SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1258 (24), Friday, March 30, 2007
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TITLE: Rosneft Snaps Up Yukos Stake
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Rosneft extended its reach over the dismantled Yukos empire on Tuesday, winning back a block of its own shares in the first of a series of auctions to sell off the remains of the bankrupted oil firm.
It took 10 bids and 10 minutes for Rosneft’s newly formed subsidiary RN-Razvitiye to cast the winning offer against a subsidiary of TNK-BP, its sole competitor for the stake.
The state-controlled firm won the lot, which included the 9.44 percent Rosneft stake held by Yukos, for 197.84 billion rubles ($7.6 billion) — a fraction above the discounted starting price of 195.5 billion rubles ($7.5 billion).
“We are entirely happy with the results of today’s auction,” Rosneft spokesman Nikolai Manvelov said.
TNK-BP, which announced its intention to participate in the auction just hours before registration closed Friday, resigned itself quickly to defeat.
“We participated and made five or six serious bids, but in the end we weren’t successful. So good luck to Rosneft,” TNK-BP vice president Peter Henshaw said by telephone after the auction. “We bid until our limit and didn’t go past it.”
Rosneft was widely expected to emerge victorious, with analysts agreeing that the participation of TNK-BP was a symbolic gesture aimed at giving the process an air of legitimacy.
“It was an open process, one that followed the laws of the Russian Federation,” Eduard Rebgun, Yukos’ court-appointed bankruptcy receiver, said by telephone. “It went, thank God, normally.”
Dozens of reporters were herded into a conference room at Yukos’ headquarters to watch the auction, broadcast from a nearby room, on video screens.
Once the home of the country’s largest oil company, the skyscraper now holds empty halls that used to be adorned with pictures of its former boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Auctioneer Sergei Mishin oversaw the bidding as two representatives from RN-Razvitiye and two from TNK-BP subsidiary Samotlorneftegaz sat side by side at small desks, taking turns to raise their paddles in calm succession as the bids rose incrementally higher.
The men from TNK-BP quietly consulted each other before letting the winning bid — just $100 million above the starting offer — go to their competitors. The process was over soon after it had begun, brought to an end with the swift banging of the auctioneer’s hammer and a loud sigh from Mishin.
“This was an open process,” Rebgun’s spokesman Nikolai Lashkevich told reporters afterward. “You can see this through the fact that several bids were made. There was real competition, and the company that offered the higher price won.”
At $7.6 billion, Rosneft’s winning bid for the lot, which also included 12 promissory notes in Yuganskneftegaz, was about 10 percent lower than its market value.
RN-Razvitiye, set up in January with just 10,000 rubles in starting capital, drew a $9 billion loan to finance the auction and is expected to sell off the stake within the year.
Manvelov, Rosneft’s spokesman, said the company would use the 9.44 percent stake “as a strategic currency in exchange for oil and gas assets in Russia and abroad.”
Rosneft shares fell 1.3 percent to 216.77 rubles ($8.34) at the close of trading.
Rosneft scooped up Yuganskneftegaz, once Yukos’ most-prized asset and main production unit, at a December 2004 auction through an unknown company called Baikal Finance Group.
That purchase helped boost Rosneft from a mid-tier oil company to the country’s second-largest. If it succeeds in buying Yukos units Tomskneft and Samaraneftegaz in auctions to be held within months, it would move close to surpassing private LUKoil as the country’s main oil producer.
Lashkevich said the date for the Tomskneft and Samaraneftegaz auctions could be set at a creditors’ meeting Friday.
Khodorkovsky has accused Igor Sechin, the chairman of Rosneft’s board and President Vladimir Putin’s powerful deputy chief of staff, of being behind the state’s legal onslaught against Yukos.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that the Kremlin had a hand in Tuesday’s auction.
“The auction itself and the participation of foreign companies in this auction, of course, was not organized by the Kremlin,” he said. “We can hardly understand this criticism.”
BP CEO Lord Browne met Putin on Friday as TNK-BP announced its intention to bid. The Russian-British company is facing pressure from environmental authorities over its flagship Kovykta field in East Siberia, as the state seeks to extend its control over the country’s natural resources.
“We welcome foreign companies’ interest in our market,” Peskov said, adding that the TNK-BP venture shows “foreign companies can achieve significant success here.”
Putin has made clear that foreign companies are expected to link up with Russian partners to exploit the country’s lucrative energy resources.
“TNK-BP is a very experienced player in Russian waters,” said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital. “They realize that cooperation with the Kremlin is a good idea if you want to be active in Russian hydrocarbons.
“They are building up a stock of good will,” he said.
Claire Davidson, a spokeswoman for Yukos’ former managers, called the auction “controlled and rigged.”
“The fact the lots that Mr. Rebgun is responsible for auctioning are arbitrarily discounted is proof that they are designed to favor the purchasers,” she said. “There is no real title to this auction.”
Davidson and Tim Osborne, director of Yukos shareholder GML, formerly known as Group Menatep, said they would not bring new lawsuits over the auction but that minority shareholders could consider legal action.
GML has filed a $28.3 billion suit in The Hague under the terms of the Energy Charter Treaty for what it claims was the illegal expropriation of Yukos. A first hearing is due to be held in June, Osborne said.
“If we are awarded damages by the Energy Charter Treaty claim and have any difficulties collecting, we could look at any Western company that would have benefited from receiving these stolen goods and go after them for it,” he said.
Rosneft is Yukos’ largest creditor after the Federal Tax Service. Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year sentence on charges of fraud and tax evasion, and prosecutors filed new charges in February that could keep him in jail a further 15 years. Yukos was dismantled amid claims that it owed $33 billion in back taxes.
The next auction is set for April 4, when Yukos’ 20 percent stake in Gazprom Neft goes up for auction along with two gas production units. Gazprom and a Russian-Italian consortium comprising Eni, Enel and ESN, a company owned by businessman Grigory Beryozkin, have said they will take part. Independent gas producer Novatek is also believed to be interested.

TITLE: Helicopters and Oil for Hu in Kazan
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Gazizova and Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: KAZAN — Chinese President Hu Jintao toured a plant that makes one of Russia’s most-advanced helicopters and got a crash course on Tatarstan’s oil as he wrapped up a multibillion-dollar visit Wednesday.
While Tatarstan, the last stop on Hu’s three-day visit, hopes China will invest in its economy and jointly produce the Ansat helicopter, at least one local trade official was not holding her breath. She said she had learned that bureaucracy was worse in China than in Russia.
After overseeing more than $6 billion in deals in Moscow, Hu met with Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiyev for talks that did not yield any firm agreements, a Shaimiyev spokeswoman said.
“They are getting acquainted and walking around,” the spokeswoman said.
A Shaimiyev spokesman said the two leaders had discussed ways to boost business and cultural relations, particularly through Tatarstan’s Alabuga free economic zone. “It looks like the Chinese are interested,” said the spokesman, Airat Zaripov. He declined further comment.
China is expected to invest $12 billion in Russia over the next 13 years, and “a significant part” of the money could go to Tatarstan industries such as petrochemicals and machine building, Rossia television reported from Kazan.
Shaimiyev said in televised remarks that oil and textiles were key industries that Tatarstan wanted to develop with Chinese.
Accompanying Hu and his delegation on a tour of the Kazan Helicopter Plant, Tatarstan’s top trade official, Khafiz Salikhov, said the plant was looking to join forces with the Chinese.
“We are talking about establishing cooperation, including the creation of a joint assembly plant in China,” he said.
Plant general director Alexander Lavrentyev said his plant had been holding talks for the past six months with a large Chinese company to assemble the Ansat, a new, multipurpose helicopter.
“What they will result in, I don’t know,” he told reporters, adding that a sticking point was deciding the joint venture’s ownership structure.
He declined to name the Chinese company, saying only that it was located in a free economic zone in southeast China.
The aircraft is Russia’s only fly-by-wire helicopter, meaning it is controlled by an electrical interface rather than mechanically.
Ruslan Pukhov, director for the Moscow-based Center of Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, suggested that the Chinese had turned to the Russians to cut costs but added that the low cost was Russia’s only competitive advantage. If talks fail, the Chinese could turn to Eurocopter, a subsidiary of Europe’s aerospace giant EADS, he said. “The Chinese are extremely tight-lipped and tough negotiators,” he said.
The Kazan plant has sold 186 helicopters to China since the 1950s but did not sell any last year. Lavrentyev said he hoped the plant would restart sales next year or in 2009, adding that China was interested in military helicopters such as the Mi-17-B5. 
From 1958 to 1979, China produced 545 Mi-4 helicopters under license, a project that gave birth to China’s own helicopter-building industry, the plant said in a statement.
For Hu’s visit, the plant was emptied of most of its workers and decorated with a sign reading, “Long Live Russian-Chinese Friendship.”
But some people at the plant expressed suspicion about the guests. “About 50 years from now, Year of Russia in China festivities will be celebrated on this territory,” said a plant worker who refused to give his name. Many ordinary Russians are fearful of China’s growing economic clout in Russia’s border regions.
The local trade official said talks with the Chinese were inching along. “It’s very hard to map out any projects with China,” she said by telephone. Bureaucracy in China is even more widespread than in Russia, she said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that talks with Chinese carmaker Great Wall over an assembly plant had dragged out for several years. The company announced in 2005 that it was ready to spend $70 million to produce its Hover off-road vehicle in Russia.
Great Wall chairman Wang Fengying said Wednesday that the company was now waiting for the Economic Development and Trade Ministry to allow it to work in the Alabuga zone, Interfax reported. Wang said the company hoped to start assembling cars by year’s end.
Hu, accompanied by Deputy Premier Wu Yi and other delegates, also visited an exhibition of local wares, the local Kremlin and met with students.
The first stand at the exhibition was for regional oil firm Tatneft, where the Chinese were told about local efforts to increase crude production.
“They spent the longest time at the Tatneft stand,” said Lira Tazetdinova, a spokeswoman for the republic’s trade department.
Nail Ibragimov, Tatneft’s first deputy general director, showed off plans for a petrochemical plant and a refinery in Nizhnekamsk, Interfax reported. But no talks between the officials from energy-hungry China and Tatneft took place, and no deals were struck, Tazetdinova said.
A Tatneft spokeswoman, Nuriya Valeyeva, said the Chinese had expressed interest in the stand but declined further comment.

TITLE: ‘Kidults’ Asked to ‘Switch Off Brains’
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A new TV channel broadcasting cartoons will be launched in St. Petersburg on Sunday aiming to cater to a growing category of viewers known as “kidults” — adults that refuse to grow-up — the channel’s owner said on Thursday. 
Prof-Media also announced that the channel, known as 2x2, will broadcast locally on the Rambler TV frequency.
The Simpsons, Beavis & Butthead, South Park, Russian animation classics and Japanese anime are all expected  to be part of the new 24-hour channel, which aims to attract “the mature Pepsi Generation.”
In their mid-30s, this generation listens to iPods, plays Sony PlayStations, reads Harry Potter — and 2x2 hopes to tap into its entertainment tastes.
“We cater for young viewers, where ‘young’ has nothing to do with age, it’s rather a lifestyle attitude,” 2x2’s director Natalia Vashko told the St. Petersburg Times on Thursday.
According to Vashko, 2x2 will also try to attract viewers who “lead a very energetic lifestyle and are rarely home — other channels don’t really count on them.” 
“One of the reasons to stop at my channel is that it will be the most neutral choice — it’s funny and the programs are short,” Vashko said in a telephone interview.
The channel’s slogan is “Switch Off Your Brain, Switch On 2x2.” 
Despite showing programs made for children, Vashko said 2x2 is not for children.
“Of course children can also watch us, but in principal we made the channel without kids in mind,” Vashko said. 
“We believe that only adults should spend their time in front of the TV, those who are tired and just want to relax by pressing a button,” he said.
However, sociology experts say the category of “kidults” is far from being a mass trend in Russia. 
“The reason why adults watch children’s programs is the presence of children in a family or infantilism. Although you can find a group of ‘eternal children’ in every large city, you can hardly call it ‘mass’,” Mikhail Podushko, strategic development director of WorkLine Research said in an emailed statement. 
Vashko thinks the new channel has also got the potential to become a so-called “background” channel. 
“As I have experience in analyzing TV ratings, I can assure you that background TV constitutes a large part of all TV-watching,” she said. 
Podushko agreed. According to the Workline’s data, the number of “active viewers” is constantly falling in Russia in general. 
“At present, the number of those who watch television ‘with one eye’ amounts to 60 percent, whereas in 2002-2003 such viewers made up only 40 percent,” Podushko said. 
Renat Yafizov, staff writer for Karta-SMI (“Media Map”) web portal, said the channel has the potential to be successful because “cartoons in Russia are currently all the rage” but the idea of a 24-hour channel was “rather dubious.” 
“I can’t see that the viewers will spend their precious nights watching cartoons even if [the channel] showed erotic ones,” he told the St. Petersburg Times. 
Although 2x2 is not for kids, erotic animation is not planned to constitute the channel’s line-up, Vashko said. 
Asked about the absence of “adult cartoons” on the “not-for-kids” channel, Vashko said the management decided to leave aside the controversial topic for the time being.
“When we were considering including such films into our programming, everyone got very tense — our public doesn’t like discussing such controversial subjects,” Vashko said.

TITLE: 2 Jailed For Brawl In Kondopoga
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Karelian court on Tuesday convicted two men for their role in a fight that led to ethnic riots in the town of Kondopoga last year and sentenced them to prison terms.
The Kondopoga City Court convicted Sergei Mozgalev and Yury Pliyev of hooliganism for attacking an Azeri bartender in the town’s Chaika restaurant in August, Interfax reported. Mozgalev, who was also convicted of battery, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, while Pliyev received eight months.
Prosecutors had asked that Mozgalev and Pliyev be sentenced to five and 2 1/2 years, respectively.
Mozgalev plans to appeal. But Pliyev’s lawyer, Valery Cherkasov, said his client would accept the ruling because he had spent five months in detention. “He will be out in three months,” Cherkasov said on Rossia television.
Mozgalev and Pliyev admitted in court Monday that they had attacked and beaten the bartender. The bartender told his employer, who in turn summoned a group of knife-wielding Chechen natives who attacked diners, killing two ethnic Russians. Mozgalev and Pliyev maintained that they did not instigate the fight, Rossia reported.
After the brawl, people armed with Molotov cocktails torched businesses owned by natives of the Caucasus.

TITLE: Churov Easily Elected as Elections Chief
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s former subordinate, Vladimir Churov, was easily elected head of the Central Elections Commission on Tuesday, replacing long-serving chairman Alexander Veshnyakov.
Churov was the only candidate nominated for the post, the importance of which has only increased ahead of December’s State Duma elections and the March 2008 presidential election.
With about 100 election officials from all over the country crammed into the hall at commission headquarters, the commission’s 15 members elected Churov 13-2 with no abstentions.
Churov, who in the early 1990s worked in the St. Petersburg City Hall’s external relations committee — at that time headed by Putin — was nominated for the commission by the faction of the Liberal Democratic Party in the Duma.
Until March 9, he was the deputy head of the Duma’s committee for CIS affairs.
Minutes before the vote Tuesday, Churov made it clear that he regarded himself as a guardian of controversial election laws churned out by the Duma’s pro-Kremlin majority.
“Unlike my predecessor, I intend to comment less on election laws, but will comply with them and demand compliance from others,” he said when asked about his views on changes in election laws last year.
Those laws, which included the elimination of a turnout threshold and the “against all” option on ballots, as well as banning candidates from publicly criticizing one another during campaigns, were publicly condemned by Veshnyakov — a position that many believe led him to fall out of favor with the Kremlin and resulted in his departure two weeks ago.
It was clear from the very beginning of Tuesday’s commission meeting that speculation about Churov becoming its next chairman was well grounded.
He sat in the middle of a long table next to Gennady Raikov, who, as the senior member of the commission, was serving as acting chairman after Veshnyakov’s departure.
Another member of the commission, Yelena Dubrovina, proposed to elect Churov as chairman, saying he “is not burdened by stereotypes formed in the electoral system” and will “bring something new” to the commission’s work.
Several other members of the commission, including United Russia member Sergei Kostenko, called on their peers to vote for Churov.
Vadim Solovyov, a nonvoting commission member from the Communist Party, was the only person who protested Churov’s nomination.
Solovyov said that Churov had no law education and had never worked in election commissions.
“A magistrate deciding a divorce needs to have a law diploma, five years of experience in court and to pass a bar exam,” Solovyov said. “Here, a chairman will be deciding the fate of 140 million people and will not have any legal background.”
Solovyov also doubted that Churov, a member of the LDPR faction in the Duma, would be alien to partisan interests.
Churov countered by saying he had not been a member of any party since 1991.
Duma deputies are not required to officially belong to a political party to be a member of a faction.
Churov must resign from his Duma seat immediately and will be replaced by the next candidate down on the LDPR ticket in the 2003 Duma elections.
Veshnyakov was on hand for the first part of Tuesday’s meeting, thanking his colleagues but lashing out at United Russia for pushing through laws limiting rights of opposition in the Duma and exploiting the administrative clout of its high-positioned members in regional elections.
“Most violations are made to the benefit of the party in power,” he said.
Bidding farewell to former colleagues, Veshnyakov, who had headed the commission since 1999, said it was important that his departure not be considered an expulsion of someone standing up for democratic principles.

TITLE: U.S. Criticizes Rally Policies
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Combined Reports
MOSCOW — The U.S. State Department has expressed alarm over “Russian government heavy-handedness” against protesters who tried to hold an anti-Kremlin march in Nizhny Novgorod.
State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Monday in Washington that authorities’ prevention of the march “raises serious concerns about Russians’ ability to exercise their rights to assembly, free speech and peaceful protest.”
The protesters tried to rally without official permission in the central Gorky Square on Saturday. Hundreds of riot police in full gear cordoned off the area, and about 100 people were detained.
Casey noted that opposition parties had faced trouble getting onto the ballot in regional legislative elections this month. Some were barred altogether. “Our concerns are intensified by the difficulties that opposition political parties face in trying to register to participate in elections,” he said. “We call upon all Russian authorities to respect fully international standards involving freedom of press, speech, and assembly.”
Russian and international activists warned on Tuesday that restrictions on freedom of speech and expression were multiplying.
“The actions of the police ... remind one of the intolerance of political pluralism that existed here in the Soviet Union,” said Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation.
In a letter to the country’s ombudsman, rights activists said the breakup of demonstrations such as the one in Nizhny Novgorod were blatantly illegal.
AP, SPT

TITLE: New HIV Center, Hotline Set Up to Offer Help
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Botkin Infectious Disease Hospital on Thursday opened a state-funded consultancy center for HIV-positive people and their relatives in an effort to overcome the social isolation associated with the disease and provide patients with timely and adequate treatment.
Two telephone hotlines have also been launched for urgent inquiries. 
Vladimir Zholobov, first deputy head of City Hall’s Health Committee, that supports the program, said HIV prevention is one of the top priorities for the Russian state, and the city of St. Petersburg in particular.
“Only half of HIV-positive patients are officially registered and therefore have access to treatment,” he said. “It is crucially important to get the infected people get in touch with the doctors. The state has enough money to provide medicines for everyone, so motivating them to get in contact is our primary goal, and hotlines and consultancy centers are meant to serve it.”
The center will offer medical aid, advice and group theraphy as well as individual sessions with psychologists and psychotherapists. 
The founders of the new service are hoping the initiative will help to increase the quality, scale and availability of health and social services for HIV-positive people and high-risk groups, including intravenous drug users, prostitutes and prisoners serving terms in Russia’s jails and camps.
Since 2002, between 3,000 and 4,500 new cases have been registered annually in St. Petersburg. According to the St. Petersburg City Center for AIDS Prevention, at least 44,000 HIV-positive people are registered in town in 2007.
Experts predict that the virus could cut the Russian population by a third in the next fifty years but stereotypes about the disease persist in Russia despite all efforts to raise public awareness.
The social isolation of HIV-positive people remains an acute problem. The children of HIV-positive parents, even if they are HIV-negative themselves, are routinely denied access to many public facilities such as swimming pools, sports clubs or health centers, said Yevgeny Voronin, chief doctor with the Republican Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Ust-Izhora, outside St. Petersburg. 
The adoption of an HIV-positive child in Russia is rare. During the 19 years which have passed since the first HIV cases were registered in Russia, only five HIV-positive children have been adopted, said Voronin. Of the five adopted  HIV-positive children, only one baby was adopted by a Russian, while the other four were adopted by foreigners, he added. 
“Society is still poorly informed about the disease,” Voronin said. “People are driven by fear that is based on  prejudice.”
“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.”
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.”
Russia is confronted with an HIV/AIDS epidemic. Although state statistics suggest that only 330,000 people in Russia are infected, experts believe that the figures have already passed one million. When one percent of the population has been infected, it is almost impossible to reverse the build-up of the epidemic, experts warn. 
Russia and Ukraine are reported to have the highest growth rates of HIV infection in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa. In Moscow, up to 1,000 new cases are registered every week. Eighty percent of those infected are aged between 18 and 30 years old.
The World Health Organization offers a universal strategy for combating HIV/AIDS, but says each country has to develop an individually designed policy to tackle the epidemic. At a conference this week in Geneva, Switzerland, the WHO and UNAIDS recommended that male circumcision now be recognized as an additional important intervention to reduce the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men.
Evidence collected from three different trials in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa showed that male circumcision reduces the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by approximately 60 percent.
Currently, approximately 665 million men, or 30 percent of men worldwide, are estimated to be circumcised.

The new Botkin Hospital HIV information hotline numbers are: 8 921 896 5549 and 8 921 896 4539.

TITLE: Morgan Stanley In Constructive Move
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Morgan Stanley Real Estate has acquired a 24.99 percent stake in RBI construction holding. By combining their resources the two companies hope to develop ambitiously large-scale regional projects, increasing the value of the holding several times over.
“A year ago we launched a joint venture with Deutsche Bank. At that time we decided to move on and increase the scale of our operations. We realized that we needed a partner inside the company, a shareholder that will back our mixed-use projects,” Edward Tiktinsky, general director of RBI Holdings, said at a press conference Wednesday.
“I saw Morgan Stanley as a partner that does not merely give us money and then look for a return, but that is ready to take part in board meetings and, with its contacts and expertise, help us to realize our projects,” Tiktinsky said.
RBI has already completed 39 buildings of various classes totaling over 530,000 square meters. Over 418,000 square meters are at a stage of design or construction.
“Morgan Stanley is an investor with partners. We do not pretend to know the local market. But we are very positive about the Russian real estate market in general,” said Glen Aaronson, managing director of Morgan Stanley Real Estate.
According to Emmanuel Blouin, executive director of Morgan Stanley Real Estate, RBI is attractive because of its “vision to become an outstanding player in the Russian real estate market.” 
More specifically, in the next five years, RBI plans to increase its own value to $5 billion, according to Tiktinsky.
“Typically acquiring a stake is only the first step. If we need additional capital injections, then that is something we will consider. We will share our expertise in specific projects. But we will also rely on the skills of our partner,” Blouin said.
Neither company indicated the cost of the deal but Igor Luchkov, head of assessment and analytics department at Becar realty group, estimated RBI Holdings to be worth about $500 million.
“Obviously, this deal provides RBI with an additional source of funding. RBI actively uses the alternative finance market. It uses bank loans, internal funds, the resources of Deutsche Bank,” Luchkov said.
Vladislav Isayev, an analyst at FINAM investment holding, estimated RBI to be worth between $1.7 billion and $2 billion.
Morgan Stanley’s acquisition does not let it control the company, but it implies the responsibility to make additional investments. Thus, the price of the stake is only likely to be between $100 million and $250 million,” Isayev said.
He suggested that Morgan Stanley expects profitability of 20 percent to 25 percent investing in Russia. 
“In western countries the development business is slowing down so Russian development companies are very attractive to foreign investors,” Isayev said.
He was positive about this venture’s potential. 
“Taking into account the firm’s cooperation with such financial giants as Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, RBI’s plans look quite feasible,” he said.
Tiktinsky indicated that the partnership with Morgan Stanley makes unfeasible projects feasible, like the relocation of industrial enterprises and the redevelopment of large-scale sites.
However, he noted, because of the high price of land in the city many projects are economically unreasonable. It follows that RBI has its eye on development projects in the regions with about 15 cities under consideration.
“Today yields in most countries are lower,” Aaronson said. However he noted that Morgan Stanley would be interested in high-quality projects no matter what their profitability, be it five percent or 15 percent.
“Expanding into the regions requires in-depth knowledge of specific local features and thorough preparation. The company needs to organize data collection and processing, which entails a considerable expense. And that’s exactly the point where this merger could deliver a synergetic effect,” Luchkov of Becar said.
RBI plans to develop residential and commercial projects in equal amounts, Tiktinsky said. He did not exclude the possibility that some of the new projects could be realized in cooperation with Deutsche Bank, if “the terms are attractive.”

TITLE: Quantum Looks to Expand Horizons
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg-based IP and Internet provider Quantum Communications has announced it is to undergo a rebranding as part of a new strategy of aggressive regional expansion. 
Managers believe that customers will easily get used to the new trademark, Prostor Telecom, which will be seen to symbolize “unlimited opportunities” (Prostor stands for “open space”).
This year Quantum will invest over 300 million rubles ($11.5 million) into the development of its regional network.
“We are restructuring the company in order to focus on the regions. St. Petersburg will become just another of these regions,” said Igor Bobov, General Director of Quantum.
The company has already established branches in 18 cities from Kaliningrad to Kemerovo and services a total of 4,000 corporate clients and 6,000 individual clients.
Quantum emerged in 1997 as a small Internet provider. In ten years the company became a universal communications operator. Last year it was listed among the five largest wireless broadband providers in Russia. By March of this year Quantum had 59 hot-spots, including 46 hot-spots in St. Petersburg — the largest chain in the Northwest region and one of the largest in Russia.
Turnover accounted for $15 million last year – a 55 percent increase on 2005 figures. The network capacity is 12,500 telephone numbers. The company services 300 business centers.
The servicing of individual clients started in 2001. At the same time Quantum opened its first branch in Cherepovets. “This experience proved that the regions have the potential to be developed,” Bobov said.
The Russian Regions repeat the major trends of the St. Petersburg market with a time lag of about two years, he noted. 
“St. Petersburg is a model city for us. Here we have advanced most of all in communication services. Here we test all our new projects.”
He emphasized that Quantum is strong in project management. “We have reliable technology and could open new branches in a conveyer-like manner,” Bobov said.
Quantum prefers to grow organically, not through acquisitions. This spring the company will open branches in Tver, Ulianovsk, Samara and Tomsk. From now on the company plans to open one new branch a month. About 45 cities with populations over 250,000 people are under consideration.
In particular regions the rebranding process started in June last year — the company tested its new trademark on customers and was satisfied with their positive reception, Bobov said.
Apart from developing its radio and fiber-optic network (300 kilometers at the moment), Quantum is creating home networks in new houses, said Quantum senior engineer Andrei Astreiko. Quantum cooperates with 10 construction companies, among them IVI-93, Novyi Gorod and Stone.
The company has already completed home networks in 17 new houses (2,000 apartments). Managers are in negotiations concerning new residential buildings totaling 40,000 apartments.
Home networks could be used for providing telephone services, Internet, digital television and alarm systems, Astreiko said.
According to a report by iKS-Consulting, in the first half of 2006 the wireless broadband market in Russia was worth $33 million — a 61 percent increase on the same period in 2005. By the end of the year experts expected the market to reach $80 million.
Despite the rapid growth, the total volume of the wireless broadband market is still relatively small. It accounts for only eight percent of the broadband market and for five percent of the whole Internet market.

TITLE: Sistema Jet Grounded In Milwaukee
AUTHOR: By Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A $16 million executive jet ordered by Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s Sistema Group was forced to land at Milwaukee’s Mitchell Airport by U.S. authorities last week after a dispute over its ownership, a company spokesperson confirmed Wednesday.
U.S. television network NBC reported Monday that U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the carrier as it headed to Russia via Canada after the supplier filed a claim that it had been stolen.
A Sistema spokeswoman, who declined to be identified, denied these accusations. “We did not breach any agreements. We were not running off with the airplane. It was flying out of the country with all the necessary permission,” she said. 
“This is simply a disagreement between two companies.”
Uncertain as to the nature of the alarm, border control officers, customs agents and an FBI anti-terrorism unit swamped the aircraft just after touchdown. It was soon determined that the matter was a contract dispute.
“There is no criminal or terrorism nexus here,” FBI agent Monica Shipley told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday.
The two-year long dispute between Sistema and a company based in Delaware centers on claims that the U.S. firm failed to make alterations worth $2 million to the 139-seater McDonnell-Douglas MD-87 plane. 
Sistema accordingly resolved to withhold payment of that amount.

TITLE: Premier’s
Ally Slain
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: KIEV — A Russian businessman allied with Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was shot dead by a sniper as he was being escorted from a Kiev courthouse by police.
A police officer who was guarding Maxim Kurochkin, 38, was seriously wounded in the incident, which occurred during a break in his extortion trial Tuesday, Kiev police chief Volodymyr Polishchuk said. He died on the spot after being hit by a bullet fired from a building neighboring the Svyatoshynsky District Court, Polishchuk said. 
Police said Wednesday that they had found the suspected murder weapon, a sniper rifle, on the roof of the building, and that two male suspects had been spotted leaving in a Mazda car, Channel 5 news reported.
Yanukovych said Wednesday that he knew of no political motives in the killing, Unian news agency reported.
Deputy Interior Minister Mykola Kupiansky said police were “cooperating with our counterparts from Russia to identify the people who may be involved in the crime,” Unian reported. 
Kurochkin, who ran the Russian Club, an organization uniting Russian and Ukrainian political analysts and journalists supporting Yanukovych during the 2004 presidential campaign, was arrested in November at Kiev’s airport. 		AP, SPT

TITLE: Gordeyev Talks Trade in Canada
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia and Canada, the only net crude-oil exporters in the Group of Eight, will seek ways to promote joint energy projects that may lead to a global supply network, ministers from both countries said.
Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev met with Canadian Trade Minister David Emerson in Ottawa on Tuesday to update foreign investment rules and technology standards that they say have hampered trade.
“Our countries could become very long-term stable partners,’’ Gordeyev said through a translator in remarks to open the meeting with Emerson. “Oil and gas could become an area of cooperation between our two countries.”
‘’We’re not going to hide the fact that Russia has gone through a transition period,’’ Gordeyev said, The Canadian Press reported. “All of this is behind us. There is now a modern legislative framework in place … and we are becoming a comprehensible and open economy.’’
Executives from PetroCanada, Gazprom, Bombardier and Aeroflot were also at the two-day summit, which finished Tuesday and was designed to boost the 2.25 billion Canadian dollars ($1.94 billion) of annual trade between Canada and Russia. The event brought together about 200 business executives from both countries, the news agency reported.
“There is plenty of room to make more of the Russian-Canadian trade relationship,’’ Emerson said. Canada wants to develop trade with Russia in energy and mining, Emerson said. New rules could jump-start projects between the countries’ “complementary” economies and help create a global network of energy supplies, he said.

TITLE: EU Seeks to Encourage 
Central Asia Energy Ties
AUTHOR: By Markus Krah
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The European Union tiptoed into the race for Central Asia’s vast energy resources on Wednesday, but it faces tough competition in a region where both Moscow and Washington are already elbowing hard for control. 
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier brought a host of EU officials for a summit in Kazakhstan, aiming to bolster the EU’s role in the strategic region, which sits on some of the world’s biggest oil, natural gas and uranium reserves. 
Speaking in the Kazakh capital Astana, Steinmeier said energy was a key element in the EU’s strategy for Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. 
“The EU aims to diversify its energy policy. This is why it is necessary to increase our contacts with Central Asia,” he told reporters after talks with regional foreign ministers. 
“The talks showed that the time is right for a new, closer cooperation.” 
The talks, heavy on rhetoric but thin on detail, were part of EU president Germany’s plan to present a paper setting out its ideas for a first EU strategy for Central Asia. It intends to present the draft plan for approval at a June summit. 
Rights groups had called on Steinmeier to use his trip to get tough on the often patchy human rights record in Central Asia, particularly in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, whose leaders are frequently criticized in the West for tolerating no dissent. 
Germany has denied that the EU is putting energy interests before human rights in mapping out its strategy for the region. 
“It’s in our interest that the Central Asian countries take a path to be peaceful, democratic and prospering states,” he said. 
The United States, which has a military airbase in Kyrgyzstan, and Russia, the region’s former imperial master, are the two main players in the vast Muslim region stretching from the borders of Russia in the north to Afghanistan and Iran in the south. 
Oil-rich Kazakhstan sees itself as the region’s most stable and economically strong country and aspires to become the first state from the ex-Soviet bloc to chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2009. 
Speaking alongside Steinmeier, EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said Kazakhstan, which has never held an election judged free and fair by Western monitors, needed to show more commitment to democratic reform. 
“Now we want to see these reforms,” she said, adding, however, that there still was “a very good chance to see the first Central Asian country in OSCE chairmanship.” 
Another regional power, Turkmenistan, is Central Asia’s top natural gas producer. The EU is particularly keen to establish contacts with the nation’s new leadership following the December death of its long-serving and reclusive leader. 
But oddly, Turkmenistan’s deputy foreign minister, who had been scheduled to speak at the conference, disappeared without warning after the talks. 
Asked by a reporter where he was, Steinmeier said, jokingly: “I can’t tell you where he is. I hope he did not get stuck in the lift.”

TITLE: The Little Sweaty Fist Hypothesis
AUTHOR: By Bret Stephens
TEXT: “This is very easy to understand,” said President Vladimir Putin last year, explaining his idea of an energy policy. “Just think back to childhood when you go into the street with a candy in your hand and another kid says, ‘Give it to me.’ You clutch your little sweaty fist tight around it and answer, ‘What do I get in return?’”
So why, when it comes to the Iranian nuclear file, has Putin finally opened his little sweaty fist, signing on — with no apparent compensation — to additional United Nations sanctions against the Islamic Republic while calling for a halt to Russia’s construction of the nuclear reactor at Bushehr?
That’s the question to which nobody seems to have anything better than a partial answer. From nearly day one of his presidency Putin has been Iran’s best friend at the UN and, not so coincidentally, the leading supplier of its advanced conventional weapons. In 2000, the Kremlin tore up the so-called Chernomyrdin agreement, a secret protocol negotiated by U.S. Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s in which Russia pledged to stop selling arms to Iran within five years. In 2002, Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov went out of his way to state that “Russia does not accept President George W. Bush’s view that Iran is part of an ‘axis of evil.’”
Since then, Russia has openly supplied Iran with sophisticated surface-to-air missiles. There are reliable reports that Russia has also assisted Iran covertly with its ballistic-missile technology. The Bushehr deal, itself valued at $1 billion, was intended as just the first of five planned reactors worth $10 billion. Russian diplomats have diluted to near-insignificance the sanctions imposed so far by the UN. In January, Russian Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov paid a call on Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. It seems the meeting went well: “The Islamic Republic,” said the Khamenei, “welcomes all-out promotion of relations with Russia, believing the capacity for expansion between the two sides is higher than expected.”
And then, on March 19, Iranian, European and U.S. sources reported that Russia had informed Iran that it would not supply the reactor with the uranium it needs to function unless Iran complied with UN resolutions calling on it to suspend its enrichment program. And citing a payment dispute, Russia also began pulling some of its 2,000 personnel from the site, while officially claiming that it was a routine staff rotation. At the UN Security Council, U.S. diplomatic sources confirmed that Russia had been remarkably cooperative in negotiating Saturday’s unanimous resolution on Iran, going so far as to blunt an attempt by some of the nonpermanent members to insert language calling for a nuclear-free Middle East — code for disarming Israel.
What gives? Past experience suggests the answer may yet turn out to be not much at all. At the 2003 Group of Eight summit in Evian, France, Putin reportedly assured the other leaders in attendance that Russia would not supply Iran with nuclear fuel unless they agreed to snap UN inspections of their nuclear facilities. A later “clarification” from Russia’s top atomic energy official indicated that Russia would provide the fuel no matter what Iran chose to do about the inspections. Similarly, Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, has recently insisted that “there has been no Russian ultimatum to Iran of any kind,” while adding that the deal with Iran “was on track.” Put simply, the easily resolved payment dispute may be all the fire there is here, and not smoke to cover a sweeping change in Russian policy.
For their part, U.S. diplomats are sticking to their story that the Russian-Iranian split is real — as does Iran, which in the last week has publicly accused Russia of being an “unreliable partner” taking “double-standard stances.” The words are carefully chosen. As Victor Yasmann of Radio Free Europe writes, “Russia cares about its commercial supplier … [and] preserving its political reputation within the Islamic world.” That’s especially the case now that Russia’s once-failing military exporters are doing a thriving business selling bottom-of-the-shelf weapons to Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Yemen, Algeria and other bottom-of-the-shelf states. If Russia is seen to succumb to international pressure on Iran, other dubious regimes may be less inclined to attach themselves to it as clients.
Yet another reading of events suggests the mixed signals coming from Russia reflect policy schizophrenia within the Kremlin itself. “There is clearly an active pro-Iranian lobby in Moscow,” says Pavel Felgenhauer, defense correspondent for Novaya Gazeta. He adds, however, that Moscow’s change of policy is “the result of an assessment that a nuclear Iran is a major danger to Russia and its national interests.” Among other indicators, Felgenhauer points to Russia’s naval buildup in the oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea.
The Russian leadership may also have started to notice that it is increasingly in bad odor with a West that, at some level, it longs to be considered a part of. “There is a compact pro-Western group who think that cooperation with the major industrial states, primarily the United States, could benefit Russia much more than murky dealings with questionable partners like China, Iran, Iraq or Libya,” writes former Russian diplomat Viktor Mizin in a perceptive analysis in the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
Finally, there is the “little sweaty fist” hypothesis. Critics of the Putin government were dismayed last year when the Bush administration agreed to Russian membership in the World Trade Organization, apparently for nothing in return. The Bushehr volte-face may be the delayed — and disguised — payoff. Alternatively, Russia may expect that its sudden pliancy on the Iranian file may yield dividends on the things it cares about most, particularly in what it considers its rightful sphere of influence. In a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed that may have also served as a trial balloon, the Nixon Center’s Dimitri Simes proposed two prospective giveaways: The breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Putin has long regarded as rightfully Russian, and the looming question of Kosovo’s independence, to which Russia is vehemently opposed.
In the meantime, the Kremlin preserves all its options, a reminder, as Glen Howard of the Jamestown Foundation observes, of an old KGB maxim: First create a problem, and then offer to be part of the solution. On that score, at least, Putin is nothing if not true to type.

Bret Stephens is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, where this comment appeared.

TITLE: The Geopolitics of Accounts Receivable
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: On Sunday, the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council, including Russia, unanimously passed Resolution 1747, which provides for the imposition of sanctions against Iran in response to its nuclear development program. On Monday — the very next working day — Russia announced that Iran had finally made overdue payments for Russian construction work on the Bushehr atomic energy plant in Iran.
Looking at this from a commercial rather than a diplomatic standpoint, Moscow appears to have pried the money from Tehran using the Security Council in much the same way it uses the Prosecutor General’s Office for the same purpose at home.
When trying to explain why Russia is assisting Iran in its atomic energy program, analysts usually opt for complex geopolitical explanations, like portraying it as Moscow’s answer to a U.S. White House trying to create a unipolar world.
A simpler explanation is that Russia has become a very active economic actor and pragmatically minded people in President Vladimir Putin’s circle are prepared, in the best tradition of Adam Smith, to sell just about anything to anyone.
There are two chief Russian parties to the Bushehr contract with Iran. One is Atomstroiexport, which used to be a private company and belonged to United Heavy Machinery head Kakha Bendukidze. After Bendukidze was named Georgia’s minister for reforms, his business interests in Russia came under attack. Atomstroiexport was hit with back tax bills (the case was like a small, low-profile and very quiet Yukos), and Bendukidze sold the company to Gazprombank for $26 million.
It turned out then that if Atomstroiexport didn’t continue work on the Bushehr project, it was in danger of going bankrupt. After Gazprombank took control, therefore, construction at Bushehr was resumed.
The other main Russian party to the contract is Techsnabexport, also known as Tenex. Its current general director, Vladimir Smirnov, was one of the co-founders of the Ozero dacha co-op in 1996, along with President Vladimir Putin, Russian Railways CEO Vladimir Yakunin and Yury Kovalchuk, the former chairman of St. Peterburg’s Bank Rossiya. Prior to arriving at Tenex, Smirnov was head of the St. Petersburg Fuel Company, reputedly tied to the Tambov crime group. He later was in charge of the state company responsible for supplying the presidential administration.
It is hard to say exactly what happened between Russia and Iran two weeks ago, when Russia suddenly announced that Iran had not transferred payment due in January for work on the Bushehr project while Iran answered that the money had, indeed, been handed over.
What is clear is that not being able to agree on whether money had been transferred is not the type of thing that should cause problem for major countries or companies of this stature. Try to imagine, for example, Microsoft and IBM arguing over whether or not the other had made a scheduled payment of $100 million. But conflicts like these regularly flare up between less savory groups: One side says it paid for the cocaine, while the other says it hasn’t seen a cent. It’s tough for outsiders to determine who is telling the truth, but the character of the two parties to the deal is never in doubt.
Moscow has more than uranium to sell to Tehran. The Russian veto in the Security Council is of great value to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In this sense, the Security Council veto has the same value as Moscow’s Basmanny District Court, in the sense that it can be used to coax the other side into showing more economic flexibility.
On Saturday, Russia punished Iran for not handing over the money, unreservedly voting in favor of the Security Council resolution. Iran got the hint, and the money was handed over immediately.
It looks like Atomstroiexport has come out victorious in a difficult geopolitical battle.

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

TITLE: Bottle suckers of the world unite!
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Nigel Burch and the Flea-Pit Orchestra, the skiffle/Weimar cabaret-influenced band from London which arrives in the city this week, sings tragic yet utterly danceable songs about lost love and heavy drinking somewhere in concrete slums — invoking poetry that the late U.S. author Charles Bukowski once described as “the best cure for a hangover.”
“We are no philosophers, we’ve got no thoughts at all. With not one brain-cell between us, we sit staring at the wall … Rooted to our bar-stools, just like cabbages in a row,” sings the band’s singer-songwriter Nigel Burch, who backs himself by playing banjulele, a cross between a banjo and a ukelele, in a song called “Me and All the Other Vegetables.”
“I only draw, write and sing about the things that I see,” claims Burch, who describes himself as “The Troubadour of Urban Angst” on MySpace. 
He cites the Soviet samizdat classic “Moscow-Petushki,” a drunken, increasingly surreal travelogue by the late author Venedikt Erofeev as one of his favorite books, alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” as well as works by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Franz Kafka, E.E. Cummings, John Fante and Bukowski.
Bukowski’s quote comes from a letter that the author wrote to Burch after receiving a collection of his poems.
“Beside the songs I’ve always written other stuff — poetry I suppose you would call it — although that word in England sends people running screaming from the room — in Germany people want to talk about it, to read it and hear it. I sent some poetry and stuff to Bukowski in 1984,” he said.
“I was surprised to receive a wonderfully supportive, friendly and very positive reply. He said, rather perversely, that great writing always made him laugh and he hadn’t laughed so much since reading Celine decades ago. He also wrote, ‘You’re the best cure for a hangover I ever lucked across.’
“So I didn’t make it up. I replied to him and received another two letters but he definitely never heard any of my songs and I doubt he would have been particularly interested if he had have done — who knows?”
With such literary tastes, Burch, whose music has been described by The Guardian as “a cross between the music of Ian Dury, Brecht and Weill, an Irish pub band and a 1950s skiffle group,” puts the word before music.
“I have always been more interested in lyrics [by such] songwriters [as Bob] Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Lehrer, Jake Thackray, Kevin Coyne, Tom Waits,” he said.
“I have always had literary interests, so with most of the songwriters I have mentioned, the lyrics have been of prime importance. I like songs to be concise and clear, to say complicated things in a simple way. Hank Williams was a master of this and I’ve always liked the raw emotion of a lot of the country and blues singers: Leadbelly, Jimmie Rodgers, Big Bill Broonzy.”
Burch paid homage to Coyne on “Whispers From the Offing — A Tribute to Kevin Coyne” by contributing his version of the late songwriter’s song “Black Cloud.” 
“One of my major influences was Kevin Coyne who I got to know over the years,” he said.
“Johnny Rotten cited him as one of his big influences. He was always a bit too much for English tastes and found more success in Germany.”
Burch said he likes The Pogues, the London-based band with which the Flea-Pit Orchestra has a connection in form of The Pogues’ long-time drummer Andrew Rankin who occasionally performs with Burch’s band.
“Their stuff [is] what I was looking for. I’d always come from a folky background but found it all a bit twee and up-it’s-own-woolly-jumpered-arsehole but on the other hand could never bear the leather-clad, big-haired rock type with long guitar solos,” he said. 
“Punk was a great fart of not-very-fresh air but lacked something for me. The Pogues came along with the edge, the rawness and the energy but more importantly songs that were real and had intelligent [lyrics] — although since meeting [Pogues lead singer] Shane [McGowan] recently it makes you wonder how.”
Though the Flea-Pit Orchestra is not as theatrical as The Tiger Lillies, a London cabaret trio that it occasionally collaborates with and sometimes gets compared to, the influence of Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill is evident. 
“I’ve always been interested in the Brecht/Weill collaborations and we often include our version of ‘Mack The Knife’ in our set,” said Burch.
“Particularly as it is set in London so has personal connotations for me and involves themes of extreme behavior in the city: murder and arson etc., subjects which I am attracted to and repelled by at the same time.”
An upcoming project, “The End Of The World Variety Show,” is set an hour before the world ends and examines what human beings do if they have only sixty minutes left to live, according to Burch.
“Most of them, I suspect, would want to have sex,” he said.
“What would people do if there were no consequences or punishment — no babies, no hangovers, no prison?
“The show is slightly more lighthearted than that but it is an attempt to restore the tradition of English music-hall and real variety that has disappeared from the London scene.”
Burch is also considering creating a musical based on his own songs. 
“Eventually I hope to build a theatrical show around my own songs/poems with the Flea-Pit Orchestra providing a live backing to a production that will involve other characters as well as the ‘I’ protagonist of my stage persona,” he said.
“In relation to the whole idea of theater/performance for the band I do try to keep a sense of reality so that what is on stage does relate to the outside world and doesn’t become too removed or a form of escape by dressing up in funny clothes and putting on make-up. I wear the same hat on stage as I do in the street, although when performing I am a heightened version  of myself.”
The Flea-Pit Orchestra’s first and so-far only CD, “Bottle Sucker,” released in 2002, is available from gigs and the website, while its second album, “Mr Doo-Lally,” was recorded a while ago, but is still to be released.
Burch, who played the guitar with punk bands in the 1970s and 1980s, picked up banjulele by chance, he explained.
“After playing guitar in various rock bands and on solo gigs I decided I needed something to sound a bit different from all the other six-string strummers, pluckers and pickers and started to play the ukulele, the tiny four-stringed guitar-shaped instrument made famous years ago by Tiny Tim,” he said.
“It was interesting to see how my songs sounded stripped down right to the bare bones — not all songs survive such close scrutiny but I think a lot of mine did. I liked that empty, naked sound but it was hard to sustain a long concert like that. I borrowed a banjulele from Martin Jaques of The Tiger Lillies, the instrument most famously played by George Formby, a huge star in the war years, and I found the sound made a connection with the English music hall which was his background and a tradition that I feel I belong to. 
“My dad and my granddad both also played the banjo so I grew up with musical surroundings and heard the old-time songs from a very young age. Incidentally, the word ‘ukulele’ comes from Hawaii and means ‘dancing flea’ because one’s fingers move around the fretboard like little fleas, hence the Flea-Pit Orchestra because orchestras also play in orchestra pits and lots of the songs are set in flea-pits — dirty hovels, smelly bed-sits and crumbling pubs.”
The band’s music is often described as perfect to drink and dance to and many of Burch’s lyrics mention alcohol.
“But it’s easy to joke about it — for some people it’s poison, for others it’s their lifeblood,” said Burch.
“I’m not qualified to say much. If something good happens, people drink to celebrate. If something goes wrong, they drink to drown their sorrows. I grew up around drink — I don’t know many teetotal musicians except the ones who aren’t allowed to drink because they are alcoholic. I know people who have fallen along the wayside, but many still carry on against all the odds.
“Drink is everywhere [in London], it’s an alcoholic culture — winos and school kids in the street, late night clubs, cheap booze in the supermarkets, pubs everywhere. Everybody gets drunk at weddings, birthdays and funerals. The hospitals and police stations are on alert at closing time and especially at the weekend when the world just seems to go berserk. I just tell stories about what I see and what I sometimes do. I’m part of it, for a moment, but I suppose it’s time I grew up and settled down. What drunks do is often boring, sometimes interesting and often against the law. It’s not usual to see someone drunk in Moscow is it?
“But listen to ‘Bottle Sucker’ and there’s a lot of other things going on there, not every song is soaked with beer and rotgut. There might even be a little beacon of compassion and love shining through the shit.”
Drummer Ranken, the Flea-Pit Orchestra’s famous Pogues connection, is not coming to Russia; the band will perform with its other drummer, Steve Blake.
“Ranken still plays with us occasionally depending on his commitments to The Pogues,” said Burch.
“Obviously he earns an enormous amount of money playing with them and would not consider coming to Russia for the money we are getting paid — peanuts to what he’s been earning in Japan, Las Vegas and New York. The Flea-Pit Orchestra are small fry compared to The Pogues I’m afraid, but he will do local London gigs or anything that interests him.”
Dylan Bates will play violin, and Richard Lee double bass.

Nigel Burch and the Flea-Pit Orchestra will perform at 8 p.m. on Saturday at The Place, 47 Ul. Marshala Govorova, M.: Narvskaya/Baltiiskaya. Tel.: 331-9631. <i>www.fleapitorchestra.co.uk, www.myspace.com/nigelburch</i>

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: <b>The Rolling Stones</b>, which has cancelled a local concert last year, is now due to perform in St. Petersburg on July 28, the band said in a statement late last week.
Last year’s concert should have taken place at the Kirov Stadium, but the historic structure has since been pulled down. 
Now, according to the promoter PMI, the concert will take place on Palace Square, which makes things interesting because <b>Mikhail Piotrovsky</b>, the director of the State Hermitage Museum, which is located around the square, has strongly opposed many events taking place there such as a concert by Paul McCartney in 2004 and a failed festival of European cinema last year. Piotrovsky claims that such activities affect both the walls of the Hermitage and its exhibits. But he has no objections to The Stones, the promoter said.
Last year, The Stones cancelled a number of European concerts, including one in St. Petersburg, due to Keith Richards’ head injury caused, reportedly, by falling from a coconut tree while on holiday in Fiji.
As the home of the Russian Revolution, St. Petersburg gets a mention in “Sympathy for the Devil,” the band’s 1968 song inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita.” 
“I stuck around St. Petersburg/When I saw it was a time for a change/Killed the czar and his ministers/Anastasia screamed in vain,” are the lyrics of the song.
A nice twist is that The Stones could be supported by <b>Iggy Pop</b> in St. Petersburg, PMI said. Pop has performed in Russia only once, at the weird setting of Krylya (Wings), a beer-sponsored open-air festival of Russian rock in Moscow in 2002. So far Pop’s web site has only tour dates until May.
Tickets for the Stones’ gig will cost between 1,000 ($38,50) and 10,000 rubles ($385). Forty thousand fans are expected.
PMI’s other upcoming concerts include <b>Placebo</b> (Ice Palace, May 25), <b>Ozzy Osbourne</b> (Ice Palace, May 29) and <b>Aerosmith</b> (SKK Peterburgsky, July 7).
A new music club will open this weekend. Called <b>The Place</b>, it hosted a “secret” pre-opening event featuring the Austrian electronic duo TanzBaby earlier this month, but will be officially launched on Saturday with a concert by <b>Nigel Burch and the Flea-Pit Orchestra</b>, the London-based skiffle/cabaret/folk-influenced band. See interview, pages I and ii.
According to the news release, the club will promote concerts by “interesting, mostly international bands.”
In charge of the concert program will be Claire Yalakas, who worked with Red Club at the venue’s better times when it hosted such acts as Marc Ribot and Los Cubanos Postizos, Lydia Lunch, The Tiger Lillies and Violet Indiana. The location at 47 Ulitsa Marshala Govorova is not very convenient, though. But it is not as forbidingly far away, as Maina.
The club’s program includes U.S. singer-songwriter Lisa Germano who will perform on April 21.
<i>— By Sergey Cherno</i>

TITLE: Rostropovich at 80
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Combined reports
President Vladimir Putin threw a star-studded Kremlin reception on Tuesday evening to celebrate cellist Mstislav Rostropovich’s 80th birthday.
Among the guests were Monaco’s Prince Albert II and princesses from Spain, Greece, Jordan and Denmark, Interfax reported. Also in attendance were Azeri President Ilham Aliyev and a number of Russian ministers and governors.
Rostropovich was born in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, which was then a Soviet republic. He and his wife started a foundation that conducts charitable activities in Azerbaijan including vaccinating children.
Speculation has risen that Rostropovich is seriously ill since his unexplained stay in hospital. On Monday, he also skipped a concert in central Moscow that he was supposed to lead.
After posing for the cameras, he stood up and delivered a speech in a tired and at times slightly slurred voice.
“Colleagues and friends I’m the happiest man,” he said. “My family, friends and colleagues are here with me on this day.”
Rostropovich, exiled for over a decade by the communist Soviet government, then thanked Putin for arranging the dinner, wished guests a pleasant evening and sat down looking relieved. The speech had lasted barely 20 seconds.
“Dear Slava,” Putin said. “From the very bottom of our heart we wish you a happy birthday. We do not only love, know and remember your anniversary but we will also do everything to be worthy of it.” He then walked round to Rostropovich and slung a red sash over his shoulder — an order of services to the motherland.
Earlier Tuesday, Putin praised both Rostropovich’s musical accomplishments and his human rights activism. 
“In all your life and creative work you have many times shown the truth that art and morality together supplement each other and constitute a single goal. In all of the world you are known not only as a brilliant cellist and gifted conductor but as a confirmed defender of human rights and freedom of spirit and an uncompromising fighter for the ideals of democracy,” Putin said in a statement. 
One of the giants of classical music, Rostropovich went into exile from the Soviet Union with his family in 1974 after housing dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn for four years. He and his wife Galina Vishnyevskaya eventually lost their Soviet citizenship. 
The government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Tuesday published an article by Solzhenitsyn’s wife Natalya that included what she said was the first publication of a letter her husband wrote in May 1973 when they moved out of Rostropovich’s house. 
“Once more I repeat to you and Galya my delight at your steadfastness, with which you endured all the oppression connected with me and did not allow me to feel. Once again I am grateful for the years of shelter with you, where I survived a time that was very stormy for me, but thanks to the exceptional circumstances I all the same wrote without interruption,” the letter says in part. 
Three years after his exile, Rostropovich became music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington. 
He held that position until 1994 and retains the title conductor laureate.
Rostropovich developed close relationships with three of the 20th century’s leading composers — Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten and Dmitry Shostakovich, his teacher. He commissioned dozens of works for cello from them and others.
His students included such greats as Jacqueline du Pre, Mischa Maisky, Natalia Gutman, David Geringas, Han-Na Chang and David Finckel.
“He’s the most inspiring musician that I have ever known,” said Finckel, the Emerson String Quartet’s cellist and co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. “Inspiring for audiences who were nonmusicians to sense that something wonderful was happening in music and to get them to return to it; inspiring for composers who heard such a compelling voice in his sound and his approach that they dreamed of having their music played by him; and inspiring for instrumentalists, especially cellists. … He was never the kind of mentor to me or others that made you feel hopeless.”
(AP, Reuters)

TITLE: Psycho drama
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An opera that blurs the borders between opera and drama, “Jenufa,” which brought international recognition to its creator, Czech composer Leos Janacek when it first played in Prague in 1916, is coming to St. Petersburg on Wednesday, to enjoy its first ever staging at the Mariinsky Theater.
A pshychological drama revolving around a humble Moravian family, the opera has been in vogue since it was first staged. This season alone sees four new renditions of “Jenufa,” including premieres at the Metropolitan Opera, the Washington National Opera and Staatstheater Stuttgart. 
“Jenufa” originally premiered in Brno in 1904 but attracted little attention, and it was the much later 1916 version that became popular. Karel Kovarovic, who was at the time director of Prague’s National Theater, had amended the opera — without Janacek’s knowledge — by incorporating his own re-orchestration of the finale.
But the Mariinsky is reviving the initial 1904 version.
Kovarovic’s much lighter, more melodic adaptation was born largely out of fear that audiences — which had at that time been nurtured on the languid tempos and luscious sentimentality of Puccini — would not sit through Janacek’s short, dark masterpiece. But as time went on, Kovarovic’s softened version fell out of fashion, and these days most companies go for the real thing.
Based on “Jeji pastorkyna” (Her Stepdaughter), a story by Gabriela Preissova, a contemporary of Janacek, “Jenufa” was the composer’s first opera based on prose rather than verse.
When the story begins, Jenufa is expecting a child from Steva and is urging him to marry her. Her pregnancy helps Steva escape from serving in the army, and the young man celebrates the good news by returning home drunk. His condition propels Jenufa’s foster-mother, Kostelnicka, to suspend the marriage until Steva combats his drinking problem. Steva’s stepbrother, Laca is also in love with Jenufa. When Jenufa rejects him, Laca slashes her face with a knife. 
When the baby is born, Kostelnicka begs Steva to marry Jenufa, but the woman’s disfigured face is no longer attractive to him. And worse, Steva is now engaged to the mayor’s daughter Karolka. Kostelnicka then tries to arrange the marriage of Jenufa and Laca, who is still in love with her. Kostelnicka drowns the baby and convinces both Jenufa and Laca that it died of natural causes, but the truth comes out as soon as the wedding ceremony begins. Jenufa offers freedom to Laca, who remains faithful, and the couple declare their love for each other.
The Mariinsky production is being staged by the young Moscow director Vasily Barkhatov, known for his experimental productions at Helicon Opera.
Exposure to Janacek in Russia has been limited to less than a handful of shows. The Novosibirsk Opera Theater has staged “Jenufa”, and Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater has staged the opera twice, while Helicon Opera once put on Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case.”
Janacek has been a missing link in the Mariinsky repertoire for many decades, and now the company is happily and enthusiastically filling the gap. This means that more Janacek will follow shortly: a production of “The Makropulos Case” is scheduled for June.
Set designer Zinovy Margolin said that because “Jenufa” has seldom been seen in Russia it is easier for the production team.
“With operatic bestsellers, every new show is like walking across a minefield because expectations are so high and audiences are so demanding,” he said. “But in Russia, the stage history of this opera — despite its tremendous international success — is virtually nonexistent.”
Before “Jenufa,” Janacek was known almost exclusively as folklorist, and this interest reveals itself in Act I.
“The first entrance of [main character Steva] in Act I painstakingly resembles Janacek’s score for [his earlier piece] ‘The Beginning of a Romance,’” Barkhatov said. “But Acts II and III are all about drama and harsh dissonances.”
“Jenufa” is often seen as a work of art that grew out of Janacek’s personal torment and spiritual discomfort. 
“It is nearly impossible to say whether it was Janacek’s own family catastrophe that caused ‘Jenufa’ to emerge or whether it was the opposite and the score threw the composer into a troubled emotional and mental state,” Barkhatov said.
When the composer began the opera, his son had just died of meningitis. While work on “Jenufa” was in progress, Janacek’s daughter Olga fell fatally ill while on a journey to Russia and the composer played some of the music to her before she died.
Margolin said the Mariinsky’s “Jenufa” will be set “in the middle of nowhere.”
“I am not recreating a Moravian village from 1900, and it will be nothing like a modern Czech brewery,” he said. “It is a timeless story, so our take will be to create some kind of a metaphysical space for the show. Three quarters of Russia lives like this anyway — and it certainly did a hundred years ago.”
Barkhatov feels that the market for “Jenufa” will be limited in Russia and in St. Petersburg specifically.
“We are not making a popular hit,” he said. “A rather narrow circle of opera audiences can appreciate this music and I am aware of the fact that the opera will not be shown very often.”

“Jenufa” is performed on Wednesday at the Mariinsky Theater. Www.mariinsky.ru

TITLE: Here is the muse
AUTHOR: By Heather S. Sonntag
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Rarely do those who merely view art have the chance to trace the deeper artistic processes of creation directly from an artist. But at the National Center of Photography, Deborah Turbeville, a renowned American fashion and art photographer, is currently unveiling the primary sources of her inspiration in a lecture series entitled Elements of Style. The lectures introduce her collective muses, an eclectic source of elements that influence and inspire her artistic and commercial projects. 
In the series, which runs until April 12, Turbeville outlines the repertoire of elements she uses in photography, illustrated with slides of her past projects. The list includes: lighting, casting, color, cropping, collage and editing, fantasy, neo-realism, surrealism, sensuality, and atmosphere. Turbeville actively seeks both artistic and conceptual styles that stretch across such media as film, novels, photography, theater, painting and sculpture.
At the top of the list, Turbeville places the “muse,” defined as a person, an object, architecture, or a landscape. The muse is ultimately “a presence that inspires us and imposes itself into our work,” she explains. Turbeville said her first muse was the “atmosphere” — specifically the nature and landscapes of the shores of northern New England where she grew up.
Never formally trained in photography, Turbeville bought a camera with a light meter and started shooting street and beach scenes. Humbly admitting that she started with no particular passion or talent for photography, a series of fateful jobs and encounters with those who worked in the field of fashion and art combined with her intense appreciation for literature and history to hone a personalized development of aesthetic sensibilities and style. Turbeville’s work has been compared to Eugene Atget; she has shot an unparalleled book on Versailles commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis, and her career teems with endless assignments for the world’s top fashion magazines.
In the lectures, Turbeville candidly divulges her personal story of what it takes to make oneself an artist, not just a photographer. The clue, she says, is an intellectual passion for reading history and literature to tap into cultural sensibilities that may be conveyed in the frozen stills of photography.
Observation is also extremely important. Turbeville says she pays astute attention to detail, people, places and the character therein. Her work is “extremely experimental,” not only in the way she takes photographs, but also in their developing and printing. Turbeville said she shuns the digital age because it cheapens the craft of photography, since photography took a long time to reach the height of fine art. 
Turbeville encourages her listeners to have a wide range of perspectives and sources; a major underlying theme to the lectures is the necessity of cross-pollination of ideas and networking with other artists, either in person or simply by viewing their work and knowing their biographies, so that they may serve as models, creative mentors, and muses. Her lectures have focused on the lives and work of Diane Arbus, August Sander, Eugene Atget, Bressai, Man Ray, and Lartigue, to name a few.
Appealing to students of art and photography, professional photographers, enthusiasts of film, and those interested in the history of visual culture in the twentieth century, Turbeville’s lectures, accompanied by slide shows, are delivered in English with spontaneous translation in Russian by staff of the National Center of Photography. Films follow each lecture.
Turbeville traveled to St. Petersburg last month to attend the opening of her exhibition, “The Russian Years: 1995-2005,” which was supported by the U.S. Consulate General and is currently on tour in Kaliningrad, but continues to deliver lectures every Tuesday and Thursday until April 12. 

National Center of Photography, 
35 Bolshaya Morskaya. Tel: 314 1214. www.ncprf.ru

TITLE: Dancing the spirit
AUTHOR: By Katya Madrid
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The program notes to the annual Vertical Theater Festival, which took place at the Music Hall last weekend, state that the festival producers tried to “gather into one all the bits of the world mosaic that is contemporary Butoh from Japan, Europe and Russia.” 
The mosaic theme was picked up by musicians Leonid Fedorov and Vladimir Volkov who performed on the first night of the festival, showcasing Butoh, an improvisational dance form from Japan, when they sang: 
“Flew and melted. Not possible to collect all the pieces. Flew and melted,” from their album “Melting.” 
The duo, who also perform with rock legends Auktyon, were dynamic, poetic, personal and funny. Various Butoh dancers appeared on stage during their performance, and continued in the improvisational spirit of the first half of the evening, adding to the spectacle. 
The line-up for the next two nights of the festival included Ken Mai and the Mask and Feather Theater in “10 Images of Man,” Waguri Yukio, Asuka Shimada and Yuko Kawamoto in “The Journey of a Soul ,” and Tsuruyama Zulu Kinya and Yuko Yuki in “Dance of the North, Dancing the Spirit,” all of whom hail from Japan. 
Butoh comes out of post-Hiroshima Japan in the 1950s. Its originators, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, founded the art form in opposition to traditional Japanese dance, and as an answer to the horror that their country experienced from the explosion of the atomic bomb, with the intention of honoring the moment in all its beauty and ugliness. It is a way of translating feeling into movement and sound. Often improvisational in nature, a Butoh performer goes into a trance-like state, yet remains open to an exchange with the audience. 
In a post-performance interview, Tsuruyama Zulu Kinya who, together with Yuko Yuki, choreographed and performed “Dance of the North, Dancing the Spirit,” said that he could “feel the breath” of the Russian audience. 
The exhalations, after the audience held their breath in wonder, were tangible. According to Kinya, a connection through breath is one of the deeper ways of connecting to other people, he said, and having that experience with his audience was truly inspiring.  
He chose dance as his primary form of expression precisely because it has “no words, [so it is] open to communication with all people.” 
Music plays an important role in Zulu’s work. He produces an image for the musicians to work with, but the rest is pure improvisation. For Vertical, he brought with him from Japan musicians Masahiro Nitto and Tomo, who he has worked with for the last three years. 
Tomo has a musical career outside of the Butoh world, but he is focusing on his collaboration with other mediums because “it adds a different dimension” to his music, he said Sunday. 
“By myself I am free, and loud! While dancers care more about structure. Zulu expects the unknown,” he continued. “I do not want too much information.” 
Tomo, who speaks English, was kind enough to translate for Yuko Yuki, a student of Butoh founder Hijikata, whom she called “her father.” She called Kazuo Ohno “her mother,” seeming not to care that both originators are men.
Yuki, who was born in Tokyo, moved to Akita in the north of Japan more than 25 years ago because it is where Hijikata comes from, in order to develop a deeper understanding of the region that gave birth to Butoh. 
She called it “the land of the spirits and the ancestors,” whose presence is corporal for her. She said the land was her teacher. 
“One must surrender to the environment” and “experience nature internally. No matter whether its Butoh or other forms of expression, art should be spiritual,” Yuki said.
On Sunday, the show moved to Music Hall’s smaller stage.  
The more intimate setting lent itself to very different experience from the previous night in the big hall. But Kinya wouldn’t say which space he preferred. 
“Wife or lover,” he said. “Which is better? Both are good.” He failed to say whether he has either or both.
Pale figures in various states of undress crept around Music Hall all weekend. Live music drew a crowd on the mezzanine, where several dancers were roped off in their own “play pen” with lots of colorful, messy paint. 
Also taking part were Odd-Dance Theater of St. Petersburg, Nu Transit of Finland, Kalimba with Olga Arefiyeva of Moscow, Ptitz of Nizhny Novgorod, and PAG&ARM, part of Moscow’s Fabrika.

TITLE: In the Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: This month’s announcement that Roman Abramovich is getting divorced from his wife Irina had a strange deja-vu quality to it, since the British tabloid News of the World ran the same story last October, prompting a swift denial from the billionaire. As before, the parties directly concerned are staying tight-lipped, but at least there’s another chance to look at pictures of the “stunning” Darya Zhukova in her bikini.
The news of the divorce came out March 13, prompting lavish coverage in British newspapers. The Times was even inspired to publish an editorial in verse based on Tammy Wynette’s song “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” The first line was “My ex-spouse is as rich as stink.”
Naturally, the journalistic debate has centered on the divorce settlement. It could be as much as $6 billion — at least if you believe a source “close to the Abramovich camp” quoted in the Daily Express on March 19. Frankly, I would take all the figures with a grain of salt, since the newspapers can’t even agree whether Abramovich’s alleged girlfriend Zhukova is 23 or 25.
My favorite piece of coverage was an article in the Sun on March 15 revealing that the Abramoviches used to sleep in bedrooms 30 meters apart — on their yacht. The source, a “Red Rom insider” as the tabloid put it, described Darya as “the sort of girl who might not respond if you say a friendly ‘hello.’” Apparently, male staff on the yacht used to admire her from a safe distance while she sunbathed in a bikini.
Amazingly, the Sun didn’t print a picture of “stunning brunette” Zhukova in her bikini, but The Times made up for that oversight with a photograph of her svelte loveliness captioned simply “Darya Zhukova, the girlfriend.” So far, no one has written much more than that about Zhukova, who released a statement over the weekend denying that she was responsible for the break-up of the Abramoviches’ marriage, The Sunday Times reported. 
The most intriguing detail in the Sunday Times story was the insight that Zhukova lives in a $29 million apartment in the same London building as Osama bin Laden’s pop-singer niece. I wonder if she ever asks her neighbor to turn the music down. It’s nice that Darya — the daughter of an oil and metals magnate — must be one of the few people in the world who wouldn’t be overawed by Abramovich’s multiple yachts. That gives them something in common, in addition to a certain lack of cheery bonhomie.
Desperate to give the story more sex appeal, The Daily Mail ran an article saying that the “third woman in Roman’s divorce” was Russia’s very own It Girl, Ksenia Sobchak. The 10 photographs of a semi-clad Sobchak on the tabloid’s web site hinted at three-in-a-bed romps, but the article only said that she introduced Roman and Darya at a party in Moscow. It quoted a “confidante of Mrs Abramovich” as saying that “Irina loathes Ksenia.”
It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that the Sun described a different sequence of events, writing that Darya met Roman at his own New Year’s Eve party. In that case, they would probably have exchanged glances over the salat olivye, whether or not Ksenia helped them out with the friendly hellos.
It has certainly been a busy month for Paris Hiltonski, as The Daily Mail dubs her. She also managed to score a sexy photograph in The Times, illustrating a story about billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s upcoming 42nd birthday party. The broadsheet reported on a rumor that he is planning to marry Sobchak as a prank and then get a quickie divorce. Poor old Ksenia. It sounds like she picked the wrong billionaire.

TITLE: Empty elegance
AUTHOR: By Victoria Donovan
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Most Eiffel</b>
6 Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya. Tel: 315 4035
Open from 12 p.m. until last customer leaves
Menu in Russian, French and English
Dinner for two without alcohol 3,900 rubles ($150)
Perched on the bank of the Neva and with impressive views of the glittering St. Petersburg skyline, Most Eiffel, a relatively new addition to the city’s haute cuisine scene, has all the necessary accoutrements to make a big splash among the big spending diners in town. 
Boasting an opulent interior and chefs trained in French culinary schools, Most Eiffel should be teeming with St. Petersburg high society, but on the Monday evening we visited, our fellow diners were conspicuous by their absence. 
And, according to our waiter, this sorry state of affairs has been pretty much a constant since the restaurant opened. 
What then is keeping St. Petersburg’s loaded lunchers away? It can’t be the service, which is exemplary. On entering we were immediately relieved of our jackets and deposited in the care of an endearing German-speaking waiter who managed to strike the elusive balance between ingratiation and distance that every top restaurant strives for. Attentive to the smallest details, we were even invited into the chronically overstaffed kitchen to witness the lobsters and oysters bubbling happily away in their tanks.
The absurdly outsized menu cards reflect the outsized prices at Eiffel Bridge but you do get quality, and theater, for your money. In an opening flourish, we were presented (“with the chef’s compliments”) delectable miniature appetizers of Philadelphia cheese wrapped in Parma ham and served on toast with cherry tomatoes. The “fried frog paws with sauteed vegetables” (500 rubles, $19), dramatically revealed from beneath a silver tureen, were succulent and meaty although they could have benefited from a generous dose of lemon juice to enhance the delicate garlic savor. My companion’s “pumpkin thick cream soup with bacon” (400 rubles, $15) was whipped to perfection and filled with flavorsome hints of spices which avoided overpowering the sweet pumpkin aroma.
The “medallions of venison marinated in cream” (850 rubles, $32), were juicy and cooked with finesse, imbibing subtle smoky flavors from the grill. However the accompaniment of two rather pathetic-looking dauphinoise potatoes added little to the visual and palatal experience and, served on cold plates, the meat quickly became tepid unforgivably marring its luxuriant texture. The “filet of black-cod with tiger shrimps” (1,300 rubles, $50), while benefiting from a slinky saffron sauce, failed to inspire eulogies from my companion who found the dish to be rather run-of the-mill for the price — and the prawns were cold. Desserts however were a resounding success — the creme brule (450 rubles, $17) ceded with a satisfying crack to reveal an ethereal vanilla-laced center while the piquant blackberry sorbet (400 rubles, $15) served in a sweet wafer cup was a refreshing conclusion to our sensual debauchery.
The art nouveau-inspired interior of Most Eiffel has clearly been designed to ooze affluence and appeal to St. Petersburg’s epicurean elites. But while the starched white table linen and red plush seat covers succeed in adding a regal element to the decor, the fastidious regularity of finely-laid empty tables sprawling over two floors and overly-bright lighting ultimately create a clinical and frigid atmosphere. Lacking the je ne sais quoi of French restaurant culture, Most Eiffel clearly misses the mark and, despite the excellent food, could remain a restaurant wasteland.

TITLE: Blood on the sand
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: “300” is about as violent as “Apocalypto” and twice as stupid. Adapted from a graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, it offers up a bombastic spectacle of honor and betrayal, rendered in images that might have been airbrushed onto a customized van sometime in the late 1970s. The basic story is a good deal older. It’s all about the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, which unfolded at a narrow pass on the coast of Greece whose name translates as Hot Gates.
Hot Gates, indeed! Devotees of the pectoral, deltoid and other fine muscle groups will find much to savor as King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) leads 300 prime Spartan porterhouses into battle against Persian forces commanded by Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), a decadent self-proclaimed deity who wants, as all good movie villains do, to rule the world. 
The Persians, pioneers in the art of facial piercing, have vastly greater numbers — including ninjas, dervishes, elephants, a charging rhino and an angry bald giant — but the Spartans clearly have superior health clubs and electrolysis facilities. They also hew to a warrior ethic of valor and freedom that makes them, despite their gleeful appetite for killing, the good guys in this tale. 
(It may be worth pointing out that unlike their mostly black and brown foes, the Spartans and their fellow Greeks are white.)
But not all the Spartans back in Sparta support their king on his mission. A gaggle of sickly, corrupt priests, bought off by the Persians, consult an oracular exotic dancer whose topless gyrations lead to a warning against going to war. 
And the local council is full of appeasers and traitors, chief among them a sardonic, shifty-eyed smoothy named Theron (Dominic West, known to fans of “The Wire” as the irrepressible McNulty). 
Too cowardly to challenge Leonidas man to man, he fixes his attention on Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), a loyal wife and Spartan patriot who fights the good fight on the home front. Gorgo understands her husband’s noble purpose, the higher cause for which he is willing to sacrifice his life. “Come home with your shield or on it,” she tells him as he heads off into battle after a night of somber marital whoopee. Later she observes that “freedom is not free.”
Another movie — Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s “Team America,” whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of “300” — calculated the cost at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that “300” aspires to become. 
Its digitally tricked-up color scheme, while impressive at times, is hard to tolerate for nearly two hours (true masochists can seek out the Imax version), and the hectic battle scenes would be much more exciting in the first person. I want to chop up some Persians too!

TITLE: England Stumbles to Victory Against Part-Timers
AUTHOR: By Trevor Huggins
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — World Cup holders Italy and European champions Greece got back on track in Euro 2008 qualifying on Wednesday, but England labored to beat Andorra and Sweden suffered an upset in Northern Ireland.
Striker Luca Toni headed a goal in each half as Italy beat Scotland 2-0 in Bari, sending a clear message to the rest of Group B and to the critics of under-fire coach Roberto Donadoni.
The world champions looked sharp right from the start, despite not having played since a qualifying win over Georgia last November.
A friendly scheduled last month against Romania was cancelled in the wake of the death of a policeman in rioting after a Serie A match.
Italy are fourth on 10 points, but they are only two points behind the other three sides — France, Scotland, who have played a game more, and leaders Ukraine.
Captained by Andriy Shevchenko, Ukraine were 1-0 winners over Lithuania, courtesy of an Oleg Gusev header.
Greece, rocked by a 4-1 home defeat by arch-rivals Turkey last weekend, beat Malta 1-0 with a 66th-minute penalty converted by Angelos Basinas, following a red card for Malta’s Roderick Briffa.
The win moved the Greeks into second place in Group C on 12 points, one behind Turkey who came from 2-0 down to draw 2-2 with Norway in Frankfurt.
The Turks, playing behind closed doors in Germany to complete a ban after crowd trouble in a World Cup qualifier against Switzerland in 2005, were trailing with under 20 minutes to go before Hamit Altintop levelled with two free kicks.
Sweden, the only side other than Turkey with a 100 percent record before Wednesday’s games, fared even worse — losing 2-1 in Northern Ireland after taking a 27th-minute lead.
Johan Elmander got the opener but Northern Ireland striker David Healy, who scored a hat-trick against Liechtenstein on Saturday, struck twice more to propel Lawrie Sanchez’s men to the top of Group F.

REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT
It is a remarkable achievement for both men.
Healy is now the qualifying competition’s top scorer with nine goals while Sanchez has defied the odds with his team since being tipped to quit after he was savaged in the local media last September.
His team now have 13 points, one more than Sweden and four ahead of Spain, who gave their qualifying hopes a much-needed boost with a 1-0 win over Iceland that lifted them to third in the group.
Group E leaders Croatia, who did not play, now have three teams firmly on their tail with Russia, Israel and England all just two points behind.
Israel leapfrogged England after a 4-0 drubbing of Estonia in which 17-year-old substitute striker Ben Sahar scored twice.
England, who were booed at halftime and full time, stumbled to a 3-0 win over lowly Andorra in Barcelona — with Steven Gerrard only breaking the deadlock in the 54th minute.
He added another before David Nugent tapped in a late third on his debut but it will not be enough to still a growing media campaign against coach Steve McClaren.
Furious fans chanted “What a load of rubbish” and “You’re not fit to wear the shirt” as England toiled against a side ranked 163rd in the world.

McCLAREN PRESSURE 
The pressure appeared to take its toll on McClaren as he walked out of the news conference after just two minutes of questioning from reporters.
Giovanni van Bronckhorst kept the Netherlands top of Group G after scoring the winner five minutes from time in a 1-0 victory in Slovenia.
Though Northern Ireland’s feat was impressive, the two real shocks of the night came earlier.
Azerbaijan defeated a previously unbeaten Finland side 1-0 in Group A to record only their third win in 34 qualifiers since they first started playing them in 1994.
Liechtenstein caused the next upset with a 1-0 victory over Latvia in Group F, bringing up only their second win in their 33rd qualifier since 1994.
With the qualifying competition now around the halfway mark, the next qualifiers take place at the beginning of June. Next year’s finals are being jointly staged by Austria and Switzerland.

TITLE: Storm Brews Over U.S. Prosecutors
AUTHOR: By Laurie Kellman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Eight federal prosecutors were fired last year because they did not sufficiently support President Bush’s priorities, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff maintains, calling it a legitimate policy.
Kyle Sampson, who quit earlier this month, disputed Democratic charges that the firings were a purge by intimidation and a warning to the remaining prosecutors to fall in line. Nor, he said, were the prosecutors dismissed to interfere with corruption investigations.
“To my knowledge, nothing of the sort occurred here,” Sampson said in remarks prepared for delivery Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But he acknowledged that federal prosecutors serve at the president’s pleasure and are judged in large part on whether they pursue or resist administration policy.
“The distinction between ‘political’ and ‘performance-related’ reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial,” he said. “A U.S. attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective … is unsuccessful.”
The Justice Department admitted Wednesday that it gave senators inaccurate information about the firings and presidential political adviser Karl Rove’s role in trying to secure a U.S. attorney’s post in Arkansas for one of his former aides, Tim Griffin.

TITLE: Dispute Over Britons Held in Iran Escalates
AUTHOR: By Alan Cowell
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: LONDON — The dispute with Iran over Britain’s captured sailors and marines escalated sharply on Wednesday when Britain froze all “bilateral business” with Iran and the Iranians displayed some British prisoners on state television — an act condemned by the Foreign Office here as “completely unacceptable.”
Britain and Iran also argued over whether the 15 Britons were in Iraqi or Iranian waters when they were seized.
One of the captured sailors, Faye Turney, 26 — the only woman among the 15 Britons — was shown on Iranian television wearing a black head scarf and saying, “Obviously we trespassed into their waters” and praising her captors as “very friendly, very hospitable and very thoughtful, nice people.”
“They explained to us why we had been arrested,” she added.
Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, attending a meeting in Saudi Arabia, indicated earlier that Turney could be released within days. “There was no hurt or harm,” Turney, whose rank is leading seaman, said in the television report. “They were very, very compassionate.”
Iranian authorities also made public what they said was a letter written by Turney to her family in which she expressed remorse for having strayed into Iranian waters and said she and the others were being treated well.
“We were out in the boats when we were arrested by Iranian forces as we had apparently gone into Iranian waters,” the letter said. “I wish we hadn’t because then I would be home with you all right now. I’m so sorry we did because I know we wouldn’t be here now if we hadn’t. I want you all to know that I am well and safe.
“I am being well looked after, I am fed three meals a day and I’m in constant supply of fluids,” the letter said. Her words were addressed in part to her husband, Adam, and her 3-year-old daughter, Molly.
The circumstances in which she recorded her words and wrote the letter were not clear. After the videotape was broadcast, Margaret Beckett, the British foreign secretary, said that she was concerned about “any indication of pressure on or coercion of our personnel.”
Some of the captured Britons were shown in a room eating a meal with Turney, but it was also not clear the extent to which the tape had been edited. In one section she was wearing a black and white checkered headdress, in another a black head scarf.
Up to now, British officials have been denied access to the captured sailors and marines, and their whereabouts are not known. But Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister, said Tehran had agreed to allow British officials to meet with the 15 Britons, The Associated Press reported, although he did not say when this meeting would occur.

TITLE: Phelps Claims Third World Record
AUTHOR: By Julian Linden
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MELBOURNE — Michael Phelps demolished his third world record in three days on Thursday to collect his fourth gold medal of the world championships and strengthen his claims to be the greatest swimmer of all time.
The 21-year-old American slashed almost a second off his own world record to win the 200 metres individual medley final after setting the best ever time for 200 freestyle and 200 butterfly the two previous days.
The U.S. posted two more world records in the Susie O’Neill pool to continue their domination of the championships in the lead-up to next year’s Beijing Olympics.
Natalie Coughlin, Dana Vollmer, Lacey Nymeyer and Katie Hoff combined to smash Germany’s 4x200 freestyle world record and Leila Vaziri equalled her 24-hour old time of 28.16 to win the 50 backstroke gold medal.
Italy and Canada both collected their first golds of the championships when Filippo Magnini and Brent Hayden dead-heated in the men’s 100 freestyle final.
The pair touched the wall in the identical time of 48.43 seconds to share the honour of being the fastest men in water and producing the first dead-heat in any event at a world swimming championship.
Jessicah Schipper provided Australia’s fifth gold medal of the championships with an all-the way win in the women’s 200 butterfly final ahead of American Kimberley Vandenberg and Poland’s Olympic champion Otylia Jedrzejczak.
Phelps is chasing an unprecedented eight world titles in Melbourne and few would bet against him after his amazing performances over the first five days of competition.
Phelps has been a serial record breaker since he broke his first world mark as a 15-year-old in 2001 — the youngest man to achieve the feat — but his performances in Melbourne have elevated him to a new level.
“To be (mentioned) with the names of guys like Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, some of those guys are just incredible,” he told reporters.
“To be able to be included in that is a pretty big accomplishment and something to be proud of.”
Phelps’s winning time of 1:54.98 slashed 0.86 off the previous record of 1:55.84 which he set at last year’s Pan Pacific championships in Victoria, Canada.
His American team mate Ryan Lochte finished second in 1:56.19 after pushing Phelps most of the way and Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh was third in 1:56.92.
Magnini, 25, joined American Matt Biondi and Russian Alexander Popov as the only men to win the 100 freestyle event at successive world championships, while Hayden provided Canada with their first world swimming champion in 21 years after a lung-bursting finish to the final.
Australia’s Eamon Sullivan grabbing the bronze medal in 48.47 with just 0.38 separating the eight finalists at the wall.
“In the last 15, I was seeing God,” Hayden said. “There is always a point where you feel like you have hit the wall and that is what I felt when I was 20 out.”
“But I told myself you have come too far not to do this. So I didn’t take a breath and put my head down and went as fast as I could.”

TITLE: Sports Watch
TEXT: <b>CSKA Advances</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — CSKA Moscow advanced to the Russian Hockey Leagues playoff semifinals after defeating Salavat Yulaev 3-1 in Ufa Monday night, winning the best of 5 series 3-2. 
The Moscow team, which finished the season in 6th place, was the only bottom seeded team to advance from the quarter finals. They next face league champions Ak Bars Kazan. 
Siberian powerhouses Metallurg Magnitogorsk and Avangard Omsk will duke it out on the other semifinal contest. 
The first semifinal was due to take place Thursday with others scheduled from Friday through Wednesday. Due to a change in the Russian Hockey League rules, CSKA needs to advance to the finals in order to get a medal. The league will not hold a series to decide the bronze medal winner, rather award it to the team semifinalist with the best regular season record that doesn’t advance to the finals. 

<b>Maradona in Hospital</b>
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) — Argentine soccer great Diego Maradona was taken to a Buenos Aires hospital in an ambulance on Wednesday after falling ill and was undergoing tests, the hospital said.
Maradona, who led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup title, has battled cocaine addiction and in recent weeks appeared overweight.
A statement from the Guemes hospital did not specify what Maradona was suffering from, but said his hospitalization was “not related to an addiction to dangerous drugs.”

TITLE: Coach Says
Sorry For Family Spat
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MELBOURNE — A Ukrainian swimming coach filmed fighting with his daughter at the world championships in Melbourne told a magistrates court on Thursday that he would not repeat the behaviour.
Mikhaylo Zubkov, 38, was filmed pushing and shoving his 18-year-old daughter Kateryna Zubkova in a marshalling area on Tuesday evening. Kateryna tried to push her father away several times during the scuffle.
Zubkov’s lawyer told the court the incident was a personal and delicate family matter and his client was remorseful.
Police tried to have an intervention order extended, banning Zubkov from contacting his daughter, but the magistrate dismissed the matter after the swimmer refused to give evidence.
Speaking through an interpreter, Zubkov gave an undertaking that he would not engage in conduct similar to his behavior at the championships, local media at the court reported.
Zubkov and his daughter left the court together.