefaction are expressed by large lonesome heads, bewitching crystals that spring up in the dark, and a weightless and absorbing space filled with harsh, piercing sounds. 
Leaving the main exhibition space, the  spectator finds a large blue clumsy lion  that voices the artist’s autobiography, written in 1929. This quite strange homage to Filonov by the Moscow-based contemporary conceptualist artist Vadim Zakharov suggests that Filonov “looks from the distance on the tragedy of his greatness,” but this puts too much pathos on the whole matter. As an idea it is fine, but Zakharov should have found better means to fulfill it or at least found a more expressive lion. 
There is already enough ambition and tragedy in Filonov’s curriculum vitae; themes of power and violence featured in the artist’s life as much as in his art. Returning from service during World War I, Filonov enthusiastically welcomed the new Soviet state. In the 1920s, his analytical method got the green light from the new cultural commissars and attracted many followers among artists. But by the 1930s, as with almost all the figures associated with the Avant-Garde movement, he was considered politically unreliable and artistically too “formalist.” Political ostracism was followed by abject poverty. The new world which he had once welcomed destroyed his own. 
Filonov died from starvation during the Siege of Leningrad in 1941. 
	
The Pavel Filonov retrospective runs through Oct. 1 at the Benois Wing of the Russian Museum. www.rusmuseum.ru

TITLE: London calling
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: London’s classical music lovers this month are torn between Russia’s two great companies — St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater and Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater — which are performing in the British capital at the same time at venues within a few minutes walk of each other. 
While both companies’ commercial interests might be hurt by the overlapping tours, the British audience benefits from the choice. The Royal Opera House (Covent Garden) is hosting the Bolshoi which has taken its familiar classics “Swan Lake,” “Cinderella” and “Don Quixote,” while the Mariinsky has come up with a much riskier offering; a festival exclusively showcasing the more obscure works by Dmitry Shostakovich during what is the centenary year of the St. Petersburg composer. 
Performing at the Coliseum, home of the English National Opera, until Saturday, the Mariinsky presents the Shostakovich ballets “The Leningrad Symphony,” “The Bedbug” and “The Golden Age,” his operas “The Nose” and a version of “Katerina Izmailova,” a reworked version of  “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” that originally infuriated Soviet culture bosses in 1936. 
“Some people think it is possible to whitewash the Soviet period from the history of Russia, but in my opinion it would be a wrong thing to do,” the Mariinsky’s artistic director Valery Gergiev told reporters in London this week. “‘Katerina Izmailova,’ which premiered in 1963, almost thirty years after ‘Lady Macbeth,’ was perhaps less daring but certainly more perfect, a creation of a wise and fine master... And by the way, the Mariinsky is performing the [original] ‘Lady Macbeth’ in London a month later.”
Aside from new twists to decades-long arguments that have surrounded “Lady Macbeth” and its later incarnation “Katerina Izmailova,” politics is in the air in London, despite Mariinsky’s efforts to depoliticize its productions.
Writing about “The Nose,” Shostakovich’s 1930 opera based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 short story, The Guardian’s Tom Service saw in Yury Alexandrov’s 2004 staging allusions to contemporary Russia.
“Amid the chaos of the crowd scenes, and the surreal frenzy as everyone tries to get a glimpse of the nose on its daily promenade on the Nevsky Prospekt, the production had a serious point to make,” reads the review from last Saturday. “Throughout the show, Kovalyov’s nose remains on his face, as if the whole thing were the result of a collective delusion, a state-sponsored hallucination.”
The Times critic Richard Morrison also saw political associations. 
“Maybe it is a comment on those hierarchical societies  in which appearance, status and conformity count for more than achievement, integrity and truth,” wrote Morrison. “That theme would certainly have seemed as pertinent in Shostakovich’s Soviet Union as in Gogol’s Imperial Russia. And it hasn’t exactly been rendered irrelevant today, either  in  Putin’s Russia or Blair’s Britain.”
Musically, visually and vocally, the Mariinsky’s opera tour was deemed a success by London critics.
“The uniform excellence of the company’s singing is unrivalled by any western opera company in this repertoire: Shostakovich’s dementedly high tenor parts were sung with astonishing accuracy,” wrote The Guardian. 
But the Mariinsky’s ballet tour has had a tough start. The Independent gave its review an unflattering title: “Flapping choreography.”
“The dancers of the Mariinsky ballet prance across the stage with tireless zaniness, flapping wrists and joggling elbows,” wrote Zoe Anderson in The Independent on Wednesday. “The music, a patchwork of Shostakovich’s fragments, grinds on alongside. This is ‘The Bedbug,’ and it’s a disaster.”
Leonid Yakobson’s 1962 one-act ballet, “The Bedbug” set to a mixture of Russian songs and folk tunes, in addition to Shostakovich’s music, makes a considerable departure from the Vladimir Mayakovsky play on which it is based.
Yakobson’s legendary eccentricity and sense of the grotesque are both very much present in the work. The treatment, Yakobson’s dramaturgy was given by the Mariinsky in London, failed to make the critics happy.
“Perhaps it seemed new in 1962,” Anderson wrote. “It must have been more energetic. The Mariinsky don’t put their backs into the moves. Hands flap, feet shuffle, but there’s no spring.”

TITLE: Two years and a dose of Dickens
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Times was not the first English-language newspaper in St. Petersburg. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the city was a flourishing Imperial capital, a range of publications were printed in English. In the second of a series of articles, art historian Andrei Vorobei looks at The St. Petersburg English Review of Literature, the Arts and Sciences, published in St. Petersburg in 1842-1843. 
The first truly English magazine published in the city — The St. Petersburg English Review of Literature, the Arts and Sciences — appeared during the conservative, autocratic reign of Nicholas I when Russian society was restrained by secret police and heavy press censorship. 
Thanks to the prominent French writer and traveller Marquis de Custine (1790–1857), who visited Russia a couple of years before the first issue of the Review was published, we have his famous “Letters from Russia,” one of the most diverting and intelligent foreign literary accounts of tsarist Russia of the period. The Review conformed to the limitations imposed by the regime and even was designed for its top noblemen. 
“We are well aware that it is only to the present generation of the Russian nobility, for whom chiefly the work was published, that our language and literature are becoming generally and familiarly known,” the editors wrote. 
A list of subscribers 15 pages long gives a clear idea about its circulation and included His Majesty the Emperor and Her Majesty the Empress, followed by members of the Imperial family, ambassadors, and high-ranking bureaucrats. Besides a large body of Russian readers, the second category of readers was foreigners.
It can be assumed that such an innovation in the ordinary press of the time became possible due to the acquaintance its editors had with the Imperial court. The cover page informs that the Review was published “under the patronage of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Empress” and that S. Warrand, one of the editors, was “a teacher of the English and Literature to Their Imperial Highnesses [the future tsar, Alexander II], lecturer at the Imperial university and the Imperial law-college of St. Petersburg; knight of the Orders of St. Anne, St. Stanislaus, and St. Vladimir.” 
The second editor Thomas Budge Shaw (1813-1862) came to Russia in 1840 and eventually the Cambridge graduate became one of the most significant figures to promote the literary traditions of the two countries. 
Shaw had been acquainted with the family of Warrand, whose daughter he soon married. Thanks to Warrand, Shaw was quickly appointed as a lecturer of English at the Imperial Alexander Lyceum and later at St. Petersburg University. His “Outlines of English Literature” published for Russian students soon became a bestseller in England. His translations of Russian literature works “give many a hint in England of the true character of the Russian national mind.” 
At around 100 pages, the Review was published twice a month for almost two years. Details about the magazine’s operation can be found in the editors’ lengthy letters, which aired the opinions and suggestions of readers (“why no politics?,” “why so little poetry?,” “why not a greater number of original articles?,” “why is the review too dear?”). 
A letter appeared at the end of the first year of its publication that reminded readers that “the principal object of the St. Petersburg English Review was to be a selection of the best and most popular articles, to be extracted from the publications of Great Britain, embracing every subject likely to interest the general reader.”  
According to the editors, about half of the pages were devoted to “serious or instructive matter,” and the other half to “mere amusement.” 
A large English Literature section suggested various compositions by such classical and contemporary figures as Daniel Defoe (the overview was dated around the time of the latest Russian translation of “Robinson Crusoe”), William Wordsworth, Thomas Moore and others. In addition, the section serialized novels over several months including Charles Dickens’ “Barnaby Rudge,” although some subscribers “many times din into [the editors] unfortunate ears, that they had read Barnaby Rudge: the several copies (complete) were already in St. Petersburg.” 
The Review covered the questions  of “what’s on” and or “how is it” in England: articles with statistical data and analysis (“London Fires in 1841,” “Great Britain at the commencement of the year 1843,” “Mendacity, its causes, and statistics”) were permanently varied with historical compositions and information about Britain’s colonies and other far-flung climes — “Afghanistan and India,” “Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Armenia,” “American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens.” 
There was section of general interest, spanning stories from “The History of Cock Fighting” and “Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece”to “Lynch-Law” and “On the changes of social life in Germany.” A miscellany section featured in brief gossip, scandals and “discoveries” such as “Mr. Porter, in an analysis of the Census, states that in all Great Britain there are 13 000 idiots, lunatics & c., and in England alone 1 in 500.”
The editors tried to put in each issue a dose of what in England existed separately in numerous reviews and magazines “for every class of reader” and each number had a very eclectic mix. The Review was apathetic toward Russian matters; there were almost no original articles written by local English or Russian authors during the magazine’s history. 
Readers complained. 
Some wanted more serious stuff; others looked for trash and only trash. A few wanted military or sports news, others wanted politics or science; another wanted more about Asia, while someone else was interested in Europe or America. 
In the middle of its second year, the editors informed the readers that due to “the expenses of publication so far exceeding the amount of subscription” they were unable to continue publishing. 
“Whether this our failure arises from our having, by a too great variety of subjects, failed to suit the matter to the taste of the public — thus verifying what we formerly, with fear, predicted, that in trying to please everybody we should please nobody — or whether there is not yet a sufficient number of English readers in Russia, we know not.” It was both. 

The author and The St. Petersburg Times thank the staff of Rossika, the Newspaper Department, and Russian and Foreign Magazines Funds of the Russian National Library for assistance in providing the material for this article.

TITLE: Final Summations Given In Saddam Proceedings
AUTHOR: By Bushra Juhi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq — Lawyers gave their closing arguments Thursday for the last two defendants in Saddam Hussein’s trial, and the chief judge adjourned the proceedings until mid-October when the ex-president and two top lieutenants could be sentenced to death.
Saddam was not in court because his court-appointed attorney presented closing arguments Wednesday. The defense team has boycotted the trial since last month to protest the killing of lawyer Khamis al-Obeidi. He was the third defense lawyer slain since the trial began in October.
The ousted president and seven others have been on trial since Oct. 19 for their alleged roles in the killing of Shiite Muslims in Dujail following an assassination attempt on Saddam there in 1982. The prosecution has asked for the death penalty for Saddam and two others. The final two defendants to appear in court for closing arguments were former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Awad al-Bandar, who presided over the revolutionary court that sentenced Shiites in Dujail to death or imprisonment in the crackdown.
Both defendants said they would not accept their court-appointed lawyers, who nonetheless presented summations maintaining that the government had failed to establish a link between their clients and the killings and human rights abuses in Dujail.
“I refuse these procedures and I will not present my own defense,” Ramadan told the judge. “I do not know who this lawyer is, or his name.”
Ramadan said he could produce “1,000 people from Dujail” to testify that “they never saw me there.” He also complained that the government had done little to find the killers of the defense lawyers, adding that “if I left prison now, I could find the killers in five minutes.”
In his closing, Ramadan’s court-appointed lawyer said there was no evidence tying the former vice president to the events in Dujail.
“He had no role in the arrest of the people of Dujail ... There is no evidence of his involvement in the case,” said the lawyer, whose identity was withheld for security reasons.
Ramadan was the commander of the Popular Army, established in the early 1970s as the militia of Saddam’s Baath Party. The lawyer said that even if the Popular Army was involved in the Dujail events, no evidence had been presented showing that Ramadan issued any orders.
Speaking after the closing, Ramadan criticized the lawyer for dwelling so much on the Popular Army, saying his role was primarily training and he had no direct control over the units, which were under the control of local Baath party leaders.
“It’s not even an issue of how strong or weak my influence was over the Popular Army,” he said. “The fact is, I had no control over it to begin with.”
Chief Judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman accused the boycotting attorneys of taking money from their clients and not defending them.
“They’re sitting abroad now generating fame by issuing political statements on television stations as if this case is a political one. This behavior will harm you, the defendants. This is a criminal case, not a political one,” Abdel-Rahman said.
The five-judge panel adjourned until Oct. 16 to consider a verdict.

TITLE: Israel Not to Expand Offensive
AUTHOR: By Laurie Copans
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Top Israeli Cabinet ministers decided Thursday not to expand the country’s Lebanon offensive but ordered the call up of thousands of additional reserve soldiers to boost the campaign. The decision came as Israeli jets pounded across Lebanon on Thursday, extending their air campaign a day after suffering its highest one-day casualty toll in fighting with Hezbollah, with nine soldiers killed.
So far, 16 days of bombardment and intense ground fighting in recent days have been unable to stop the Hezbollah rocket attacks. On Wednesday, the guerrillas unleashed their biggest volley yet — 151 rockets into northern Israel.
On Thursday, a Hezbollah rocket slammed into a laundry detergent plant in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona, setting a warehouse on fire, Israeli security officials said. Farej Fares, a local police commander in the northern town, said no one was in the building when it was hit, and that there was no threat of toxic materials being released into the air.
The Israeli military warned Lebanese in the south on Thursday that their villages would be “totally destroyed” if missiles are fired from them.
A high-level Mideast conference in Rome ended Wednesday without agreement. Most European leaders want Israel to halt its offensive against Hezbollah immediately, while the United States is willing to give Israel more time to punish the guerrilla group.
“We received yesterday in the Rome conference permission, in effect, from the world, part of it gritting its teeth and part of it granting its blessing, to continue the operation, this war, until Hezbollah’s presence is erased in Lebanon and it is disarmed,” Justice Minister Haim Ramon told Army Radio.
Although top international, European and U.S. officials agreed in the Rome conference that urgent action was needed to stop the killing of civilians in Lebanon, they issued no joint statement calling for a cease-fire.
With cease-fire efforts stalemated, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that she was prepared to make a second tour of the Middle East to try to hammer out a resolution, but she did not specify when.
“I am more than happy to go back,” Rice said, if her efforts can “move toward a sustainable cease-fire that would end the violence.” She spoke in Malaysia after attending the Rome conference. Rice held talks in Beirut and Jerusalem earlier in the week.
During a session Thursday with the security Cabinet, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the goals of Israel’s 17-day offensive are being met, participants of the meeting said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose details of the discussion.
The participants said the call up of three additional reserve divisions, comprising thousands of soldiers, was meant to refresh troops in Lebanon, but the huge size of the mobilization raised questions about the military’s overall strategy. One division has 12,000 to 15,000 soldiers.
Ramon, considered to be close to Olmert, also told Army Radio that Israel should unleash massive airstrikes against villages in southern Lebanon to clear out Hezbollah gunmen.
His call for greater firepower came a day after Israel suffered its heaviest single-day casualty toll in the campaign, with nine soldiers killed and 25 wounded in house-to-house fighting in Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon.
Ramon said the Israeli air force must bomb villages before ground forces enter, suggesting this would help prevent Israeli casualties in the future.
Asked whether entire villages should be flattened, he said: “These places are not villages. They are military bases in which Hezbollah people are hiding and from which they are operating.”
Ramon said Israel has given civilians in southern Lebanon sufficient warning to leave the area, and that those left behind should be considered Hezbollah sympathizers. “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah,” he said.
However, it is believed that civilians remain in these communities. A Red Cross doctor who visited the town of Bint Jbail before the Israelis advanced on it this week said the majority of residents had fled, but a considerable number were taking cover in schools and other places.
Ramon said the military should not hold back.
“What we need to activate in south Lebanon is tremendous firepower before ground forces enter,” he said. “Our great advantage against Hezbollah is firepower, not hand-to-hand combat.”
The Israeli daily Haaretz said military officials have criticized the government for not ordering a broader ground offensive, which they said would give troops an advantage over Hezbollah. Several thousand Israeli soldiers are currently fighting several hundred Hezbollah gunmen. Military commanders also demanded greater air support of the ground troops, Haaretz said.
One of the aims of the ground offensive is to push Hezbollah out of a 1.2-mile strip along the Israeli-Lebanese border to prevent future attacks by the militia. However, Israel’s offensive has failed to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel.
During the 17-day offensive, Hezbollah has fired more than 1,400 rockets into Israel. By midmorning Thursday, 30 rockets had already hit three northern Israeli towns. On Wednesday, 151 rockets hit Israel, the highest daily total since the start of the fighting, the army said.
Israel’s offensive has killed 423 people in Lebanon since the crisis began July 12. It erupted when Hezbollah fighters staged a cross-border attack that led to the deaths of eight Israeli soldiers and left two captured.
Fifty-two Israelis have been killed in the fighting, including 34 soldiers.
The growing Israeli casualty toll was accompanied by criticism of the military operation. Some politicians warned that Israel could get dragged into a long offensive in Lebanon. Israel withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation of the area.
In the first apparent ramification of the killing of four U.N. observers by an Israeli airstrike earlier this week, Australia decided to withdraw 12 unarmed logistics specialists who had been sent to southern Lebanon to help with evacuation efforts.

TITLE: Somali Lawmakers Try For Removal of Prime Minister
AUTHOR: By Guled Mohamed
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOGADISHU — Somali legislators are trying to remove Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi from power, in a move government sources said on Thursday was aimed at persuading rival powerful Islamists to enter peace talks.
A lawmaker said a vote of no confidence in Gedi had been presented to the speaker and would be debated on Saturday. 18 ministers and assistant ministers later resigned from the fragile interim government.
“We have resigned because we have failed to fulfill the needs of the Somali people. We have decided to vacate all the seats for the Khartoum talks,” state minister of parliament and government relations Abdirahman Haji Adan told Reuters.
Analysts say the achievement of a power-sharing agreement in talks slated to take place in Sudan — whereby the Islamists take some ministerial positions — could be the only way to avert war in Somalia.
Gedi’s position would be vulnerable in any shared government because President Abdullahi Yusuf would likely offer the prime minister’s post to the Islamists, according to analysts.
In another development giving the Islamists full control in the capital, militiamen said gunmen loyal to a warlord who controlled a former presidential palace — known as Villa Somalia — were preparing to hand it over.
Although the Islamist movement seized Mogadishu from warlords last month and now controls a swathe of the south, some pockets in the capital remained under warlord control.
The Islamists are split between moderates wanting talks and hardliners who believe they can win a military campaign against the interim administration.
“They want to go to Khartoum without a prime minister and see if they can hammer out a deal with the Islamic courts,” said a source close to Somalia’s parliamentary speaker. “After that is when the president will appoint the prime minister.”
The government’s interim charter says that once a vote of no confidence is passed against a prime minister, the president is required to appoint a new one within 30 days.
Talks took place in Khartoum in June but the government boycotted a second round this month in protest at alleged Islamist violations.
“The motion is supported and even funded by Islamists who want to take the position once talks with the government commence in Khartoum,” a government source said.

TITLE: Yankees Move Ahead in Playoff Fight
AUTHOR: By Tyler Kepner
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: ARLINGTON, Texas, — When it was over — after five Yankees relievers, four lead changes, two booming homers and one pivotal missed bunt — one fact stood out about the Yankees’ wild 8-7 win over the Texas Rangers on Wednesday.
For all of their injuries and occasionally ragged play, the Yankees have the lead for a playoff spot. They are a half-game up in the American League wild-card standings, whether they want to know it or not.
“We’re still shooting to win,” said Jason Giambi, whose two-run homer in the ninth inning made the difference. “We want to win this thing. We’ve got our opportunities to play Boston head-to-head, and we’re keeping ourselves in the middle of everything.”
For the Yankees and the Red Sox, it is all shadow boxing until a five-game series in Boston next month. But the Yankees landed a big punch on Wednesday, creeping to a game and a half out of the East division lead with their victory and the Red Sox’ loss in Oakland.
Giambi, who had just four hits in his previous 32 at-bats, connected on a 2-1 pitch off closer Akinori Otsuka for his 29th home run. Working his third game in a row, Mariano Rivera came in for the save to finish off a three-game sweep.
Otsuka was trying to hold a 7-6 Rangers lead. Texas had gone ahead with three runs in the eighth, taking advantage of an injury to the setup man Kyle Farnsworth.
Manager Joe Torre had planned to use Farnsworth in the eighth inning, whether or not the Yankees were winning. 
“I thought my work was over when I said, ‘Get Farnsworth in the game,’ ” Torre said. “All of a sudden, Gator tapped me on the shoulder.”
Ron Guidry, the pitching coach, told Torre that Farnsworth was hurt. Torre had vowed before the game not to use Scott Proctor, who worked two innings Tuesday, so he went with the rookie T. J. Beam, just up from Class AAA Columbus this week.
The Yankees led by 6-4, but Beam walked his first hitter on nine pitches and then allowed a double to Ian Kinsler. With the middle of the order due up, Torre called for Proctor.
Proctor was not hit hard, but the results were disastrous. On the first pitch, Michael Young bounced a two-run single through Proctor’s legs to tie the game. Mark Teixeira then singled, and Torre pulled the infield in. Hank Blalock bounced a curveball over first base to put Texas ahead by a run.
“Proctor deserves the medal of honor here for telling Gator he could get a couple of outs,” Torre said. “He gave us a valiant try there.”
After another single, Shawn Chacon replaced Proctor with the bases loaded and no outs. Improbably, he struck out Mark DeRosa and caught a liner by Brad Wilkerson, flipping to first for an inning-ending double play.
Chacon, who has no real role after being bumped from the rotation in early July, earned the victory.
“It’s not like you lose confidence in yourself,” Chacon said. “You just kind of sit there and wonder how much confidence they’ve lost in you.” Consider some of Torre’s confidence restored. He called Chacon the “player of the game, for me,” though there were many candidates. One was Alex Rodriguez, who belted a full-count, 97-mile-an-hour fastball from Francisco Cordero over the center field fence for a homer.

TITLE: Hiddink Charged With Tax Fraud
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Guus Hiddink, the newly appointed coach of the Russian national football team, will be charged with tax evasion in his native Netherlands, his agent confirmed Wednesday.
Dutch prosecutors have scheduled a court hearing for Sept. 15, when Hiddink will be quizzed on his 2002 income. During the first half of that year, including during the World Cup, Hiddink served as national team manager of South Korea. After the tournament was over, Hiddink moved to Belgium and took over as manager of Dutch team PSV Eindhoven.
“This is a preliminary hearing about the income Hiddink earned during his work in Korea in 2002. He lived in Korea until the 2002 World Cup was over,” Hiddink’s agent, Cees van Nieuwenhuizen, said by telephone from the Netherlands on Wednesday. “The Dutch authorities want to claim tax on his income in Korea, but Hiddink already paid tax on that income in Korea.”
A spokeswoman for the public prosecutor’s office in Amsterdam said Wednesday that Hiddink would be prosecuted “for tax fraud,” without elaborating, The Associated Press reported. 
The charges against Hiddink came as no surprise, his agent said. “We have been working on this since September of last year, when [the prosecutors] started to ask questions,” van Nieuwenhuizen said. Hiddink has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
As part of the investigation, Hiddink’s offices in the Dutch city of Eindhoven were searched in October, when he was in charge of league champion PSV from a base in Belgium. 
Van Nieuwenhuizen said the Dutch tax authorities had been investigating the fiscal year 2002, which in the Netherlands corresponds with the calendar year. The hearing in the Netherlands will fall nine days after Russia’s first Euro 2008 qualifier against Croatia. “It will not affect his work in Russia at all,” van Nieuwenhuizen said. “I don’t think he has to be there in person. He can send his financial expert to the hearing.”
Van Nieuwenhuizen said prosecutors had not specified the amount they were seeking in back taxes and penalties.
Andrei Malosolov, a spokesman for the Russian Football Union, said Wednesday afternoon that he was unaware of the charges facing Hiddink until informed by a reporter. “We have discussed this report, and we are not prepared to comment until we have been in contact with Guus Hiddink, and until we sort out the details,” he said later Wednesday. “Maybe Hiddink himself will comment when he comes to Moscow this Saturday.” 
Hiddink signed a 2 1/2-year contract with the Russian Football Union after coaching Australia at the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

TITLE: California Attracts Olympic Interest As Franchises Moot New Stadiums
AUTHOR: By Jim Christie
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SAN FRANCISCO — The U.S. Olympic Committee advanced Los Angeles and San Francisco on Wednesday to the next step in the contest to bid to host the 2016 games, a move that comes as many of the state’s sports teams draw up plans for new stadiums.
Chicago was the third city tapped by the committee. Each offers the “potential of a dramatic Olympic legacy that could produce a positive impact for the worldwide Olympic Movement for decades to come,” committee member Bob Ctvrtlik said in a statement.
The Olympic interest may give California’s professional sports franchises another talking point for private investors and public debt authorities as they seek to finance new state-of-the-art facilities. 
From San Francisco in northern California to San Diego in the state’s south, owners of pro franchises are talking about the need for new stadiums.
The San Francisco 49ers and San Diego Chargers of the National Football League have plans for new stadiums; the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball are in the market for land to build a new ballpark; and the Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association have an initial deal with local officials for a new arena.
The Athletics’ owners are also looking into building a stadium in the San Francisco Bay to launch a Major League Soccer team, and rival groups in Los Angeles and Anaheim aim to lure an NFL franchise by building new stadiums.
The plans are reminiscent of the buzz ahead of the stadium-building spree that swept California in the 1960s after baseball teams such as the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants moved West. Many of those facilities are now outdated, lacking amenities to attract corporate sponsorships and fill luxury seating.

TITLE: Juventus Needs Not Be Sorry
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ROME — The man at the center of Italy’s match-fixing scandal, former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi, has hit out at the decision of an appeals court earlier this week to confirm the club’s relegation to Serie B.
Nicknamed Lucky Luciano for his wily dealings in the transfer market, Moggi said he was disappointed after Juventus was found guilty of conspiring with referees and linesmen to rig matches during the 2004/05 season.
The club will start next season in Serie B on minus 17 points.
“The club has nothing to be sorry for. Its staff have always behaved correctly,” Moggi was quoted as saying in Corriere dello Sport on Thursday.
The scandal began in early May when newspapers published intercepted telephone conversations between Moggi and senior Italian Football Federation (FIGC) officials, discussing refereeing appointments.
Moggi quit his post on the last day of the season then refused to take part in the FIGC investigation or the sports tribunal that followed it, claiming he had become “extraneous to the world of football”.
Juventus has said it will go to Italy’s civil courts in an attempt to clear its name and be reinstated in Serie A.
Two other clubs found guilty — Fiorentina and Lazio — have also promised further legal action after losing their places in next season’s European competitions.
Moggi attacked the appeal court’s decision to admit the phone taps as evidence and predicted a lengthy legal battle, which could end with the verdicts being overturned.
“It is not finished yet. In fact, it has only just begun and I’m hoping there will be a very different ending. You’ll see that I’m right,” he said.