SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1291 (57), Tuesday, July 24, 2007
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TITLE: Race Brawl
Ends In Confusion
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Two young men were hospitalized and three were detained by police following an inter-ethnic brawl in St. Petersburg on Friday. A policeman was also hurt in the incident.
Prosecutors have filed minor charges of “hooliganism” for what they called “the drunken gang fight” between three ethnic Dagestani men and three extreme nationalist members of the Anti-Illegal Immigration Movement (DPNI), at 13/3 Ulitsa Utkina near Ladozhskaya metro station.
But, in what the DPNI’s leadership sees as unfair police treatment of its members involved in the fight, a contrasting picture of the event from the police’s official version has emerged.
DPNI’s St. Petersburg spokesman, Andrei Kuznetsov said that when an enormous group of “Caucasian natives” attacked “two Slavs,” a police officer on patrol stopped the fight and took them to the 52nd police precinct, only to detain the Russians and clear the Caucasians, although “one of the Russians was put in intensive care with head injuries.”
He said the police officer was injured amid a dispute at the precinct with the DPNI members who sought the release of their colleagues.
The police say the officer was attacked by Russians who had suspected him of favoring the Caucasians.
“Had it not been for the help of the three Dagestani men who knew the officer, his condition would have been worse,” said Krasnogvardeisky District prosecutor Andrei Stepanov about the injured policeman.
According to the police, two Dagestani men were hospitalized with facial injuries and a broken leg and finger.
Meanwhile, police said, two Russians who “insinuated injuries” while in detention were hospitalized. They then fled and are now at large.
Incidents of ethnic gang fights are rarely reported in St. Petersburg, but Oksana Karpenko, deputy director of the Center for Independent Social Research believes such events are inevitable in a city that has become infamous for violent hate crimes in the past five years.
She said St. Petersburg is particularly xenophobic to people from southern republics.
“Sixty percent of St. Petersburgers are in favor of evicting natives of the Southern Republics,” she told a round-table on urban tolerance held at the St. Petersburg British Council earlier Friday.
She said “the anti-migrant mood typical of modern Russia is, among other things, due to an officially instituted favorable treatment of so-called natives [ethnically Slav citizens], in most cases, to the detriment of non-natives [non-Slav citizens].”
The British Council event, aimed at promoting inter-ethnic tolerance, was followed by an all-day concert Saturday at the Peter and Paul Fortress featuring multi-ethnic bands from the U.K.
Historian Irina Levinskaya from the St. Petersburg Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History believes that Russian policy makers have contributed to the growth of xenophobia in the nation.
“[This is] St. Petersburg! Not the Caucusus!” Levinskaya quoted Governor Valentina Matviyenko as telling owners of kebab shops near Ladozhskaya metro station during a campaign against street vendors this month.
Friday’s inter-ethnic brawl occurred near the same metro station.
TITLE: U.K. Slams Russia Over Lugovoi Extradition
AUTHOR: By Mansur Mirolayev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Tension between Russia and Britain escalated Monday as both sides accused the other of refusing to cooperate in the investigation into the killing of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London.
A high-level Russian prosecutor defended Russia’s refusal to extradite former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi, Britain’s prime suspect in the radiation poisoning of Litvinenko, himself a former KGB agent, in November.
“There is no evidence in the materials provided by Britain that there was an objective investigation of the Litvinenko case by Scotland Yard,” deputy prosecutor general Alexander Zvyagintsev said at a news conference. “The Russian side has more grounds to doubt the objectivity of the British justice system.”
Zvyagintsev said Russian prosecutors are ready to open a case against Lugovoi if there are grounds to do so.
Russia has refused to turn over Lugovoi on the grounds that the constitution forbids extradition of Russian citizens.
Britain’s ambassador to Russia has directly challenged that argument. In an interview published Monday, Sir Anthony Brenton said Russia could get around the ban if it wanted to cooperate on the case.
“Russia’s constitution, like those of other states, is clearly capable of interpretation in the light of circumstances,” he said in an interview with the Interfax news agency and Kommersant newspaper. The ambassador noted specific sections of the constitution that are routinely violated in Russia.
Lugovoi was one of three Russians who met with Litvinenko in a London hotel on Nov. 1, the day he fell ill, but Lugovoi has denied any involvement in his death.
The politically charged case also was expected to be discussed at a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.
The extradition dispute may further complicate efforts by the EU and Russia to draw up a new cooperation agreement to replace the one that expires in December.
Brenton said Britain was not asking Russia to violate its own constitution, “but to work with us creatively to find a way around this impediment, given the serious and unprecedented nature of this murder. Such cooperation has not been forthcoming.” Russia has offered to try Lugovoi in Moscow if Britain presents sufficient evidence against him. Brenton said this was not an option for British prosecutors, who he stressed were independent of the government.
“They note that the crime was committed against a British citizen and took place in London. The appropriate venue for the trial is therefore London.
“Moreover, both the UN and the EU have stated publicly their concern that the law in Russia is applied selectively,” Brenton said. “There would therefore be grounds for a legal challenge against any attempt to accept a trial in Russia.”
Britain announced last week that it was expelling four Russian diplomats, restricting visas issued to Russian government officials and reviewing interaction on a range of issues in what it said was a necessary response to Moscow’s refusal to cooperate.
Russia countered by saying it will expel four British diplomats, stop issuing visas for British officials and halt counterterrorism cooperation.
TITLE: Demographic Future Bleak for City
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Demographers have provided dire statistics depicting a sharp decline in Russia’s population in the next few decades — and said that St. Petersburg, which loses an average of 70 people every day and has the lowest birth rate in the nation, could be hit hardest.
According to the St. Petersburg Civil Registry Committee, an average of 130 children are born in the city every day but the daily mortality rate is just over 200.
However, the International Institute for Strategic Studies maintains that St. Petersburg’s leading position in Russia’s population decline has been exaggerated, reporting worse figures in the neighboring regions of Lenoblast, Novgorod and Pskov with annual demographic decline there ranging between 1.21 percent and 1.5 percent, while St. Petersburg is experiencing a less than 1 percent annual slump.
Dmitry Dubrovsky, head of modern ethnology and inter-ethnic relations at St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum of Ethnography, said the forecast demographic catastrophe has nothing to do with Moscow and St. Petersburg, “because these cities as a rule are attractive spots for both internal and foreign migrants, ready to cover any demographic gap.”
But “the real concern in Russia’s official circles is about an extinction of Russians as a race, rather than population decline in its traditional sense,” says Dubrovsky, adding that it was one of the factors that prompted President Vladimir Putin last year to adopt a special policy aimed at “calling ethnic Russians abroad back home, but restricting migration for other nationalities.”
To reverse the current prevailing demographic trend, according to Dubrovsky, Russia has to revise its socio-economic and development policies so that the balance of development and fair distribution of services between rural and urban Russia and between the center and the periphery can be equally ensured.
“If there is anything to fear from the migration trend,” continued Dubrovsky, “Russia should start with mending its chaotic internal migration rather than focusing on the comparatively more easily controlled migration from abroad.”
However, the St. Petersburg Bureau of Statistics, or Petrostat has offered figures depicting the city’s alarming demographic situation, saying the mortality rate was almost double the birth rate in the first quarter of the year compared with the same period last year when 18,700 deaths were registered. About 9,986 children were born in St. Petersburg during the period, driving the city’s population to 4.567 million by April, according to Petrostat.
The St. Petersburg Civil Registry Committee say the birth rate has declined by 46 percent, while mortality jumped by 27 percent in the past 10 years, including the first 5 years that saw half of the male labor force and one-eighth of the female force die before reaching retirement age.
As the child population continually declined, it was taken over by the elderly population in 2001, with 631 pensioners to every 1,000 working people.
Russia loses 800,000 people every year, said Anatoly Antonov, head of the Department of Demography and Family Sociology at the Faculty of Sociology at Moscow State University.
RIA Novosti quoted him earlier in the month as saying that “Russia will be inhabited by only 40 million people in the next 40 years, down from the current 143 million, if it does not adopt a policy to preserve natives in their regions.”
But the United Nations says Russia’s population will fall by a third by the middle of the century when the world population will be close to 9 billion, given the ongoing rate of Russia’s economic growth and living standards.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies report warns that if the slump is not reversed, Russia’s population will be “only a little bigger than that of Vietnam and Ethiopia, one-third of the U.S. and one-twelfth that of China,” by 2025. The current U.S. population is about 250 million.
Currently, Russia’s annual rate of population decline is 0.5 percent, but will jump to 1.2 percent by the year 2020 and to 2.2 percent a decade later, the Institute reported.
TITLE: Lugovoi Says He’s Enjoying His Time at Home
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Andrei Lugovoi complained on Friday he was becoming so popular at home that crowds of fellow Russians hounded him to get an autograph.
“I do not know if I am a hero or not,” Andrei Lugovoi, the former Federal Guard Service officer accused by Britain of murdering emigre Alexander Litvinenko, said in a live interview on Ekho Moskvy radio.
“Right now, I have no plans to become a politician, but I do experience difficulties visiting public places, especially with my family — I am approached by people all the time.”
Once a frequent visitor to Britain where he had business interests, he said he was now taking pleasure in just hiking across his own vast country, often sleeping in a tent.
“I think all of Britain is just a bit bigger than the Moscow region, so if I lived there without a chance to travel elsewhere I would be bored,” he quipped. “But Moscow alone offers you much more of interest than London and Paris put together.”
Lugovoi again questioned the British case against him, and also offered some colorful criticism of Britain, saying it “has always hidden con men, swindlers, adventurists and defectors,” and that “to speak of imperial ambitions for Britain today is funny, to say the least.”
TITLE: Environmentalists Beaten, One Dead in Armed Attack
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Masked attackers armed with metal rods and baseball bats raided a camp of environmental protesters near an east Siberian uranium enrichment plant over the weekend, beating one person to death and injuring several others.
The attack appeared to be linked to simmering hostilities between local nationalist and anti-fascist groups. But it is bound to stoke worries about a resurgence of nationalist groups, as well as the work of nongovernmental organizations critical of the government.
About 15 darkly dressed attackers stormed the camp of 25 activists in a woodland clearing near the Angarsk Electrolysis Chemical Complex at about 5 a.m. Saturday, said one of activists who was on night patrol at the time.
“I tried to wake everybody up so we could start a coordinated defense,” said the activist, Maxim, 21, who refused to give his last name because he said police had asked the activists not to speak to the media.
Shouting nationalist slogans, the attackers knocked down tents and dragged out activists before beating them with metal rods, baseball bats and sticks, Maxim said, speaking on a friend’s cell phone because the attackers stole his.
One activist, Ilya Borodayenko, 26, died of severe head injuries in hospital a few hours later.
“I saw blood coming out of his mouth and ears,” Maxim said. “The doctors told me he had a punctured lung as well as a cracked skull.”
He said another activist — whom he only identified as Marina, 25 — suffered multiple fractures to her right arm after being beaten around the face and arms. He sent a reporter several photographs of the woman being treated by a white-coated doctor at the camp shortly after the attack. Blood is seen glistening through the woman’s matted hair, and her right arm is bound in a makeshift splint.
“In between the blows, they shouted, ‘Anti-Antifa!’ and, ‘Do you like being in Antifa now?’” Maxim said.
Several of the activists are also members of a vocal anti-fascist group called Antifa, and this probably motivated Saturday’s attack, Maxim said. The activists represented three environmental organizations, including Defending the Rainbow and Autonomous Action.
Two activists remained hospitalized in stable condition Sunday, Maxim said.
Eight suspects, aged 18 to 22, were in custody Sunday, Interior Ministry spokesman Valery Gribakin said. He suggested that the motive for the attack might have been theft, saying one of the suspects had been detained carrying a backpack with several cell phones.
The suspects will be charged with hooliganism and intentional grievous bodily harm resulting in death, Gribakin said. A hooliganism conviction carries a maximum punishment of seven years in prison, while the second, more serious charge has a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Gribakin promised to bring all the attackers to justice. “Work will not stop even for one minute,” he said, Interfax reported.
Irkutsk regional police, however, are reluctant to classify the attack as a nationalist-related crime, the activists said. “The local police want to present the attack as ordinary hooliganism. They very grudgingly wrote down that we told them the attackers shouted slogans against anti-fascists,” said Igor Kozlov, a member of Autonomous Action, Ekho Moskvy radio reported.
“Many people flatly deny the existence of neo-Nazis in their city,” Kozlov said.
Authorities were keeping an eye on the camp before the attack, and several police officers stopped by the day before the attack to search the tents, Maxim said. Police suspected that one or more of the activists was involved in spraying graffiti on municipal buildings calling for a halt to nuclear waste processing, he said.
Several members of the camp refused to present their documents because police failed to produce a search warrant, Maxim said. No one was charged and the police left, he said.
Repeated calls to local police and the hospital went unanswered Sunday.
Mikhail Kreindlin, head of Greenpeace in Russia, and Alexander Brod, director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, said it was too early to start pointing fingers in Saturday’s attack. But Brod said authorities in the past have hired local criminal groups to silence dissent and write it off as hooliganism.
Brod said he had asked associates in Irkutsk to make sure the police investigation is conducted properly and is not allowed to fizzle out.
TITLE: Thieves Take Toxic Truck, Search Widens to Moscow
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG – A truck carrying dangerous waste was stolen in the Leningrad Oblast on Saturday, Interfax reported citing an unidentified police source.
The incident happened when the driver of the Kamaz truck, which was transporting beryllium waste products, decided to pull off the main road and stop for lunch, the agency said.
Police believe the thieves were probably unaware of the cargo and wanted simply to steal the truck.
Beryllium is a metal in the first category of carcinogens, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It can be harmful if inhaled and the effects depend on the period of exposure. According to Fontanka.ru, four sealed containers of work clothes covered with beryllium particles, classified as dangerous cargo, were being transported from the Tverskaya Oblast to the Krasny Bor nuclear power station near St. Petersburg to be buried.
The former director of Krasny Bor, Vladimir Vovchanov, called the driver’s behavior “unacceptable” and said that such waste products not only cannot be left alone, but they have to be guarded with armed security during their transportation, Fontanka.ru reported.
Police are searching the Moscow region as they think the stolen vehicle was taken to the area, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Homeless Radio Launches Podcasts Ahead of Festival
AUTHOR: By Karina Papp
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Radio podcasts raising awareness of homelessness in St. Petersburg have been made available on the Internet with a new project called Homeless Radio.
“Our radio is not the same as that which we listen to in our cars on the way to work,” said Arkady Turin, a coordinator with Homeless Radio, which is backed by charity New Social Solution. “It is a kind of podcast of interviews with homeless people. And it is calculated to help foster a more tolerant attitude to socially excluded people and to let everybody know that the homeless are the same as everyone else.”
Homeless Radio has so far podcast two programs called “To Remember Goodness” and “Concert by Request.” But more are planned, said Turin.
“We have begun small, but who knows, maybe some day we’ll start real broadcasting?” Turin said.
The project got underway in May when London’s International Ten Feet Away Festival of Homeless Art asked for podcasts from Russia.
The festival, held at the end of July, is a forum where homeless and ex-homeless people will have the opportunity to exchange thoughts, ideas and future projects in the arts.
Ten Feet Away International includes poetry, photography exhibitions, theater, dance and music workshops, sculpture and even circus workshops. The festival takes its name from the tendency of members of the public to stay “ten feet away” from homeless people on the street. Homeless Radio podcasts can be found at www.putdomoi.ru, the website of St. Petersburg’s homelessness magazine and an affiliate of the U.K.’s The Big Issue.
Blogs from St. Petersburg homeless people can be found in English on the site of Ten Feet Away International at http://tenfeetaway.wordpress.com.
TITLE: Child Killed in Carriage Crash
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The five-year old daughter of the mayor of Sochi died in a St. Petersburg hospital on Saturday after a horrific road accident involving one of the city’s picturesque horse-drawn carriages.
Valeriya Kolodyazhnaya on Friday had fallen onto the road at Palace Embankment after a Lada car crashed into the back of the horse-driven carriage in which Viktor Kolodyazhny, the mayor, was taking a sight-seeing ride with his family, Vyacheslav Stepchenko, a St. Petersburg police spokesman told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday.
The small child was seriously injured and taken to the local Mariinsky Hospital where she later died, Stepchenko said.
According NTV channel, German doctors were called in to help but arrived too late. The foreign doctors confirmed that their Russian colleagues “did everything they could, but the situation was extremely serious,” the report said.
The tragedy comes just weeks after Sochi mayor Kolodyazhny celebrated successfully winning the bid to bring the 2014 Winter Olympics to the southern Russian city.
The horses pulling the carriage in the incident were not hurt.
Although there has been much speculation in the media that the main reason behind the incident was that the driver of the car that collided with the carriage was speeding, the police declined to comment Monday because the case is currently under investigation. The car’s driver has been questioned by police.
St. Petersburg-based news service Fontank.ru reported that the car in front of the Lada unpredictably changed lane, citing the Lada driver’s mother. After noticing the carriage, the driver of the Lada tried to brake but did not have enough time to stop his car. According to Fontanka, the girl was not in the carriage but seated with the driver at the time of the accident.
Meanwhile, the road police will carry out a check of St. Petersburg’s rent-a-carriage business for adherence to safety and road rules. Interfax on Monday quoted an unidentified source in the police as saying: “Most probably the carriages will be checked for their technical condition. There also might be some elaboration as to how to regulate the movement of such carriages on the city roads.”
Alexander Ivakhnov, whom Ekho Moskvy radio identified as the director of the company that rented the carriage service to the Sochi mayor on Saturday, said his company Valkit has been closed down because of the incident.
His carriages were stopped and taken away to a police station on Saturday, including one carriage carrying newlyweds, who were forced to leave the carriage so that police could seize the vehicle, he said in an interview on the radio on Monday.
Stepchenko declined to comment on Monday, saying he did not have more information about the case.
“This has nothing to do with reality at the moment because there are no grounds to confiscate this means of transport,” a police source told Interfax the same day when asked by the agency if there is a decision to take away the vehicles.
TITLE: U.S., EU Back Away to Avoid Veto on Kosovo
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS — A UN Security Council resolution on Kosovo’s future was set aside Friday in the face of a possible Russian veto.
U.S. and European Union supporters of the draft opted instead to pursue negotiations through a multinational group outside the council, diplomats said.
Discussions on the province will be handled by the Contact Group on Kosovo — which includes representatives from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Russia — as well as the affected parties, France’s UN ambassador said.
The decision to avoid a vote came after lengthy discussions and various drafts failed to appease Russia, which has backed Serbia in its opposition to Kosovo’s independence. Russia had maintained that the draft was a hidden route to independence.
“We regret ... that it has been impossible to secure such a resolution in the United Nations Security Council,” said France’s Jean Marc de la Sabliere, reading a statement on behalf of the co-sponsors after the council gathering
The statement stressed that it was important to determine the status of the province in the near future.
Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said Friday that his country was opposed to the resolution because of “the principle of territorial integrity.”
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Saakyan Wins Vote
STEPANAKERT, Azerbaijan (Reuters) — Azerbaijan’s breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh republic elected a local security chief as its new leader Friday, but the change was unlikely to bring new policies or unlock a 20-year conflict over the region.
Bako Saakyan, who served in the administration of outgoing separatist President Arkady Gukasyan and was endorsed by his boss to replace him, won with 85 percent in Thursday’s vote, prelinary results showed.
Azerbaijan — which lost a war for control of the mountainous area in the 1990s — called the vote illegal, while the European Union said Thursday that it did not recognize the election as legitimate.
Nagorno-Karabakh, populated mainly by ethnic Armenians, is legally part of mainly Muslim Azerbaijan.
It has declared itself an independent state but has not been recognized by any country. Efforts to negotiate a settlement with Azerbaijan have made no substantial progress.
Russia on Treaty
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Russia wants to start negotiating a new treaty on conventional forces in Europe in the fall, a senior Foreign Ministry department head said Friday, adding a time frame to a previous offer.
“We hope that in the autumn we can begin substantive negotiations with our partners in the CFE, with the United States and NATO, on the modernization of the treaty,” Anton Mazur, head of the ministry’s department for conventional arms control, told Interfax.
President Vladimir Putin announced July 14 that Russia would pull out of the treaty, a landmark pact limiting post-Cold War military strength in Europe.
Putin Pans Changes
MOSCOW (SPT) — President Vladimir Putin has said he opposes changes in the law on the status of the country’s Security Council.
The Security Council’s rights and authority “are defined by the law, and I see no reason to broaden these rights and powers,” Putin said Thursday, Interfax reported.
Putin on Wednesday accepted the resignation of Igor Ivanov as secretary of the Security Council, which wielded formidable clout under Ivanov’s predecessors. It has lost influence as security and defense agencies have gained greater policy-making powers.
Plane Engine Fails
MOSCOW (SPT) — An Atlant-Soyuz passenger jet flying from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport to Montenegro was forced to turn back Saturday after one of its four engines failed.
The aircraft, carrying 276 passengers and 11 crew members, returned and landed safely at Vnukovo at 5:27 p.m., just 23 minutes after taking off, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Lectures, Red-Light District at Nashi Camp
AUTHOR: By Alexander Osipovich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: SELIGER CAMP, Tver Region — One of the most eye-catching displays at this year’s Nashi summer camp shows three opposition politicians dressed as prostitutes.
Activists from the pro-Kremlin youth movement stopped to chuckle at the display, topped with the words “Red-Light District” and featuring larger-than-life images of three scantily clad floozies, last week.
The funny part was that the pictures had been doctored to show the faces of former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, former chess champion Garry Kasparov and writer Eduard Limonov, founder of the banned National Bolshevik Party.
“These are the people who are selling out Russia,” clarified Yelena Yefremova, a Nashi activist who had been assigned as a guide to a reporter and photographer during a daylong tour of the camp, located about 350 kilometers northwest of Moscow.
Nashi’s annual retreat on the shores of Lake Seliger is larger than ever — with 10,000 activists in attendance compared with 5,000 last year and 3,000 two years ago — and the campgrounds are abuzz with activity as Nashi prepares for State Duma elections in December and the presidential vote in March.
But just as the retreat kicked off last Monday, the future of Nashi became uncertain with the announcement that its leader, Vasily Yakemenko, was leaving. Yakemenko told reporters last Tuesday that he would step down after the presidential election to make way for a new leader, who is to be selected in a vote at the end of this week.
“I’m too old to be working in youth politics, to be leading a youth movement,” said Yakemenko, 36. Asked what he planned to do after leaving Nashi, he said cryptically, “Wherever I can serve my country with maximum effectiveness.”
Nashi, which means Ours, was founded in 2005 and immediately made itself felt by organizing a rally of 50,000 students on Leninsky Prospekt to honor the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The organization is unwavering in its support of President Vladimir Putin and frequently condemns fascism and racism. But its definition of “fascist” includes a number of political leaders critical of Putin, including Kasyanov, Kasparov and Limonov — who have led a series of anti-Kremlin street protests as part of the Other Russia coalition — and liberal parties such as Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces.
Earlier this year, Nashi activists mounted a noisy demonstration outside the Estonian Embassy and stormed a news conference being given by Estonian Ambassador Marina Kaljurand with demands that Tallinn apologize for its controversial decision to move a Soviet-era World War II memorial.
Nashi activists were also accused of harassing British Ambassador Anthony Brenton after he met with leaders of The Other Russia last year. Yakemenko said Tuesday that Nashi would not stage any anti-British protests in retaliation for this week’s expulsion of four Russian diplomats from London.
The leaders of Nashi, whose financing is opaque, deny that they receive Kremlin funding. But the organization has been closely linked to Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration.
Many believe that Nashi was set up as a response to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, in which youth-led street protests helped give the presidency to pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko.
Today, even though Putin has approval ratings of around 70 percent — and despite the fact that his opponents in The Other Russia are widely seen as a marginal political force with little chance of winning the election — Nashi activists still express fear that an Orange Revolution-style uprising could happen in Russia.
“One of our main goals is to resist any attempts to conduct an Orange Revolution in Russia,” Dmitry Baranovsky, the coordinator of Nashi’s elections division, said at the Seliger campground.
Baranovsky was standing outside a large tent where several dozen activists were listening to a lecture on exit polls and election procedures. Nashi is planning to enlist 60,000 people to conduct nationwide exit polls during State Duma and presidential elections, Baranovsky said.
Nashi activists believe that Yushchenko was able to come back from his first-round defeat in the Ukrainian presidential election thanks to Western-funded exit polls that showed he was the true victor, rather than pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych.
“I’m sure the West will try to destabilize the elections,” Nikolai Slepnyov, a Nashi activist from Tula, said near his campsite.
As Slepnyov spoke, a large digital clock behind him showed the hours, minutes and seconds left until the presidential election — a project initiated by the Tula delegation to help raise voter awareness.
In a separate project, the Tula delegation brought pryaniki, or gingerbread cakes, branded with the Nashi logo.
Humor is a potent weapon in political activism, said Tamara Pavlova, an activist from Kursk who is the chief playwright in a Nashi-sponsored puppet theater that plans to tour the country during the electoral campaign.
Pavlova showed off her actors — puppets crafted to look like opposition figures, including former presidential candidate Irina Khakamada and self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky — and shared some details about one of her plays.
“The main subject of the play is the internal opposition, as well as Russia’s enemies abroad,” she said, adding that the play had a happy ending, since the foes of Russia would be foiled in the end.
Nashi fosters an entrepreneurial spirit among activists, said Yefremova, the guide. “You present your ideas, and if Vasily Yakemenko sees that it’s a good project, he’ll make sure you get funding,” she said.
Not all the projects on display at Lake Seliger were related to politics. In the tent run by Nashi’s career division, activists filled out forms to apply for internships. Nashi has placed interns in the Duma, ministries and state-owned companies, including 30 at Gazprom, said Artyom Semyonov, coordinator of the division.
Other projects were connected to charity. Signs pointing to a bloodmobile encouraged Nashi activists to donate blood, while one display offered information about the plight of children in orphanages.
Meanwhile, in a project inspired by the national demographic crisis, 30 Nashi couples were to tie the knot in a mass wedding ceremony Wednesday. A special campsite of red tents was set up for the wedding night. In stark contrast to Russian tradition, no alcohol would be allowed, since Nashi activists are forbidden from drinking at Lake Seliger.
The campers must follow a strict regime where everyone rises at 8 a.m. and participates in a morning exercise — running for men, aerobics for women — to the sound of thumping techno music and, at least last Tuesday, to Yakemenko shouting “Go! Go! Go!” through a loudspeaker.
Yakemenko seems to be widely admired by the movement’s activists. The words “Vasya, I love you!” were written with masking tape on the side of one tent.
Now that Yakemenko has announced he is leaving, however, it is unclear what awaits Nashi after it executes its mission in the upcoming elections.
But Yefremova, a two-year Nashi veteran who has earned the title of “commissar,” had a simple answer. “He’s leaving to make way for us,” she said.
TITLE: Bombs That Look Like Balls
AUTHOR: By Roman Kozhevnikov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KHOST, Tajikistan — Every spring, meltwater dislodges bomblets in the mountains and sends them down steep gullies toward inhabited areas.
That is how Salim Saimuddinov, 10, who was born after Tajikistan’s 1992-97 civil war ended, became one of its victims.
A green-eyed boy wearing ripped tracksuit bottoms and an old denim jacket, he lives in a small village in the Pamir Mountains of eastern Tajikistan.
Two years ago, he went out with his brother Narzikul to collect firewood, a necessity in a village where the electricity rarely works. It was Narzikul who spotted the bomblet and, thinking it was a ball, picked it up and threw it.
“Suddenly something exploded. My leg and face were covered in blood,” Salim said, looking frightened as he recalled the ordeal. “My brother brought me home and then we went to the hospital.”
Shrapnel hit his right eye while his leg was pummeled by 160 small metal balls from the unexploded, Russian-made ShOAB-0.5 bomblet, part of what is known as the RBK series of anti-personnel cluster bombs.
These bombs have been found in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Uganda and are still used by the military in countries including Cuba, India, Syria and Ukraine, according to data compiled by Human Rights Watch.
Anti-personnel mine use may have declined after high-profile campaigns, but the process of clearing them is costly, and needs to go on for years after the guns fall silent.
“I was very scared,” Salim said as his eyes filled with tears. “I do not want this to happen to me or anybody else again.”
Tajikistan’s civil war, which pitched a Moscow-backed secular government against a coalition of Islamists and others, killed 150,000 people. The country has been gradually recovering ever since.
The United Nations Development Program’s Tajikistan Mine Action Center says 10,000 mines and unexploded ordnance are scattered over 25 million square meters of Tajikistan, a country that is 90 percent mountains.
Cluster bombs explode to scatter bomblets over a wide area, each one effectively becoming a land mine that will often remain deadly for decades.
A peculiarity of the ShOAB bomblets that wounded Salim is that the devices, 6 centimeters in diameter, often roll downhill, and, like other cluster bombs, they often arouse the curiosity of children.
“We need more deminers, we need more detectors,” said Andy Smith, chief technical adviser of the Tajikistan mine center. “We do not have enough funding. The bombs will be near the land and the houses soon.”
There have been 300 confirmed deaths and about the same number of injuries recorded from mines in Tajikistan since 1992, many of them women and children, and there are presumed to be many more unreported deaths and maimings.
Two more people join the list of casualties every month, and there has been no downward trend.
Smith said funds for land mine clearance often flow to hot spots like neighboring Afghanistan, while more peaceful countries like Tajikistan are often overlooked.
“It will take a hundred years if this level of financing remains,” he said.
Salim, whose local school teaches only Tajik and math, said his wounds made him want to learn medicine.
“I would like to become a doctor who treats eyes, to help others and to cure my own eye,” Salim said.
TITLE: Using Tourists to Ward Off the Miner
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Environmentalists and local entrepreneurs have called for an ecological resort to be founded in Karelia to protect Lake Ladoga from the effects of quarrying.
They claim the resort would be a profitable venture attracting both Russian and foreign tourists, supplying taxes to the regional budget and providing local jobs.
Although in recent times the lake’s unique rocky islands, or skerries, have mainly suffered from the occasional forest fire, extensive areas were recently leased to a forestry company that plans to develop several dozen quarries in proximity to the lake.
“If intensive industrial development of these territories continues, the local population will lose the islands’ unique recreational potential,” said Maria Favorskaya of SPOK, a Karelian environmental organization.
Last year, Komileszagotprom purchased for 25-year lease over 27,000 hectares in Pitkaranta district and over 34,000 hectares in Sortavala district.
At the moment the company is awaiting standards related to the new Forestry Code, which came into force on Jan. 1, 2007, before proceeding with projects.
The new laws reduced the area protected around lake Ladoga from a band of one kilometer to just 200 meters and classified mining as an acceptable way of exploiting forestry resources. About 40 quarries will be launched in Lahdenpohsky district in proximity to Ladoga, environmentalists said.
“Have you seen the quarry in Kuznechnoe? It’s like a moon landscape. It’s hard to breathe because of the amount of dust. It’s dead soil. The area around Vuoksa river is already unsuitable for recreation. The same thing could happen soon to Ladoga,” said Alexei Travin, coordinator of Zelenaya Volna ecological organization.
The new resort is not only an environmental initiative. Activists claim they could pay back the investment by charging entrance fees of about 100 rubles per person. They could also offer organized tours and sporting activities.
“The ecological resort should be oriented towards sports tourism. Several experienced guides should be employed to accompany tour groups during their stay in the resort,” said Yekaterina Kudashkina, vice-president of Excurs, a regional multi-sport organization that offers walking tours, mountain hiking and river crossing.
While local forestry and quarrying companies are reluctant to employ locals because of concerns over drunkenness, the resort will offer job opportunities to the people of Karelia and give an incentive to develop the area’s service industry, Kudashkina added. The regional authorities, however, are not in favor of the idea. In 1999, a similar project was proposed by TACIS. It required annual investment of three million to five million rubles over the first five years to operate the resort. However, the Karelian government did not approve the project and TACIS lost 3.5 billion euros in funding.
A slow-down in the local economy means the regional authorities are more inclined to focus on the economic activities of forestry and mining. According to the Karelian government’s web site, last year the region’s gross domestic product increased by only 2.5 percent, while industrial growth was three percent compared to 18.7 percent in 2005.
Karelia’s drive for industrial development has already caused ecological problems in the neighboring districts of the Leningrad Oblast. Mass protests caused the Karelian government to ban quarrying next to Yastrebonoye lake.
“According to the Administrative Code, a person or company can be charged with penalties related to the environmental damage they cause.
However the cost of lost forest is nothing compared to the cost of lost recreational territory,” said Alexander Karpov of Eco research center.
“Businesses in Russia still prefer to make profits in the short-term, fearing a change in the economic situation,” Karpov said.
However a number of entrepreneurs and environmentalists are ready to rent the land in Karelia, invest into infrastructure and keep the forest in a good condition. Eco-tourism could be very popular among Finns and Russians, they insist. Nevertheless, foreigners are prevented from coming to Ladoga by a lack of infrastructure and organized tours.
TITLE: Russia’s Antitrust Body Probes for Collusion
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s antitrust body is probing 51 banks and 70 insurers on suspicion of collusion as the government aims to make the consumer-loan market more transparent.
Some of Russia’s 10 biggest banks are among those under investigation for agreeing with insurers on insurance rates offered to consumers, Andrei Kashevarov, the deputy head of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, told reporters on the sidelines of a July 20 banking conference. The banks may face penalties under the administrative code, he said, without elaborating.
The government is cracking down on banks’ requiring consumers to pay higher rates for purchasing insurance along with products such as mortgages and car loans. The central bank, which sees consumer lending rising 65 percent this year, said from July 1 lenders must include all mandatory charges when calculating the effective annual percentage rate for loans and disclose it to consumers.
The banking industry is booming as wages continue to increase in the ninth straight year of economic growth, reaching a monthly average of 13,810 rubles ($543.50) in June. Retail sales rose an annual 14.7 percent last month, when disposable income increased 7.9 percent, according to the Federal Statistics Service.
The economy expanded 6.7 percent last year when total insurance premiums reached 611 billion rubles, triple the volume of premiums in 2000, according to the Finance Ministry.
Russia’s economy will probably expand 7 percent this year, government officials have said.
TITLE: EU Scraps Russian Urea Fertilizer Tariff
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Stearns
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: BRUSSELS — The European Union removed a tariff on a fertilizer from Russia called urea, ending more than a decade of protection for producers in the EU such as Grande Paroisse SA and Yara International ASA.
The EU said Russian urea exporters including EuroChem and Nevinnomyssky Azot are no longer a threat because they sell the farm product “significantly above’’ a minimum price on which the duty is based. The EU introduced the levy, the difference between the price floor of 115 euros ($159) a metric ton and the import price when this is lower, in 1995 to punish the Russian industry for selling in Europe below domestic prices or below the production cost, a practice known as dumping.
“There is no reason why the Russian exporting producers would apply lower prices if the existing measures were repealed, considering they have managed to sustain much higher prices,’’ the EU said in a decision Monday in Brussels. Russian companies have 16 percent of the EU’s 1.5 billion-euro urea market and the bloc’s producers, who also face competition from nations such as Croatia and Egypt, have at least 34 percent, the EU said.
The 27-nation bloc’s removal of the antidumping duty marks a defeat for the European Fertilizer Manufacturers Association, which wanted the trade protection prolonged for five years. Saying the expiration of the measure would lead to price-undercutting by Russian exporters, the association also sought to turn the duty into a fixed levy in euros per ton.
Grande Paroisse of France and Yara, an Oslo-based producer with operations in the EU, benefit from tariffs on other types of Russian fertilizer including ammonium nitrate. EU manufacturers of urea also include Germany’s SKW Stickstoffwerke Piesteritz GmbH, Spain’s Fertiberia SA, Hungary’s Nitrogenmuvek Zrt. and the Czech Republic’s Chemopetrol AS.
In addition to being a fertilizer, urea can be used in agriculture as an animal-feed additive. The financial situation of EU urea producers “overwhelmingly improved’’ between 2002 and 2006 compared with the late 1990s. Domestic producers have “not suffered any injury’’ from Russian exports, which continued to be dumped while being sold above the price floor, the EU said.
TITLE: Gazprom Lifts Notes Ceiling Up to $30Bln
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom has doubled the maximum ceiling for borrowings under its loan participation notes program to $30 billion as it continues buying new assets.
Gazprom, one of the country’s heavily indebted firms, said in its bond prospectus, obtained Friday, that its debt under the LPN program would at no time exceed $30 billion.
The previous prospectus, prepared for a bond issue in May, said the limit was $15 billion.
The new prospectus was issued for investors ahead of Gazprom’s road show of a benchmark dollar-denominated bond, which is due to start in the United States on Friday.
“There have been rumors the bond could be postponed, but at the moment the signals are that it is going ahead,” a banking source in Moscow said.
Many bond issues have been postponed in recent weeks due to market volatility, including the one planned by heavily indebted state oil major Rosneft, which this week scrapped a multibillion-dollar issue just after finishing a roadshow.
Sources have said Gazprom will stick to the bond plan despite global credit markets’ turmoil over worries about U.S. subprime mortgages and their potential impact on the wider economy.
The outlook for the bond was also soured by a diplomatic dispute between Moscow and London although Russian officials have said it will have no impact on the financial sector.
Gazprom’s debt stood at $31 billion as of the end of last year, but it continued expensive acquisitions throughout this year, including spending $7.45 billion on buying half of the Sakhalin-2 project from Shell.
It also spent over $2 billion buying control of Moscow city power utility Mosenergo as well as $625 million on a share in Belarussian pipelines.
In 2006, Gazprom spent 38.7 billion rubles ($1.52 billion) on debt-servicing interest, up from 30.95 billion in 2005 and 19.46 billion in 2004.
Gazprom will likely sell $1 billion to $2 billion of dollar-denominated eurobonds in the week beginning July 30, a person familiar with the offering said.
The person declined to be identified because terms are not set. Gazprom hired ABN Amro Holding and Morgan Stanley to manage the sale, which they began marketing Friday.
Gazprom is rated A3, or the seventh level of investment grade, by Moody’s Investors Service and BBB, or two rungs lower, by Standard & Poor’s.
The gas monopoly last sold floating-rate notes in dollars March 26, when it issued $700 million of three-year debt that floats at 90 basis points more than the three-month London interbank offered rate, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Three-month Libor, a borrowing benchmark, is currently 5.36 percent. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.
Reuters, Bloomberg
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Uralsib Loans
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Uralsib bank doubled the volume of car credit issued in the first half of 2007 compared to the same period last year, the bank said Friday in a statement.
By July 1 this year Uralsib had issued car credit amounting to $235 million total value. The total volume of car loans increased up to $509 million.
Consumer loans accounted for $241 million in the first half of this yea,r increasing the total volume of consumer loans to $685 million. Uralsib’s credit portfolio of individual borrowers accounts for over $823 million.
Telecom Profits
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Northwest Telecom plans to double its net profit this year, Interfax reported Friday.
The company plans to earn 2.5 billion rubles this year, according to IFRS. Last year Northwest Telecom net profit was reported at 1.27 billion rubles. According to Russian accounting standards, net profit will increase to 10.8 billion rubles.
Sales Spin
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Karusel retail chain increased net sales by 180 percent in the first half of 2007 up to $343.2 million, Interfax reported Friday.
Karusel opened three supermarkets this year — in St. Petersburg, the Moscow Oblast and Volgograd. At the moment the company operates 22 stores in Russia of 234,900 square meters total area.
Game Investment
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Ritzio Entertainment Group, a Russian gaming company, plans to spend as much as $8 billion on property development and expansion into retailing, Kommersant reported Monday, citing majority owner Oleg Boiko.
Boiko’s Finstar Properties unit plans to build about 2 million square meters (21.5 million square feet) of trading space on about 100 land plots in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan in five years, the newspaper said, citing Sergei Khramov, the unit’s head of development. Finstar now has 20 plots and will begin construction this year, he said.
Aeroflot Purchase
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Aeroflot, eastern Europe’s largest airline, said its board approved buying Airbus SAS A350 XWBs and Boeing Co. 787 Dreamliner jets to help the carrier renew its long-haul fleet in the next decade.
Aeroflot’s board agreed to purchase 22 A350s and 22 Boeing 787s, the Moscow-based airline said Monday in an e-mailed statement. The company will hold an extraordinary shareholder meeting Sept. 4 to seek final approval for the deals, valued at more than $7 billion at list prices.
Aeroflot said June 20 it will receive the 270- to 350-seat A350s from Toulouse, France-based Airbus between 2014 and 2017.
The carrier agreed June 9 to buy the 787s from Chicago-based Boeing.
Steel Jump
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s use of steel products surged in the first six months of 2007, Interfax reported Monday.
Consumption of rolled products increased almost 16 percent to 17.6 million tons from a year earlier, the Moscow-based news service said, citing Alexei Pinchuk, head of metallurgy and resource-supply policy at the Industry and Energy Ministry.
Imports of rolled products rose by more than 50 percent, Interfax said.
Consumption of steel pipes grew about 33 percent to 4.6 million tons, according to the report.
Mosenergo Receipts
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Mosenergo, the main power utility for Moscow, may sell the government’s 19.1 percent in the company by selling global depositary receipts in London, RBK Daily reported Monday.
The company is seeking to offer the shares in London to get a higher price for them, the newspaper said, citing two unidentified people in Russia’s electricity utility, Unified Energy System.
Deutsche Billions
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Deutsche Bank AG agreed to lend Russian billionaire Shalva Chigirinsky’s STT Group 12 billion rubles ($472 million) to refinance debt and develop new real-estate projects.
The first part of the loan, amounting to 3 billion rubles already provided to STT Group, will be used for refinancing the redevelopment of the Passazh Shopping Center on Nevsky Prospekt in central St. Petersburg, Deutsche Bank said Sunday in an e-mailed statement. The developer will also work with the bank on future projects, according to the statement.
The Moscow-based developer is considering an initial public offering and the German bank said in the statement that STT Group’s “strategic partnership with Deutsche Bank will becontinued on this front as well.’’
Reserved Inflation
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Peter Hambro Mining Plc, Trans-Siberian Gold Ltd. and Polyus Gold didn’t inflate their reserve levels in statements to investors, a Russian commission probing the possible exaggeration of deposits said.
The commission said in a report released Monday that the information provided by the three companies “does not give grounds for suggesting that inflated reserves information was distributed on the stock market.’’
The Natural Resources Ministry’s commission completed an investigation into the reserves statements of some publicly traded firms active in Russia, including the three gold miners.
$100 Oil
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The $100-a-barrel oil that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said would prevail by 2009 may be only a few months away.
Jeffrey Currie, a London-based commodity analyst at the world’s biggest securities firm, says $95 crude is likely this year unless OPEC unexpectedly increases production, and declining inventories are raising the chances for $100 oil. Jeff Rubin at CIBC World Markets predicts $100 a barrel as soon as next year.
“We’re only a headline of significance away from $100 oil,’’ said John Kilduff, an analyst in the New York office of futures broker Man Financial Inc. “The unrelenting pressure of increased demand has left the market a coiled spring.’’ New disruptions of Nigerian or Iraqi supplies, or any military strike against Iran, might trigger the rise, Kilduff said in a July 20 interview.
Polished Investment
WARSAW (Bloomberg) — Barlinek SA, a Polish flooring maker, will spend more than 55 million euros ($76 million) to build a plant in Russia, Polish daily newspaper Parkiet reported Monday.
The construction of the new flooring factory in Cherepovets, 500 kilometers (371 miles) north of Moscow, may start at the end of this year and will take 12 months, the newspaper said, without citing anyone.
TITLE: Power Machines Sale Ends
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Turbine maker Power Machines will close the books for its secondary share offering for Russian and foreign investors Wednesday, a source close to the placement said.
“The marketing takes place in Moscow and abroad. It is a proper placement,” the source said Friday.
Sources said earlier that the firm wanted to raise $400 million to $450 million in two tranches.
“The current placement should cover the firm’s investment needs ... It will be less than $450 million, although I can’t really say whether a second tranche will be placed,” the source said.
Germany’s Siemens holds 25 percent plus one share in Power Machines and has sought to gain control of the firm, but authorities blocked the deal, citing national security reasons.
Unified Energy System also holds 25 percent in Power Machines, which has a market value of $1.3 billion. Vladimir Potanin’s Interros Holding has entrusted its 30 percent stake in Power Machines to UES.
On Friday, the source said UES, Interros and Siemens had yet to exercise their pre-emptive right to buy shares from the additional issue.
Russian media have said UES and Interros could divest their stakes — which they consider noncore assets — simultaneously to earn a premium on the sale of a controlling stake.
TITLE: De Beers Snubs Precious Alrosa
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Diamond giant De Beers is likely to snub an opportunity to market more gems from Alrosa as it distances itself from its former role as cartel operator to focus on high-margin business.
De Beers’ move to a modern business model will, analysts say, probably see it shrug off a European court decision last week that lifted curbs on De Beers buying diamonds from Alrosa, the world’s second-largest producer.
“De Beers is not interested any more in getting maximum carats; De Beers is not interested in dealing with goods on a marginal basis,” diamond consultant Chaim Even-Zohar said by telephone from Israel. “I don’t think that De Beers is going to buy from Alrosa. The return of being a dealer is not that big.”
De Beers declined to comment on the European court decision, saying it needed time to study the judgment.
On Wednesday, the court struck down a decision by the European Commission designed to stop De Beers buying rough diamonds from Alrosa by 2009.
De Beers’ share of the rough diamond market has slipped from 80 percent over a decade ago to just over 50 percent, and that is due to drop further as it winds down its trading relationship with Alrosa.
Its trade with Alrosa is due to fall by $100 million to $500 million this year and to $400 million in 2008.
De Beers’ margin on handling Russian diamonds was about 5 percent, less than half the level for selling its own mined output, a mining analyst in Johannesburg said.
A spokesman for Alrosa said De Beers would have to decide whether it was interested in increasing purchases from Russia, but the state company was focusing on domestic sales.
“The strategy of the company’s development is to sell the main part of rough [diamonds] for all clients here in Moscow,” Andrei Polyakov said by e-mail.
TITLE: Mitsui To Route For Siberia
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TOKYO — Japan’s Mitsui is in talks with Russian Railways to launch a trans-Siberian freight service for Japanese car and electronics makers.
Mitsui said Friday that it and Russkaya Troika aimed to sign a contract deal by the end of August and start service in September.
Demand for a regular and punctual railway cargo service is growing as many Japanese auto and machinery makers, such as Toyota and Matsushita Electric Industrial, are starting up operations in European Russia.
Mitsui aims to run container services for these companies connecting the eastern city of Vladivostok and Moscow in 25 days. At present it takes 30 to 40 days to reach St. Petersburg via sea.
Mitsui said it was also looking into services connecting Shanghai with European Russia for Japanese firms. Mitsui already operates a network of warehouses in Moscow and invests in an air cargo service firm working in Russia.
The tie-up could provide many other opportunities for Mitsui, which is strengthening its railway facilities in Europe.
Meanwhile, Japanese rail car and system makers like Hitachi, Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric have approached Japanese and Russian government officials, expressing interest in a high-speed Trans-Siberian Railway, a government official said.
Japanese train makers, which compete against Siemens, are seeking to market their rail cars that run in below-freezing temperatures.
TITLE: Chevron’s CPC Hit With New Back Tax Claim
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Chevron-led Caspian Pipeline Consortium has been hit with fresh back taxes as its struggle with Moscow over the fate of the country’s only private oil link shows no signs of easing.
The consortium plans to mount a legal challenge to claims that it failed to pay $290 million in taxes for 2004 to 2005, CPC spokeswoman Olesiya Kuznetsova said Friday. The Federal Tax Service levied the taxes July 13.
Analysts warned that the new taxes, fresh on the back of claims that the CPC also underpaid taxes for 2002 to 2003, were a means of applying pressure on the consortium as it battles against the Kremlin’s desire for increased control.
The 1,510-kilometer pipeline, which connects oil fields in Kazakhstan to the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, is the only oil export link that falls outside the monopoly held by state-controlled Transneft.
“This type of project is viewed very differently today,” said Tanya Costello, an analyst at Eurasia Group. “Russia and Transneft seem to be pushing for a high level of control over the project,” she said.
Yukos was felled by back tax charges and its key assets passed into the hands of state-controlled Rosneft. President Vladimir Putin has also cracked down on foreign oil companies, spearheading the effort to dilute the share of Shell and BP in two of the country’s biggest oil and gas projects.
With a 15 percent stake in CPC, U.S. oil major Chevron is the largest of eight private companies involved in the venture. The Russian and Kazakh governments have the largest shares, with 24 percent and 19 percent, respectively. Russia passed its shares to state pipeline monopoly Transneft last month. Other shareholders include BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, LUKoil and Rosneft.
Moscow has been seeking to garner greater control over the project and its revenues, facing harsh opposition from the other shareholders, analysts say.
It has opposed plans to double the pipeline’s capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day, a move that would greatly increase the amount of oil in direct competition with Russian products for passage through the already-crowded Turkish straits.
Kuznetsova said the shareholders did not discuss the issue at a Friday meeting. “All they discussed was eurobonds,” she said, adding that the members decided to set up a working group to consider issuing eurobonds, to be led by Transneft.
TITLE: Transneft Pipeline Remains Closed
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Transneft vice president Sergei Grigoryev said Friday that an oil pipeline to Lithuania remained closed, referring to a news report that the damaged link was ready to start pumping crude again.
“This doesn’t affect Transneft,” Grigoryev said by telephone. The damage on the branch of the Druzhba trunk line took place on Russian soil, not in Belarus, he said.
Interfax reported Thursday from Minsk that the transit pipeline to Lithuania’s Mazeikiu refinery from Russia was ready to start pumping. The refinery has been without Russian crude from the pipeline, which runs through Belarus, for almost a year.
Russia closed the Druzhba line last July saying it needed repairs. Grigoryev said Friday the line was “in the same condition as before.”
Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus has called the Druzhba shut-off “political.”
Last year bankrupt oil firm Yukos sold its controlling stake in the refinery to Poland’s PKN Orlen, beating out LUKoil and TNK-BP.
TITLE: RusAl Gets Armenia’s Foil Mill Rolling
AUTHOR: By Robin Paxton
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: YEREVAN, Armenia — The aluminum foil plant on the upper slopes of Armenia’s capital accounts for around 40 percent of the country’s annual trade.
Only seven years ago, it was on the brink of ruin.
“The factory was practically dead,” admits Georgy Avetikyan, general director of the Armenal plant since its rebirth in 2000.
“But look around at the equipment we have now,” he says, surveying a factory floor filled with German-built mills squeezing thin layers of foil from metal shipped in from Russia.
Armenal is owned by United Company RusAl, the aluminum giant controlled by billionaire Oleg Deripaska. After a $70 million revamp completed last year, it can produce 25,000 tons of aluminum foil — 12 percent of the total in the former Soviet Union.
About half of the foil, used mainly to package food, drinks and cigarettes, is exported to the European Union, 35 percent to North America and 15 percent to the Middle East.
“Not a single ton leaves the factory without an order from a client,” said Alexander Burdin, director of RusAl’s packaging division, which supplies aluminum foil to companies such as Kraft Foods and Nestle.
Aluminum smelting in Yerevan dates back to the 1950s, when the Kanaker smelter was among the Soviet Union’s leading plants. But when the growing city encroached on a plant that was built on its outskirts, pollution became a problem.
The smelter was eventually closed, leaving the foil mill on the same site bereft of raw materials. Financial meltdown followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the plant effectively stopped.
“To produce foil, you need aluminum sheet — and we didn’t have any,” said Avetikyan. “SibAl came in with their business plan and got approval. There were several companies competing.”
SibAl, or Siberian Aluminum, was Deripaska’s aluminum company at the time. Deripaska later extended his reach to form a joint venture with the Armenian government in 2000. Over time, RusAl increased its ownership of the plant and by 2003 controlled it outright. It is one of three foil plants owned by the company, which is preparing a share float in London that bankers say could raise about $8 billion.
The revival of Armenal mirrors consistent economic growth in the country. Armenian gross domestic product is set to rise by about 10 percent in 2007, the fifth successive year of double-digit growth, and the country claims the lowest inflation of any former Soviet state over the past seven years. Armenal employs over 800 people who earn an average monthly wage of about $300, 50 percent more than the national average, says the company’s press secretary, Alexander Melkumyan.
A further expansion could follow.
Burdin says the plant, part of a packaging division that earned RusAl $240 million in revenues last year, has enough orders to add 60 percent to existing capacity.
TITLE: Indian Imports
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government has resumed issuing permits for Indian rice imports banned from May 1 due to discovery of a banned pesticide in shipments, the Federal Service for Veterinarian and Vegetation Sanitary Supervision said Friday.
The service said in a statement that all shipments of rice from India would be accepted after Friday if accompanied by certificates confirming their safety. This was agreed on at talks with Indian authorities held earlier this month.
India is one of the country’s main suppliers of rice.
Moscow used to import 400,000 to 500,000 tons of rice per year until it imposed a tariff of 70 euros ($97) per ton in April 2005. Imports shrank to 300,000 to 350,000 tons after that, analysts have said.
TITLE: Poaching Feeds and Bleeds Kamchatka
AUTHOR: By Olesya Dmitracova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: UST-BOLSHERETSK, Kamchatka Region — For a rare visitor to the volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula in the Far East, no other custom reveals more about the local economy, lifestyle and environment than salmon poaching.
Widespread illegal fishing in Kamchatka, home to a quarter of all Pacific wild salmon, has exploded in one of the world’s last great wildernesses.
“Everybody poaches, everybody is a criminal,” said Sergei, a self-confessed poacher who declined to give his last name, in the drab town of Ust-Bolsheretsk near Kamchatka’s western coast.
“There are no jobs,” he said, speaking reluctantly from the doorway of his riverside cabin.
His neighbor, Igor, agreed: “If you don’t catch any fish, you go hungry.”
Fishing industry experts estimate that more than 100,000 tons of salmon is poached in Kamchatka every year, and much is fished only for its red caviar.
Poaching is one of the biggest threats facing Kamchatka salmon, with two kinds of the fish already included in Russia’s Red Book of species at risk.
Poaching is as central to the economy of this region as fishing is to its culture.
“As soon as we could walk, we started going to the river. Women and children go fishing too,” Igor said.
While some people fish to eke out a living, for many others poaching has become a sophisticated and lucrative business involving modern boats, costly helicopter rides to rivers and well-placed connections among local authorities.
“Everybody is in it,” said Valery Vorobyov, who heads one of Kamchatka’s largest fishing firms.
Rampant corruption in Kamchatka’s fishing trade, where cash can redeem any crime, reflects a post-Soviet decline in the peninsula’s legal controls and policing.
By moving their precious load from one ship to the next, poachers take salmon, crab and other kinds of fish to Japan and further, evading maritime border patrols.
“Eighty percent of what’s produced in Kamchatka and taken out of Kamchatka is fish,” Vorobyov said aboard his fishing vessel in the enormous but crumbling port of Kamchatka’s capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
Illegal fishing is also a result of a depressed economy on Kamchatka, a militarized area with few developed industries that is heavily reliant on shipments from the mainland. Its secluded rivers and coastline have long been protected from development.
“Poaching today is a social evil. We need to eliminate the reason for poaching as it is a consequence of what happens here,” said Alexander Krengel, head of the fishing department in the regional administration.
The poaching of Pacific wild salmon on Kamchatka, where all of the six kinds of salmon survive, threatens to damage the peninsula’s unique environment.
This land, twice the size of Britain, is home to shimmering hot springs, noisy geysers and 29 active volcanoes as well as rare Steller’s sea eagles, puffins and 12,000 brown bears.
“Birds and bears eat salmon, while salmon live only where the natural conditions are just right,” says Gennady Inozemtsev, Russia program manager at the international Wild Salmon Center. “It’s all part of one natural chain.”
In this way, he adds, the salmon population reflects the state of the wider environment.
Local residents say bears have started attacking people, partly due to a lack of fish in some years, and the animals now come closer to villages and towns to rummage through heaps of garbage in search of food.
Rotting fish waste dumped by careless poachers poisons streams and rivers. The stench wafts through local settlements.
As reserves of wild salmon dwindle, fish lovers rely increasingly on farmed salmon.
Out of 2.5 million tons of salmon produced every year across the globe, about 500,000 tons is wild salmon that is prized by fish eaters.
“Salmon is the economic and social core of Kamchatka — it is its soul,” said Margarita Kulakova of the Environmental Education Center in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
TITLE: Gold Miners To Dig Deeper
AUTHOR: By Robin Paxton
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SEVERO-YENISEISKY, Krasnoyarsk Region — Cutting the ribbon at Russia’s largest gold mill this week, Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Khloponin forecast a huge increase in production by the time gold medals are handed out at the 2014 Winter Olympics.
The country’s miners are investing billions of dollars to turn reserves second only to South Africa’s into gold. If its top three miners fulfill their promises, output will more than triple by 2015, a year after the country hosts the games.
But investors, awaiting evidence that these long-term plans will bear fruit, have become more conservative as gold prices draw breath after rising over 50 percent in the last two years.
Polyus Gold, which produced 23 percent of the country’s gold last year, built the new mill at its Olimpiada mine from scratch — an achievement that CEO Pavel Skitovich believes bodes well for future projects. “The important thing is proving to the market that we can build plants, and will continue to do so to keep on target,” Skitovich said after the opening ceremony.
Polyus plans to more than triple output to 3.9 million ounces by 2015 by developing several large fields in remote regions. Yet its London-traded stock is down 13 percent this year.
“This is the Polyus story: great reserves, but issues with execution. If people believed all the reserves will be taken out of the ground, the valuation would be higher,” said Vladimir Zhukov, senior metals and mining analyst at Alfa Bank.
Second-ranked Peter Hambro Mining has the opposite problem, Zhukov said — a strong track record of production but less certainty about conversion of its resources into reserves.
Olimpiada is the country’s largest gold mine, contributing 16 percent of national output last year. Three times per week, rock is blasted from the pit face and scooped into trucks with wheels that dwarf their drivers. A new lighting system guides excavators around the pit after dark.
“We’ve been through a difficult period. Now, I think the mining sector in Russia is getting better,” Vladimir Sushkevich, who heads the technical department at Olimpiada, said at the base of the 400-meter-deep pit.
The country’s gold output has declined in the last two years to sixth place in the world rankings.
In the short term, output will fall further as open-pit alluvial deposits — where the metal is found close to the surface — are depleted. Miners are going to have dig deeper to find the gold on which their growth forecasts are based.
The Russian Gold Industrialists’ Union forecasts output will drop by 2 percent to 4 percent in 2007 from 164.32 tons (5.28 million ounces) last year.
TITLE: Mining for Gold Amid Volcanic Wilds in Far East
AUTHOR: By Olesya Dmitracova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY — Gold miners on the Kamchatka Peninsula contend with volcanic eruptions, floods and poor infrastructure, but high metal prices mean the hard work pays off.
Unearthing the precious metal could also ease economic hardship in a remote region no longer propped up by Moscow, generating jobs and millions of tax dollars for the area.
“No doubt, the rise in gold and nickel prices is one of the reasons we can attract investment,” says Viktor Lopatin, deputy head of the Kamchatka division of the state mining licensing agency.
But the region’s remote location brings specific challenges.
“The infrastructure in Kamchatka makes it very difficult to mine. The main kind of transport is air transport — planes and helicopters — and the costs are very high,” Lopatin said.
There are very few roads on the peninsula, which is home to fewer than 400,000 people.
Up to 2,500 people work in the exploration and mining of Kamchatka’s mineral wealth. Platinum, copper, gold and nickel are extracted from its fiery earth. The region’s only active gold mine, Oginskaya, employs 554 people. Numbers would swell if more mines were started, Lopatin says, adding that employing one new miner creates six or seven jobs for builders, drivers and service staff.
Gold has risen more than 50 percent in value in the last two years, hitting a 26-year peak last year and enticing miners to develop deposits across the world that would previously have been deemed uneconomic.
Kamchatka has about 200 tons of gold in proved and probable reserves, and Lopatin says there could potentially be three times as much in the ground. Only a tiny fraction is being extracted.
Kamchatka produced 1.2 tons of gold last year, 0.7 percent of the country’s total.
This year, output is expected to rise to 2.5 tons as the operator, Kamgold — run by Koryakgeoldobycha, part of UralPlatinum Group — improves efficiency.
Lopatin estimates mining firms would potentially pay 120 million rubles ($4.64 million) in taxes per ton of gold, with 60 percent of that sum going into the regional budget.
Kamchatka’s unique environment can be a curse when it comes to the nascent gold sector. The peninsula has as many as 29 active volcanoes — their eruptions and frequent earthquakes can destroy roads and airport runways.
In warm months, it is forbidden to cross most rivers, which are important spawning areas for the region’s most profitable resource, fish. Miners must wait for winter and stop working again when the ice melts in spring.
In the winter, miners often have to pave trails through 2 to 3 meters of snow. When this melts in spring, it floods the few existing roads. Kamgold deputy director Valery Grigorenko agrees that gold mining in Kamchatka is difficult: “But where can you have it easier? Nowhere.” He adds that if all the correct procedures and techniques are observed, the difficulties can be overcome and harm to the environment avoided.
Environmentalists are less convinced.
“Gold mining is a way of making quick money,” said the World Wildlife Fund’s Kamchatka director, Laura Williams.
“It would jeopardize salmon-spawning areas and areas where eco-tourism could be promoted.”
TITLE: The Order And State Of Success
AUTHOR: By Anna Shcherbakova
TEXT: Admiralteysky Verf, the state owned shipyard, has seen its market share fall by half over the last year from 20 to 10 percent, according to research done by City Hall’s Committee for Economic Development, Industrial policy and Trade, published earlier this month. At the same time the share of private yard Severnaya Verf has risen from 15 to 39 percent, making it the new market leader.
Over 40 percent of Russia’s shipbuilding industry is located in St. Petersburg, with revenue estimated at 30 billion rubles (approximately $1.2 billion) a year. Admiralteysky’s production is mainly focused on diesel submarines, but last year it began building oil tankers too. Severnaya Verf produces corvettes and destroyers. Obviously there is no direct competition between the two enterprises.
It’s a bit strange to analyze a specialist market such as shipbuilding, especially the construction of military ships, which is what both enterprises specialize in. Shipbuilding cannot be compared to brewing or other consumer industries. It does not need wide promotion. There are a limited number of offers and a limited number of companies that can then satisfy that demand. New contracts are not necessarily given out according to market rules. Subjective choice camouflaged as state interest is flourishing. Companies do not deal with consumers but rather with state officials — in this case marketing becomes ‘otkating,’ from the Russian word ‘otkat,’ which means paying back part of a contract’s price to the person who had chosen that particular contractor. I don’t want to start counting all the money that’s found its way into the pockets of Chinese or Indian admirals who order ships and submarines from St. Petersburg’s shipyards but it is clear that here both state-owned Admiralteysky and private Severnaya Verf have similar possibilities. Their lobbying power in Russian circles of power is about equal.
Severnaya Verf, owned by Mezhprombank’s OPK holding company, is more efficient than Admiralteysky. With assets of 87 billion rubles (about $3.4 billion) Mezhprombank is the 22nd largest Russian bank. But of course the Russian state is much wealthier than any bank. So while there is no need for Admiralteysky to cut costs and care about efficiency, OPK, which also has a stake in another shipbuilder, Baltiysky Zavod, keeps looking to develop further.
This year it announced an ambitious project to move its factory to Severnaya Verf in order to extend its capacity and find synergy between the two companies. The project is worth $500 million and will take eight years to complete. It is an amazing amount of money for St. Petersburg and seems well worth it, given that the plot of land now occupied by Baltiysky Zavod will be used for developments with margins much higher than in shipbuilding. This is yet more confirmation that private companies are more flexible and astute than state-owned ones.
On the other hand, Admiralteysky’s poor results could be anomalous. Shipbuilding has longer production cycles than brewing for example. Last year Severnaya Verf completed a destroyer for China worth $300 million — and maybe that explains its relative success.
Anna Shcherbakova is St. Petersburg bureau chief of business daily Vedomosti.
TITLE: Corporate Governance with Shame
AUTHOR: By Alexander Dyck, Natalya Volchkova and Luigi Zingales
TEXT: The media can force a company to address grievances with corporate governance by raising managers’ concerns about their reputation. It is beneficial to managers when their company has a reputation of acting in the best interests of its shareholders. The same is also true for the regulators, who are more likely to enforce corporate governance rules when they know a large audience is watching.
Reputation is an effective constraint, however, only when there is an informed target audience, such as investors, shareholders, government regulators and the mass media. Moreover, the media often is not interested in collecting information about the behavior of managers when it is expensive to obtain or when it is difficult to package in a way that makes it entertaining.
That said, corporate governance abuses in Russia were very extreme, very common, and very visible during the late 1990s. The standard mechanisms to address these abuses were either nonexistent or completely ineffective — for example, corrupt courts.
It is interesting to look at the Hermitage Fund, which used a media strategy very effectively to force changes on corporate governance. Founded in 1996 as a generic hedge fund with a Russia focus, the Hermitage Fund found itself drawn in several heated corporate governance battles. As the largest foreign investor in Russian equities, it could not remain passive in the face of major corporate governance abuses. With weak legal remedies at its disposal to protect its investments, the Hermitage Fund chose to actively “shame” Russian companies in the international press, hoping to hurt their reputation and that of the government officials who were charged with regulating these firms.
A case study of two companies, the Sidanco oil company and Moscow City Telephone, or MGTS, shows how a carefully planned and executed media strategy can be used as a powerful tool for enacting real change in corporate governance.
In both the Sidanko and MGTS cases, the issue of corporate malfeasance centered on the illegal attempt by majority shareholders to dilute the shares of minority shareholders. The Hermitage Fund had a significant stake in Sidanco but no stake in MGTS. Sidanco’s dilution of shares was reported in 23 news articles, 14 of which were in credible international publications (nine in the Financial Times, four in various editions of The Wall Street Journal and one in The Economist). By contrast, MGTS had only three articles in credible international press (all in the Financial Times). In the Sidanco case, the stock dilution was reversed, but in MGTS it went through quickly.
The main issue is whether press coverage has any impact on the probability that a corporate governance violation is partially or completely addressed.
In a country where legal remedies are not available, the only source of leverage against these violations is international reputation, which we try to capture through three indicators:
• the percentage of foreign ownership in the firm;
• the presence of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development among the company’s lenders;
• the number of joint ventures between a company and foreign partners.
Of these, only the presence of the EBRD as a creditor has a significant impact on outcome, increasing the probability of full redress by 18 percentage points.
When adding a measure of foreign press coverage (number of articles published in the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal in the two months following the event) to the other indicators, press coverage plays a positive and statistically significant role in forcing changes in corporate governance. One standard deviation increase in the number of articles published in foreign newspapers increases the probability of full redress by 10 percentage points.
Publication in The Wall Street Journal seems to have more impact: one standard deviation increase in the number of The Wall Street Journal articles increases the probability of a good outcome by 10 percentage points versus one percentage point of the Financial Times articles.
Russian newspapers, even when credible, do not seem to have played much of a role. Hence, we infer that the main source of leverage is access to an international audience.
The presence of the Hermitage Fund among the shareholders more than triples the average coverage and supports the thesis that media coverage has a direct effect on corporate governance.
What are the main mechanisms through which the press can influence corporate behavior?
• Roughly 35 percent of the cases reach (at least partially) a positive outcome as a result of the intervention of a regulator. What does press coverage have to do with the decision of a regulator to intervene? Press coverage makes more people aware of the issues involved, thus increasing the reputation costs of regulatory inaction.
• Another 15 percent of the cases get resolved because of political intervention. In a typical democracy, politicians feel compelled to intervene on highly visible issues because their political reputation is at stake. In Russia, the important factor is the reputation vis-a-vis foreign investors — particularly British-American investors.
• In another 30 percent of the cases, a more positive resolution is due to the fact that press coverage strengthened the existing opposition. For example, in the case of the truck maker KamAZ, the EBRD was fighting the share dilution approved by the company. Press coverage strengthened the EBRD case because it increased the awareness of investors and, thus, increased the reputation cost of committing corporate malfeasance.
• In the remaining 20 percent of the cases, it looks like the company voluntarily changed its course of actions, and it is more difficult to establish the media’s role.
In sum, it looks like the primary mechanism through which media coverage has an effect is by increasing the reputation cost of corporate malfeasance. Obviously, the success of this strategy is highly dependent on the importance that corporations give to their reputation.
This result might have very important policy consequences. It means that by interacting with developing countries, the developed countries can exert a very positive influence on corporate governance. Since businesses are eager to “look good” in the public opinion, a successful media strategy can be used by investors and shareholders to coerce corporations to improve their governance standards and practices.
Alexander Dyck is professor at the University of Toronto; Natalya Volchkova is a senior economist at CEFIR, Moscow; Luigi Zingales is professor at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago. This comment is a summary of their paper “The Corporate Governance Role of the Media: Evidence From Russia.”
TITLE: No Lawyers, No Problem
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Lawyer Boris Kuznetsov fled Russia after Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court initiated a criminal case on Wednesday, charging him with the disclosure of state secrets. How could the lawyer have gained access to state secrets? The intelligence services and prosecutor’s office believe that Kuznetsov violated the law by copying and distributing secret wiretap recordings of his client, former Federation Council Senator Levon Chakhmakhchyan.
Having copied the wiretap records, Kuznetsov sent a copy of the tapes by mail to the Constitutional Court. There, employees — who had no security clearance — were able to analyze the material in the tapes and make them available to journalists.
Kuznetsov and his defense team point to Article 7 of the law regarding state secrets: “Information regarding the violation of a citizen’s rights and freedom shall not be regarded as classified.” Nonetheless, the district court made the decision about the purported criminal nature of Kuznetsov’s actions in two weeks. Moreover, even before the district court’s decision, authorities demanded that Kuznetsov sign a statement that prohibited him from disclosing facts of the case. This means that the authorities deliberately intended to classify the information on the tapes.
“The Kuznetsov Affair” is a fairly typical case. But it also represents a significant development, because law enforcement agencies have recently intensified their battle against high-profile lawyers. Kuznetsov is one of them. This is how Kuznetsov articulated his credo: “If the evidence of innocence is located in a pile of crap and my hands are tied, I will obtain the evidence with my teeth.”
He fights to defend the rights of people whom the government has already predetermined to be guilty — for example, the scientist Igor Sutyagin and the founder of The Educated Media Foundation, Manana Aslamazian. Kuznetsov also investigated sensitive cases that the government has been trying to forget — for example, the reasons why the Kursk submarine sank in 2000, killing 118 sailors. In 2005, Kuznetsov published his findings in the book “It Sank: The Truth That Prosecutor General Ustinov Concealed About Kursk.” He also filed the complaints of family members of sailors who died in the Kursk accident with the European Court of Human Rights.
As a rule, there were previous attempts to remove lawyers from sensitive cases or revoke their licenses under fabricated pretexts. This was exactly the situation with the lawyers defending Yukos and with Karina Moskalenko, who represented Russian plaintiffs against the government in Strasbourg.
After being confronted with the corporate solidarity of lawyers, the intelligence services have resorted to initiating seemingly absurd cases against them. But these cases have very sharp teeth and threaten lawyers with the real risk of serious punishment. Kuznetsov could receive up to four years in prison (up to seven years under aggravated conditions) and a three-year prohibition against practicing law.
The KGB took similar measures in the 1970s and 1980s against lawyers who defended dissidents. The battle against lawyers is counterproductive because it undermines the authority of the entire judicial system. This could very well mean that an even higher number of cases will be sent to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg by Russians claiming that they have been denied their right of legal defense at home.
Authorities should remember that Russian defendants, who have become victims of persecution as a result of clan struggles or the fight for the ownership of property, will turn to “kamikaze lawyers” such as Kuznetsov who are not afraid of fighting against the system.
This comment appeared as an editorial in Vedomosti.
TITLE: Shatter the Mirror of National Disillusion
AUTHOR: By Alex Goldfarb
TEXT: As Alexander Litvinenko lay dying in a London hospital, a strategy meeting was convened in the offices of Boris Berezovsky. The oligarch was adamant to get the word out that Litvinenko was poisoned on orders of President Vladimir Putin.
“The problem is, most people will not want to believe it was Putin,” cautioned Lord Bell, Berezovsky’s media adviser. “People are instinctively averse to the idea of presidents ordering murders. The more it seems obvious, the deeper they’ll go into denial. But if it was not Putin, then it must be you.”
Since Litvinenko’s death, the two reciprocal theories settled in the minds of millions: One of the two of them killed Litvinenko with the objective of framing the other. Like in a mirror, the known facts of the case reflect each other in the two plots: Every truth is matched by a counter truth. Berezovsky’s counter figure is as adamant as himself at painting him as the murderer. “Those people who are hiding from Russian justice are willing to sacrifice anyone to create a wave of anti-Russian feeling,” commented Putin on the killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
In the two parallel views, the hit men are agents of the respective spy agencies, MI6 and the FSB. According to Berezovsky, the investigation by Russian prosecutors is “a farce.” As for the murder weapon, one side points to the Avangard plant at Sarov — otherwise known as Arzamas-16, the former top-secret Soviet nuclear lab. The plant, located in the Nizhny Novgorod region, still operates as a large producer of nuclear weaponry. It is also where the bulk of world’s polonium-210 is produced.
The two perspectives of Litvinenko’s murder are rooted in a vastly different views of the world. In the Kremlin view, an unholy alliance of U.S. imperialists, the CIA, MI6, Chechen terrorists, fugitive oligarchs and Orange revolutionaries is conspiring to “dismember Russia.” A pack of wolves led by the big, bad “Comrade Wolf,” to borrow Putin’s metaphor for the United States.
In the reciprocal view promoted by the London dissidents, Russia’s secret services have hijacked the state and are so insecure and unsure of themselves, that they can find legitimacy only in aggression towards all those who are “not us” — ne nashi. They are driven by a siege mentality. They despise and fear the West, which they see as a threat to their power. For them, London is a combat zone — like Chechnya. It is a menace that should be contained.
By a twist of fate, Litvinenko’s murder became a clash point the two conflicting views of the world. The answer to the question “Who killed Litvinenko?” defines in the eye of the beholder his personal resolution of Russia’s identity crisis.
The reason why a better part of Russia’s educated class chose to subscribe to the Kremlin view was guessed by Lord Bell: The alternative is too horrific to accept. As Vadim Rechkalov, a seasoned journalist, wrote in Moskovsky Komsomolets: “There are 150 million Russians, and I am one of them. If we believe that Politkovskaya was murdered by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Hero of Russia, following which Putin, having killed Litvinenko, appoints Kadyrov as president of Chechnya, then why do we, in our doomed apathy, live under Putin? And if we don’t believe it, why not say so? As for me, I would rather be called a mouthpiece of the FSB than be a part of such people.” Just like an average Westerner would instinctively brush aside a suggestion that MI6 staged an act of nuclear terrorism in the middle of London or charged an innocent man because someone wants to “create a wave of anti-Russian feeling.”
The power of the Litvinenko affair is that the final choice between the two versions cannot be decided by a poll. Murder is absolute, and the truth can only be one. Of the two mirror images, only one is the reality and the other is a delusion. For millions who adhere to the wrong theory, the moment of truth will also bring about a catharsis of a larger scale: the collapse of their system of values.
Those who want to face the truth will need to subject their vision of the Litvinenko affair to two tests that can resolve the dilemma: the test of logic, and the test of evidence.
The logical consideration is based on the ancient maxim: Who benefits? Assuming that the murderer didn’t want to harm himself, the notion that the Kremlin did it might seem illogical because the scandal damaged the Kremlin first and foremost. Why would they do something that was so obviously harmful to their interests? However, this logic is faulty because it supposes that the killers expected to be caught. That is, they contemplated that polonium-210 might be identified as the murder weapon, which would have left a radioactive trail leading to Moscow and would have provided grounds for charging Andrei Lugovoi.
If, on the other hand, one assumes that the killers did not expect to be caught — a logical supposition — the answer to “who benefits?” looks very different. Had Litvinenko died of an unexplained cause, the suspicion — and all the harm — would fall on Berezovsky. Polonium was identified on the 23rd day of Litvinenko’s illness — an hour before his death — by sheer chance. Litvinenko lived that long because he was so strong and took only one sip of that tea; that was the killer’s greatest misfortune. This was supposed to be a perfect murder with no traces and only one logical suspect — Berezovsky.
There are two kinds of evidence that the British authorities are keeping under wraps. First, there is forensic data about the polonium trail: closed circuit television images and eyewitness accounts such as the testimony of the barman in the Millenium hotel who served the tea. Second, there are scientific results of isotope analysis of samples isolated from Litvinenko’s body, which could unequivocally establish the site, date and batch of polonium. If it is indeed the Avangard plant, then the Kremlin will have a lot of explaining to do.
Thus, all the cards are in Britain’s hands. Now that Lugovoi’s extradition is practically ruled out, they should publish their evidence without delay. By doing so, they will not only advance the cause of truth, but will shatter the mirror of national delusion that has afflicted the great country of Russia — to the benefit of the Russians and the rest of the world.
That would be a form of justice for Litvinenko as well.
Alex Goldfarb, an associate of Boris Berezovsky, is co-author with Marina Litvinenko of “Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB,” published by Free Press.
TITLE: A Great, Rich Land With Lots of Piles
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: In the twilight years of communism, I took an American friend around Moscow. On our prolonged excursion, she was struck less by the beauty of its historical sites than by the city’s frightening chaos, by the mindless mixture of residential buildings, fumes-spewing factories, building sites, 19th-century mansions, metal-working shops inside old churches and grass-covered vacant lots.
Then I mentioned that the development of Moscow was governed by a general plan. Actually, several, starting with Stalin’s comprehensive 1935 blueprint and lasting until 1971, when the last Soviet plan was drafted. You should have heard her laugh.
Under Mayor Yury Luzhkov, reappointed for yet another term, an intense building campaign also supposedly toes a development plan, this one running to 2020. Walking around Moscow these days, I’m reminded of an anthropological study I once read. It dealt with the intrinsic difference between the Homo sapiens and the Neanderthal. When archeologists find early human settlements, they note a logical arrangement, where habitations are placed rationally in relation to each other and to the surrounding landscape. Neanderthals, on the other hand, located their nests haphazardly, in the manner of other primates. I’m sorry to say, Moscow generally resembles the latter model.
It wasn’t always the case. Old photographs show that before the Bolsheviks began their scientifically minded planning activities, Moscow had been a wholesome, harmonious conurbation, expanding organically from an ancient core. It was clearly built by the Homo sapiens. Pointless destruction of churches, palaces, monuments and other civic and private structures deprived the city of its inner logic. Subsequent rebuilding campaigns only compounded the problem.
Moscow is a microcosm of the country. Its woes present a visual metaphor for what was done to Russian society at large. It seems that the way various societies have developed during the five millennia of civilization — complete with money, private property and attendant inequalities of wealth — followed a natural historic path. An attempt by the Bolsheviks to destroy the existing order and to rebuild society based on what they believed to be a set of rational organizing principles that could only have led to a perverse social arrangement.
Fridrikh Gorenshtein wrote a short novella titled “The Pile-Kucha.” Gorenshtein is known for his screenplays for such popular films as “Slave of Love” and “Solaris,” but he was also one of the most brilliant fiction writers of the late Soviet period. In this novella, a Moscow mathematician traveling through provincial Russia suddenly begins to see everything around him as meaningless piles. He compares Russia to undifferentiated primordial chaos, which is how the world must have appeared to humans before the development of mathematics. At its origins, mathematics is a means of separating one pile of pebbles from another — an attempt to impose order upon the physical world.
The Soviet Union became the first country in history to be ordered entirely by the exercise of human reason. Yet, according to Gorenshtein’s protagonist, it was a place where everything existed in the form of disorderly piles — gravel, bricks, coal, building materials, residential neighborhoods, humans and human relationships.
Russia’s blessing during the 1990s was the do-nothing government of Boris Yeltsin. By maintaining a hands-off attitude — whether intentionally or by default — it allowed society to start returning to normalcy and order. The current regime, however, has revived Soviet-style political activism, creating meaningless parties in the State Duma, tampering with the electoral system, controlling the media and, in general, managing democracy. Not surprisingly, preposterous Soviet-style projects are starting to pop up, such as holding the Winter Olympics at a summer resort, probably destined to be known as the white elephant by the Black Sea.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
TITLE: High Time for Britain To Release Evidence
AUTHOR: By David R. Cameron
TEXT: It wasn’t surprising that Moscow rejected Britain’s request to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, charged with murdering Alexander Litvinenko. After all, the Constitution prohibits extradition of its citizens.
Britain answered by expelling four Russian diplomats, but this response is far too tepid. It should take a firm stand on the issue by releasing the evidence that incriminates Lugovoi.
News accounts have long ago suggested there was evidence implicating Lugovoi in the crime. Investigators retracing Litvinenko’s itinerary that day reportedly found traces of polonium in the bar of a London hotel where he met with Lugovoi.
There is ample reason to suspect that the FSB was involved. Litvinenko, a former officer in the KGB and FSB who was granted asylum by Britain in 2000, was a fierce critic of both the FSB and Putin. He publicly claimed that Putin was responsible for the murder in October of Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist and opponent of both Putin and the war in Chechnya.
Legislation the parliament passed last July expanded the definition of “extremist activity’’ to include public slander of the president and other government officials. The legislation also authorized the security services to fight extremist activity beyond Russia’s border.
Litvinenko was famously poisoned with an exceptionally rare radioactive isotope that can be produced only at a nuclear facility. More than 95 percent of the world’s polonium comes from the Avangard plant, part of the large Russian nuclear complex in Sarov. It is inconceivable that anyone could have obtained the polonium except through official channels.
Despite the suspicion of FSB involvement, no hard evidence has been produced. The measures taken by Britain to signal its displeasure with Moscow’s refusal to extradite Lugovoi suggest it may have evidence the government was involved, directly or indirectly, in the murder.
It no doubt would be inconvenient for Britain’s new government to release the evidence. It has inherited delicate negotiations with Russia involving oil and gas exploration by British companies, Iran’s nuclear program, Kosovo and many other issues. And there’s a great deal of trade, investment and other financial activity between the two countries. Perhaps that’s why Britain has resorted to such symbolic gestures.
Nevertheless, if there is evidence demonstrating Lugovoi’s involvement in Litvinenko’s murder and, more important, that of the government, now is the time to make it known.
David R. Cameron is professor of political science at Yale University. This comment appeared in The Washington Post.
TITLE: From Trotsky to Litvinenko
AUTHOR: By Stefan Wagstyl
TEXT: The tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats in the dispute between Britain and Russia inevitably evoke memories of the Cold War.
This reflex reaction is misleading. There is nothing today that compares with the choking fear generated by the thought of thousands of nuclear missiles ready to rain down at a few minutes’ notice. Moscow and Washington still control enough missiles to wipe out the world many times over, but the terror this inspired has largely evaporated. Gone too is the ideological conflict between East and West.
That said, there is much in Russia’s current behavior that is rooted in the Cold War times — not least in its handling of the sinister death of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer killed in London by polonium poisoning. British prosecutors have accused Andrei Lugovoi, a former security services officer, of murder. They have not disclosed any evidence linking Lugovoi to the government, let alone the Kremlin. Russia’s reluctance to cooperate in the investigation, however, is in itself a challenge to the rule of law. Russian officials have closed ranks around Lugovoi and ruled out even the possibility of an extradition. Putin is not legally responsible for Lugovoi, but he is morally responsible for presiding over an elite that tolerates murder as a weapon.
Assassination is as old as politics. But the Soviet Union and its communist allies were particularly ruthless in pursuing enemies globally. High-profile state-sponsored executions began with the ice-pick killing of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 and continued until the 1980s, with the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, in which Bulgaria’s secret service was implicated.
Other countries have also plotted extraterritorial killings, including the United States. But only the Soviet Union pursued its foreign-based enemies with so little shame for so long. And only the U.S.S.R. simultaneously killed or incarcerated millions of its own citizens. While the peak of these repressions passed with Stalin’s death in 1953, the last political prisoners were not released until the 1980s.
Russian leaders abjured Soviet-era crimes but they did not dismantle the KGB, the agency at the heart of Soviet power. Instead, the KGB transformed itself into the FSB while former KGB officers, headed by President Vladimir Putin himself, occupied key positions in the post-Soviet government. Hope that Moscow might no longer pursue its enemies abroad was shattered with the 2004 car bomb killing in Qatar of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the former Chechen president. Two Russian agents were convicted in the killing.
Unfortunately for Putin, extra judicial killings, whether state-sponsored or not, taint Russia’s reputation. Its aim is to regain at least some of the prestige it enjoyed as a superpower and re-establish its dominance in the territory of the former Soviet Union.
Moscow knows it cannot compete with the Unites States militarily. Defense spending is only about 5 percent that of the United States. Russia also faces serious financial and technical difficulties in renewing its aging nuclear arsenal alone.
So Russia concentrates on projecting nonmilitary power. Putin is, quite rationally, doing this by emphasizing Russia’s role as an energy supplier. The Kremlin has taken the opportunity to bully some of its weaker neighbors. But the main aim is to put Gazprom, Rosneft and other Russian groups among the world’s leading stock market companies. Putin knows that in nonmilitary competition, money matters most.
A country’s influence, however, is also determined by its ability to evoke admiration as well as fear. Europe and the United States do better on admiration than fear. Some Russian officials, however, argue that if others fear Russia, who cares about admiration. On the other hand, Putin values membership in the Group of Eight and his summits with Western leaders. Moreover, Russians see themselves as part of the mainstream of European culture. When they talk of improving their country, they talk of “European standards” and living in “a civilized European country.”
But there’s the rub. The citizens of “civilized European countries” do not risk extrajudicial execution if they engage in opposition politics. State officials exist to uphold the rule of law and cooperate with foreign officials in the event of cross-border crimes. Those who want to make Russia into a civilized country must realize that it is not fancy airports, hotels or ski resorts that will win for Russia a global reputation as a civilized country. It is the rule of law, both at home and abroad.
Stefan Wagstyl is the East European editor for the Financial Times, where this comment appeared.
TITLE: Turkey’s Ruling AK Party Wins Elections
AUTHOR: By Gareth Jones
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ANKARA — Turkey’s ruling AK Party on Monday celebrated its decisive victory in a parliamentary election, but strong nationalist gains dented its majority and could hamper reforms crucial to its European Union bid.
With all votes counted from Sunday’s poll, unofficial results gave the Islamist-rooted AK Party 46.5 percent, up more than 12 points on 2002, but a more united opposition means it will get 340 out of 550 seats, slightly fewer than before.
It was a personal triumph for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a controversial but very popular politician, who called the poll early after Turkey’s secular elite, including army generals, torpedoed his choice of an ex-Islamist ally as the next president.
Financial markets welcomed the pro-business AK Party’s triumph. The lira currency traded at its highest levels against the dollar in more than two years and bonds and shares soared.
The head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, congratulated Erdogan on his “impressive” win.
Newspapers hailed the outcome as a victory for democracy.
“This (result) is the people’s memorandum,” said the liberal Radikal daily, in a reference to an army memorandum in April that derailed the presidential election in parliament and forced Erdogan to call the parliamentary poll months ahead of schedule.
The staunchly secular army, which ousted an Islamist predecessor of Erdogan’s party 10 years ago, had objected to the candidacy of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, fearing that as president he would erode the separation of religion and state.
“This election is a vote to restore democracy in Turkey. It has to be read in this way,” Ihsan Dagi of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University told CNN Turk television on Monday.
Addressing jubilant supporters at the lavish new party headquarters in Ankara on Sunday night, Erdogan was greeted with chants of “Abdullah Gul — president,” but it remains unclear whether he will risk a fresh confrontation with the secularists over the presidency.
One of the first tasks of the new parliament, which reconvenes next week, is to choose a president to replace incumbent Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a fierce AK Party critic.
Aware of Turkey’s deep political divisions, Erdogan tried to reassure those who suspect him of plotting to dismantle the secular state, saying he would govern for all Turks and citing Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, revered founder of the modern republic.
“Please be assured that no matter for whom you voted, your votes are valuable for us too. We respect your choice ... We have common values and objectives that unite us all,” he said.
Erdogan also vowed to press on with political and economic reforms required by the EU. But his party lacks the two thirds majority in parliament needed to change Turkey’s constitution and will have to work with opposition parties on many issues. Two other secularist parties made it into parliament — the nationalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) with 112 seats and the far-right National Movement Party (MHP) with 71.
Some 27 mainly Kurdish independents also got into parliament, the first Kurds since the early 1990s — prompting wild celebrating in their troubled eastern heartland. The Turkish nationalists will resist more rights for ethnic and religious minorities as well as other reforms sought by the European Union and will also press Erdogan to send military forces into northern Iraq to root out Turkish Kurdish separatist rebels that are hiding there.
TITLE: High Drama as Harrington Wins Open
AUTHOR: By Doug Ferguson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CARNOUSTIE, Scotland — Anywhere else, Padraig Harrington might have walked off the 18th green knowing his two shots that found the bottom of Barry Burn for double bogey had cost him the British Open.
Not at Carnoustie, where calamity can strike at any second and did during Sunday’s final round.
One shot crashed off the stone wall of the burn and ricocheted 50 yards across the wrong fairway and out-of-bounds. Another bounced across a tiny bridge until it plunged over the side on the last hop. Still another looked like a hole-in-one until it smacked the base of the pin and caromed 18 feet away.
The final hour was golf theater at its best.
In a nail-biter that stirred memories of Jean Van de Velde’s famous collapse in 1999, Harrington delivered the fitting finish to a day that kept everyone guessing. He took a two-shot lead to the final hole of a playoff, and still had to sweat out a 3-foot bogey putt to beat Sergio Garcia.
“I know it was only a short putt, but the emotions of it,” Harrington said. “I couldn’t believe it as it was rolling in from right in the middle of the hole, and I’m thinking, ‘The Open Champion.’ A huge amount of it was genuine shock.”
It was equally shocking to Garcia.
He was poised to capture his first major championship until he blew a three-shot lead in the final round. Harrington gave him one more chance with that double bogey on the 18th hole in regulation. Needing a par to win, Garcia hit into a bunker and missed a 10-foot par putt.
“Now, if Sergio parred the last and I did lose, I think I would have struggled to come back out and be a competitive golfer,” Harrington said. “It meant that much to me. But I never let it sink into me that I had just thrown away the Open championship.”
He became the first Irishman in 60 years with his name on the claret jug, and Harrington ended Europe’s eight-year drought in the majors. The victory moved him up to No. 6 in the world, part of the elite.
All because of a double bogey on the 72nd hole.
Harrington looked as though he might get the break of a lifetime when his tee shot dribbled across the bridge, a yard away from safety until it dove over the railing. After taking a penalty drop, he hung his head when his 5-iron bounced into the burn.
It was a sick feeling, the same one Van de Velde surely felt when he hit into the same stream. Harrington gave no thought to removing his shoes and stepping into the burn. Instead, he figured out how to get up and down for double bogey. He pitched to 5 feet behind the hole and made perhaps the biggest putt of the round.
“That was probably the most pressure-filled putt I had of the day,” Harrington. “If I missed it, it was the end of it. And to hole it was a great boost to me. That was a moment that I thought, ‘Now maybe things are going to go my way.’”
He never gave Garcia another chance.
Harrington hit 7-iron into 6 feet for birdie on the first of four playoff holes, while Garcia dumped his shot into a bunker and couldn’t get up and down to fall two shots behind. Garcia must have known it was over with two holes remaining when, on the next hole, his 3-iron at the 248-yard 16th hopped twice and appeared to be going in until the pin knocked it away.
“You know what’s the saddest thing about it? It’s not the first time. It’s not the first time, unfortunately,” Garcia said. “I don’t know. I’m playing against a lot of guys out there, more than the field.”
The guy should really have been moaning was Andres Romero, a 26-year-old Argentine who looked as if he might be the next unlikely champion at Carnoustie. He made 10 birdies, including four in a row to give himself a two-shot lead, when the pressure caught up to him and a bad break followed.
From the right rough on the 17th, his 2-iron was headed for the burn when it ricocheted off the stone walls and shot out-of-bounds, just beyond the fence on the other side of the 18th fairway. He did well to make double bogey, and his 12-foot par putt on the final hole hit the back of the cup and spun away.
“I did it on 17, not 18,” Romero said when asked if he would be linked to Van de Velde.
“But I could be put into that category by some. I certainly wasn’t thinking about Jean Van de Velde at that moment.”
As it all wrapped up, a rainbow stretched over the course by the North Sea, capping another magical day on perhaps the toughest links in golf. Like the last Open at Carnoustie, there was chaos in the end.
Only this time, it involved more than one player.
Van de Velde self-destructed all on his own in 1999, blowing a three-shot lead on the final hole with a shot that caromed off a tiny railing in the grandstand, another one into the burn, another in the bunker.
Eight years later, the bad luck belonged to Romero, the bad bounce went to Harrington. That left only bad timing for Garcia.
It was his third time to play in the final group of a major, this time with Tiger Woods out of the picture early. But the 27-year-old Spaniard couldn’t buy a putt, and he couldn’t get a break.
He closed with a 73, joining Harrington in the playoff at 7-under 277. The winning score was 13 shots lower than it was the last time at Carnoustie, but everything else — especially the final holes — was eerily similar.
Almost lost in the crazy finish was the end of Woods’ two-year reign at the British Open. Trying to become the first player in 51 years to win the claret jug three straight times, he was never a factor. He finished with a 70, shots behind in a tie for 12th.
“I wasn’t as sharp as I needed to be,” Woods said.
Romero shot a 67 in the final round and was the only player to shoot par or better all four days. He had a 34 on the back nine, despite two double bogeys that kept him from joining Angel Cabrera as a major champion from Argentina.
Richard Green of Australia matched the British Open record at Carnoustie with a 64 and finished at 279 with Ernie Els (69). Hunter Mahan made the cut on the number and tied for sixth with a 69-65 weekend.
Garcia was distraught the last time he played Carnoustie, making his professional debut in the majors with rounds of 89-83 that left him crying in his mother’s arms. He had so many chances to win this time, especially at the end.
Harrington and Garcia passed each other on the bridge over Barry Burn as Garcia marched up the 17th fairway and Harrington tried to work his way out of a mess. Garcia smiled briefly.
The Open was his, or so he thought.
“I knew he hit it twice in the water,” Garcia said. “I know he made a putt for double. And I knew par was a winner.”
At Carnoustie, that’s not always as simple as it sounds.
TITLE: Britain Hit By Intense Flooding
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the scene of Britain’s worst flooding in 60 years Monday as thousands of people remained cut off, many without access to clean water or electricity.
With swathes of central and western England under water and more rain on its way, Brown flew in a helicopter over the waterlogged county of Gloucestershire before meeting officials handling the response on the ground.
Thousands of homes have been hit by the floods, which have prompted the Royal Air Force to carry out what it said was probably its biggest-ever peacetime rescue operation here, picking up more than 100 people.
The worst hit areas are the counties of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Oxfordshire, where nine flood warnings are in place.
There are fears that Britain’s two biggest rivers, the Thames and the Severn, could burst their banks, with more chaotic results for homes and businesses.
In the university city of Oxford, which is on the Thames, large areas are already under water and scores of schools are closed, a situation likely to worsen if the banks burst.
Compounding the misery, a reported 150,000 homes do not have drinking water after a water treatment plant in historic Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, was closed after becoming deluged.
The situation led to panic buying of bottled water in the county.
TITLE: Pietersen Notches Up ‘Best’ 100
AUTHOR: By Richard Sydenham
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Kevin Pietersen said his 134 that ensured England was well placed for victory on the penultimate day of the first test against India on Sunday was the best of his nine test hundreds so far.
It was Pietersen’s third century in a Lord’s test and although he has six test scores higher than his latest effort, other elements meant more to him, shown by the animated way in which he celebrated three figures by jumping up and down and waving his bat to the crowd.
“I would probably rate that as number one,” Pietersen told reporters. “The conditions were as testing as I have known in test cricket or county cricket.
“You could see by my celebrations how happy I was. That was a really difficult day for batting, last night and this morning. After lunch the conditions were a bit better.”
Pietersen’s comments were indicative of the quality bowling from Rudra Pratap Singh, who took a test best five for 59 and Zaheer Khan, who claimed four for 79.
He raced from his lunch score of 62 to 103 in just 30 deliveries, dominating a crucial century partnership with Matt Prior.
“I like to entertain and have fun,” said Pietersen. “But setting my team up in a test match is always the most important thing to me.”
By the close India were 137 for three chasing 380 for victory.
Pietersen defended his comments before the match that he was feeling jaded because of England’s relentless schedule.
He suggested that whatever state he was in, it would not impact on his performance.
TITLE: 26 Pilgrims Killed in Crash Mourned
AUTHOR: By Thierry Boinet
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GRENOBLE, France — Families of victims of a bus crash in an Alpine pass that killed at least 26 Polish pilgrims arrived Monday in this southeast French city as Poland declared a three-day period of mourning.
French officials have said that 26 people died and 24 were injured, 14 seriously — all of them Roman Catholic pilgrims from Poland — when their bus plummeted into a ravine from a road where heavy trucks and buses are forbidden. They were returning from the Sanctuary of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette, about 25 miles south of Grenoble.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski declared the period of national mourning in the early hours of Monday after returning from France, where he rushed Sunday to meet the injured along with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
During a visit to the crash site, Kaczynski knelt, made the sign of the cross and lit a candle for those killed. Sarkozy said he was “shattered by the scale of the tragedy,” and pledged to follow the investigation into its causes “very closely.”
The French government’s No. 2 Jean-Louis Borloo, in charge of transport, said Monday there were 11 panels signaling the dangerousness of the road with a five-mile descent with a 12 percent gradient — banned to heavy trucks and buses without a permit. The bus had no permit, firefighters said.
The crash occurred around 9:30 a.m. Sunday near the village of Vizille, the prefecture of the Isere region said.
Remains of bodies were so charred that DNA tests were being used to identify them, state prosecutor Serge Samuel said in an interview. An investigation has been opened on manslaughter charges, he added.
The driver was killed, while his colleague survived, police said.
Residents of the nearby town Notre-Dame-de-Mesage claimed the bus was speeding and missed a 90 degree bend in the road. It smashed through a barrier and fell about 65 feet onto the bank of the La Romanche River, bursting into flames shortly after, firefighters said.
Cesar David, a local resident, said some of the passengers were thrown from the bus, but “many were trapped inside.”
“There was a series of small explosions,” David said. “Then the bus went up in flames. We couldn’t come near.”
Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Robert Szaniawski said in Warsaw that 50 people were on board — 47 pilgrims, 2 drivers and a guide.
Most were in their 50s to 70s, but there were also three children — a 12-year-old and two 13-year-olds — and several pilgrims in their 20s and 30s, said Marcin Szklarski, president of Orlando Travel, the agency that organized the pilgrimage.
They left Poland on July 10 for a two-week visit to famous sanctuaries in France, Spain and Portugal, including shrines in Lourdes, France, and Fatima, Portugal, he said in Skawina, Poland, outside Krakow.
The bus, a 2000 Scania, underwent technical checks three weeks ago in Germany. “The bus had passed its checks,” Szklarski said.
The crash sparked a wave of indignation among local residents who complained the road had long been a safety hazard. It was the site of several other accidents involving buses: a 1973 crash in which 43 pilgrims were killed, and a crash two years later that left 29 dead.
Nestled between Alpine peaks, the Sanctuary of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette is about 5,900 feet above sea level.
TITLE: Alonso Chases Hamilton, Wins Rain-Hit Grand Prix
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NUERBURGRING, Germany — McLaren’s Fernando Alonso won a wet and wild European Grand Prix on Sunday to cut championship-leading team mate Lewis Hamilton’s lead to just two points.
While Spain’s double world champion celebrated his third victory of the season, after a wheel-banging thrust past Ferrari’s Felipe Massa just four laps from the finish, Hamilton’s run of nine podiums in a row came to an end.
The 22-year-old British rookie, passed fit only on Sunday morning after emerging unscathed from a high-speed crash in qualifying, finished ninth and lapped in a race thrown into chaos by the wildly fluctuating conditions.
Brazilian Massa finished second with Mark Webber of Australia fending off Austrian Alexander Wurz’s Williams to take third place for Red Bull.
Hamilton has 70 points, Alonso 68 and Massa 59.
McLaren, facing a hearing in Paris on Thursday over a ‘spying’ controversy that could cost them heavily, stretched their lead over Ferrari to 27 points.
Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen, who started on pole position in search of his third win in a row, retired with hydraulics failure at a circuit full of bitter memories for him and slipped to fourth overall on 52 points.
In the past the Finn had to retire twice while leading grands prix with his previous team McLaren.
Despite clawing back vital points, Alonso kept his jubilation in check: “It’s an important race but the championship is so long. You never know what’s going to happen in 14 days. In Hungary anything can happen.”
In a race halted for 22 minutes in a downpour after four laps and then re-started behind the safety car, with Germany’s Markus Winkelhock astonishingly leading on his debut for struggling Spyker, Alonso showed all his fighting spirit.
He went almost side by side with Renault’s Giancarlo Fisichella down the pit lane after his final pitstop, successfully asserting his right of way, and then took the fight to Ferrari as rain again fell.
TITLE: Contador Could Be A Tour Contender
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PLATEAU DE BEILLE, France — Alberto Contador looked a lot like Lance Armstrong, tearing away in a mountaintop finish and outsprinting his chief rival to win the 14th stage of the Tour de France.
In Contador, the Discovery Channel team may have found a successor to the seven-time Tour winner in the year the team’s sponsorship deal runs out.
“I’m certain Contador will win the Tour in the future,” Discovery’s sporting director Johan Bruyneel said.
Contador was toe-to-toe with race leader Michael Rasmussen when the pair neared the summit of the 122-mile ride from Mazamet to Plateau de Beille on Sunday, having distanced themselves from rivals Cadel Evans, Levi Leipheimer and Andreas Kloedenthe in the first of three tortuous Pyrenees stages.
Then, with 200 meters left, Contador sized up Rasmussen, made his move down the right, boxed the Dane in next to the barriers, and left him behind.
It seemed like a replay of Armstrong’s winning ride up to Le Grand Bornand in 2004 in the Alps.
Armstrong had dropped his teammate Floyd Landis after he’d slogged for him up the hills, and then the American overtook Kloeden at the top of the final ascent just as the two turned into a corner. Armstrong stormed past him and fist-pumped gleefully at the line.
Contador pounded his fist twice on his heart after winning in 5 hours, 25 seconds, 48 seconds, and closing to within 2:23 of Rasmussen.
“This is the Tour de France. You don’t give any presents,” Rasmussen said. “The Plateau de Beille is not something you give away. It was a very well deserved win.”
Even Bruyneel feels Contador has exceeded expectations.
Bruyneel once sent Armstrong an e-mail shortly before the 1999 Tour predicting that Armstrong would be on the Tour podium. He clearly sees a winner in Contador, and maybe even a similar independence of spirit.
“When I attacked, it was not programmed by Bruyneel,” Contador said. “I chose the moment.”
Like cancer survivor Armstrong, Contador has had serious health setbacks, notably when he suffered a massive blood clot in his brain that needed surgery in 2004. The 24-year-old Spaniard took seven months to recover and then won a stage at Australia’s Tour Down Under in January 2005.
Heading into the Tour de France, Contador impressed by winning the Paris-Nice stage race. He’s obviously confident enough to taken on Rasmussen — the two-time holder of the King of the Mountains jersey.
“Rasmussen is very tough and he’s in the lead,” Contador said. “I will try to attack him.”
He gets another chance on Monday’s 15th stage: A 122-mile trek from Foix to Loudenvielle-Le Louron which features the Col de Mente, Port de Bales, and Col de Peyresourde.
Sunday’s big loser was Evans, who had begun the stage 1 minute back of Rasmussen in second place, but fell behind in the last 3 miles to drop to third, 3:04 back.
“They knew it was the right time to take some time off him [Evans],” Evans’ Predictor-Lotto team sporting director Marc Sergeant said.
Leipheimer finished 40 seconds back, and sits fourth overall, 4:29 off the pace. Kloeden, who was runner-up to Armstrong in 2004, is fifth, 4:38 back.
“This final climb is just brutal. I don’t know what it is about it,” Leipheimer said.
“But it’s always a killer. When there was all those accelerations it just hurt me.”
Rasmussen is edging closer to a victory that would rest uneasily among some observers.
The head of the International Cycling Union (UCI) said on Sunday that it will meet with Whitney Richards, the former rider who said Rasmussen asked him to carry a pair of cycling shoes in March 2002 to Italy.
Richards claimed he instead found IV bags filled with human blood substitute, which he poured down a drain.
TITLE: Last King of Afghanistan,
Zahir Shah, Dies Aged 92
AUTHOR: By Amir Shah
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL, Afghanistan — Mohammad Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan who returned from three decades of exile to bless his war-battered country’s fragile course toward democracy, died Monday, President Hamid Karzai said. He was 92.
Weak if well-meaning during his 40-year reign, Zahir Shah was a symbol of yearned-for peace and unity in a nation still struggling to emerge from the turmoil that began with his 1973 ouster in a palace coup.
When the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001 offered fresh hope for national reconciliation, many clamored for Zahir Shah’s return — not only from exile but to retake the throne.
Zahir Shah returned home from Italy in April 2002, but stood aside in favor of a young anti-Taliban tribesman, the now-President Karzai. A new constitution passed in January 2004 consigned the monarchy to history with Zahir Shah named the ceremonial “Father of the Nation,” a position that dissolves with his death.
“The people are relying on you and you should not forget them,” the monarch told the loya jirga, or grand assembly, which ratified the charter. “I hope you will try your best to maintain peace, stability and the unity of the Afghan people.”
Since his return, Zahir Shah left Afghanistan several times for medical treatment.
Karzai, who announced the king’s death during a news conference broadcast live nationwide, called the king a “symbol of national unity” who brought development and education to the country. The king remained a leader in his final years but one who didn’t seek the power of a throne, he said.
“He was the servant of his people, the friend of his people,” Karzai said. “He believed in the rule of the people and in human rights.”
Karzai said Afghanistan would observe three days of mourning over the death of the king, whose body will lie in state at a mosque in Kabul and then will be taken by carriage to a hillside tomb.
Born Oct. 15, 1914, Zahir Shah was proclaimed monarch in 1933 at age 19 within hours of the death of his father, King Muhammad Nadir Shah, who was assassinated before his eyes.
Zahir Shah was not a dynamic ruler, with uncles and cousins holding the real power during most of his reign, during which Afghanistan remained poor and forgotten.
But his neutral foreign policy and limited liberalization of a deeply conservative society managed to keep the peace — a golden age in the eyes of many Afghans pained by the extremism and slaughter that followed.
Afghanistan has always been poor but was then stable and moving toward democracy when the king ended the absolute monarchy in 1964, his grandson, Mustafa Zahir, told The Associated Press last month.
“Nobody can fill the shoes of his majesty,” said Zahir, who heads the Department of the Environment. “But we can carry on the torch of hope, not to restore the monarchy but to continue with that message of hope, although it will never have the same intensity.”
TITLE: Beckham Enters New Galaxy in L.A.
AUTHOR: By Mark Lamport-Stokes
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: CARSON, California — David Beckham made his long-awaited debut for Los Angeles Galaxy in front of a capacity crowd when he came on as a substitute in the 78th minute of Saturday’s exhibition match against Chelsea.
The England midfielder, who has been struggling to recover from an injury to his left ankle, was cheered loudly by the 27,000 fans at the Home Depot Center as he ran on to the pitch in place of striker Alan Gordon.
Although his new team were beaten 1-0 by the FA Cup holders, Beckham was delighted to launch his much-trumpeted American adventure by playing a late cameo role in front of a packed stadium that included several Hollywood stars.
“It was very emotional,” the former England captain told reporters after 12 minutes of action that featured a few deft touches, a tumble as he tried to evade a tackle by Chelsea’s Steve Sidwell and a late corner kick.
“The reaction to me if I even take off my top or kick the ball has been incredible, it made me feel a bit embarrassed at times. I really wanted to be out there tonight with all the attention. It is a great day for the club.”
His problem ankle was another matter, though.
“I’m not fit and I haven’t trained since I have been out here,” Beckham said. “The ankle is swollen and we’ll see how it is tomorrow. It is not going to go away for a week or so but it’s making progress, it’s not a serious injury.”
Galaxy president and general manager Alexi Lalas told ESPN television: “It is a long-term process and we want to make sure David is 100 percent.
“We have games next week, next month and over the next five years. Everyone will get their chance to see David Beckham here and across the country.”
Signed by the Galaxy from Real Madrid on a $32.5 million five-year deal, Beckham had been one of seven substitutes named for the match by Galaxy head coach Frank Yallop.
His pop star wife Victoria watched the action from a corporate suite accompanied by her actress friend Katie Holmes, wife of Tom Cruise.
Other celebrities in the crowd included Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, U.S. actresses Eva Longoria and Jennifer Love Hewitt and English actors John Hurt and Ray Winstone. Beckham did not appear on the pitch when his Galaxy team mates initially appeared for their pre-match warmup, delaying his arrival until both teams had run out of the tunnel shortly before kickoff.
Accompanied by a security official, the former England captain then made his way to the Galaxy bench with the capacity crowd at the Home Depot Center roaring its approval.
After Beckham sat down next to his fellow substitutes, he was encircled by around 100 photographers desperate to record the moment.
Beckham twisted his ankle playing for his country against Estonia in a Euro 2008 qualifying match last month.
He aggravated it in his final appearance for Real 11 days later when his former team clinched the Spanish league title. Saturday’s game, a sell-out, was the Galaxy’s second-highest grossing fixture since the MLS side hosted Real a year ago, with Beckham playing for the opposition.
TITLE: New Harry Potter Book Gets Worldwide Release
AUTHOR: By Mike Collett-White and Justin Grant
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON/NEW YORK — The seventh and final Harry Potter book flew off the shelves on Saturday as fans the world over snapped up copies to discover the fate of the boy wizard and his Hogwarts pals.
J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” looks set to become the fastest selling book on record based on early estimates, following months of hype and a carefully orchestrated launch designed to maximize sales and suspense.
Internet leaks of the book’s contents and newspaper articles containing spoilers appear not to have dampened enthusiasm among readers old and young, thousands of whom dressed as characters from the book.
Some could not wait to see what lay in store for the characters they have grown up with over the last decade.
“I couldn’t stop myself from finding out the end first,” said Vineet Sharma in Mumbai.
In Johannesburg, Liezl van Rensburg said: “I usually read the last page first, but this time I’m going to try not to.”
In London, thousands of Potter followers from dozens of countries dressed as witches, Hogwarts Heroes, Death Eaters and plain non-magical Muggles for the midnight launch. Many more awoke at dawn in Australia and India to snap up early copies. In New York, two teenaged boys disguised as wizards ran around with brooms between their legs, pretending to battle each other in a game of Quidditch.
Social worker Julia Schafer, 26, anxiously waited in line to find out her hero’s fate. “I really hope that Voldemort dies. The evil has to end,” she said.
In Australia, a fan had to be rescued from a lake in Canberra on Friday after he dived in to rescue a pre-purchase receipt necessary to pick up his book. In Pakistan, a bomb scare in Karachi forced a shop to cancel a Potter event.
Early reviews, some of them appearing before the official publication date, were overwhelmingly positive.
“This chest-crusher of a book ends the Harry Potter series with a bang,” said Kate Muir in the Times.
“The plot hatched over 17 years of writing clicks into place, loose ends interlocking, all as complex as a magical lock at Hogwarts Castle.”
Book store chains in Britain said first-night sales eclipsed even those of the sixth Harry Potter volume.
“We’ve sold 100,000 copies in the first two hours across the business in the U.K.,” said Fiona Allen of Waterstone’s. “That has outstripped anything we’ve sold before.”
The WH Smith chain sold 15 books every second across Britain overnight, breaking the record set by the previous Potter installment of 13 per second in 2005.
TITLE: Stepanek Takes Step Closer To Regaining Top-10 Rank
AUTHOR: By Mark Lamport-Stokes
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LOS ANGELES — Czech Radek Stepanek, sidelined for six months last year because of a neck injury, set his sights on regaining a top-10 ranking after winning the Los Angeles Classic on Sunday.
The former world number eight overturned the formbook with a 7-6 5-7 6-2 victory over tournament favourite James Blake of the U.S. to clinch his second ATP title.
“I am feeling with every match better and better,” Stepanek, 28, told reporters after upsetting the second seed at the Los Angeles Tennis Center.
“I know I can still improve my game and I am getting stronger mentally which is for me very important.
“I am on my way back there (to the top 10) but I know that it will take time, patience and hard work.”
Stepanek’s ATP ranking has plummeted to 101st following his nightmare finish to the 2006 season. He suffered a neck injury while practising in Toronto in August. For a while, he feared his professional career might be over.
“I didn’t play tennis for six months and, at one point, I was scared I was not going to play tennis any more,” he said.
Because of a dislocated disc in his neck, he lost touch, feel and power in his right hand.
“It was like the hand was not mine, I felt paralysed,” he said. “It was a very tough moment for me but the doctor gave me hope while I was injured.
“I wasn’t sure if I was going to come back or not. But I came back and I can’t complain today.”
Stepanek, whose fiancee is former world number one Martina Hingis, had a brief health scare playing in the cold temperatures of Gstaad last week.
“It was nine degrees and I called my doctor and I was nearly crying because I was not able to change the grip in my hand during the rally,” the Czech recalled.
“I said to him: ‘Don’t tell me the injury is coming again.’ Then suddenly I am coming here to LA and it is 30 degrees, the heat is great and I am feeling the hand completely different.”
TITLE: Simpsons Premiere in ‘Hometown’
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SPRINGFIELD, Vermont — Rolling out the yellow carpet, the “hometown” of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie played host yesterday to the premiere of “The Simpsons Movie,” with creator Matt Groening and the film’s producers among thousands who turned out to toast the cartoon family’s big-screen debut.
Streets were closed off, costumed Simpsons look-alikes walked through the crowds and blue-haired fans vied for tickets to one of four showings of the movie at the 212-seat Springfield Theater, the first of which was by invitation only.
“As Homer would say, ‘Woo hoo!’” said Groening, addressing the crowd in a short ceremony before the 2 p.m. first showing.
The Vermont town got the most votes in an online USA Today poll and earned the right to host the premiere, beating out Springfields in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee.
Originally uninvited, Springfield, Vermont, officials lobbied to be included in the contest and then won it, in part on the strength of a homemade video in which Homer — played by a Burlington talk-show host — runs through town chasing a big, pink, rolling doughnut before he gets chased into a movie theater by a mob of people.
Vermont’s Springfield got 15,367 votes, edging out Springfield, Illinois, which drew 14,634.
“It’s so great to have this little town on the map for something positive,” said Angelo Jardina, 56, of Springfield.
The movie officially opens July 27.
About 2,000 people turned out for the festivities, far below the 10,000 some had forecast, police said.
A banner strung across Main Street read: “Welcome to Springfield, Vermont, home of the Simpsons,” with three frosted pink doughnuts — each with a bite mark.
Stand-up cutouts of the characters from TV’s dysfunctional cartoon family filled shop windows.
Fans sampled “Duff & D’oh-Nuts” ice cream, a custom-made concoction from Ben & Jerry’s, and sipped a special version of “Duff” beer made by the Magic Hat Brewing Company of South Burlington.
About 600 tickets were to be given away for three showings yesterday, with Springfield residents getting preference.
Nick Seymour, 19, of Peterborough, New Hampshire, showed up sporting a fresh Homer Simpson tattoo on his back. “I’m a huge Simpsons fans, and a little crazy,” he said.
Two teenagers from Bellows Falls donned tuxedos for the occasion, with one of them — Trevor Fuller, 16 — carrying a piÖata of Bart Simpson that he made in Spanish class. He got it signed by Groening.
Groening and other dignitaries walked the yellow carpet to a stage set up in a bank parking lot for the ceremony, where former Phish member Page McConnell played the Simpsons theme song on keyboards.
“We knew that wherever the real Springfield was, there would be a lot of enthusiasm,” said Groening. “But I’ve never experienced as much fan intensity as here in Vermont,” he said.
“I think it’s quite clearly bigger than Elvis and the Beatles put together,” said Brock Rutter of the Vermont Film Commission.
The movie got rave reviews from people who watched the early showing.
“It was fantastic. It’s a big culmination of all the years of the Simpsons,” said Mike Iglinski, 26, of Manchester.
“I thought it was very cute. Very clever, lots of little allusions,” said Mary Helen Hawthorne, 57, of Springfield.
TITLE: Stars Gather to Welcome Beckhams to Hollywood
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LOS ANGELES — David Beckham attracted Hollywood stars Sunday the same way he draws defenders on the soccer field.
In large numbers.
A glittery array of Oscar winners and entertainment world luminaries turned out for what was billed as an official welcome-to-Los Angeles party for the international soccer icon and his wife, pop singer Victoria.
With Tom Cruise and Will Smith playing co-hosts for the invitation-only bash at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary gallery, the guest list was long and deep.
Director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer were among the first to arrive. Brooke Shields was there. “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria popped in, followed by “American Idol” creator Simon Fuller, who managed the Spice Girls pop group that launched Victoria Beckham to fame.
Wesley Snipes and Quincy Jones came to welcome the soccer star, as did Bruce Willis, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. Vivica Fox showed up too.
Others expected to drop in ranged from George Clooney to Oprah Winfrey to Steven Spielberg.
The Beckhams arrived with Cruise, accompanied by wife Katie Holmes, and Smith, with his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Cruise flew in for the bash from Germany, where he is shooting a film.
For the British Beckhams, it was a taste of classic Hollywood. A red carpet was rolled out at the entrance.
TITLE: Extravagant Evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker Dies
AUTHOR: By Anita Gates
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Tammy Faye Bakker, the diminutive and elaborately coiffed gospel singer who, with her first husband, Jim Bakker, built a commercial empire around television evangelism, only to see it collapse in sex and money scandals, died Friday at her home near Kansas City, Missouri. She was 65.
Her death was reported on her web site and by her booking agent, Joe Spotts, The Associated Press said. She had been suffering from colon cancer, which had spread to her lungs.
On May 8, Tammy Faye Messner, as she had been known since her 1993 marriage to Roe Messner, posted a letter on her web site, saying that her weight had dwindled to 65 pounds and that doctors had stopped treatment. “Now it’s up to God and my faith,” she wrote.
She and Bakker, an Assemblies of God minister, worked as traveling evangelists in the early years of their marriage. He preached, she sang and played the accordion. They began their television career in the mid-1960s, joining Pat Robertson’s fledgling Christian Broadcasting Network as the original hosts of “The 700 Club.”
In 1974, the Bakkers founded the Praise the Lord (PTL) network, based in North Carolina, and achieved wide popularity as hosts of the syndicated “Jim and Tammy Show.” At its peak, in the ‘80s, the PTL show reached as many as 13 million households, always to a drumbeat of appeals for donations.
The Bakkers’ enterprises, including Heritage USA, a 2,300-acre religious theme park and resort in Fort Mill, South Carolina, grew in value to more than $125 million.
Messner, who stood 4 feet 11 inches, was known for appearing on camera in overstated outfits and heavy makeup. She was openly emotional, whether praying for the health of an ailing viewer or for generous financial contributions. When she broke down on camera — and she did so often — her tears and mascara both ran copiously, leaving long black streaks on her face.
At one photo sitting, when a makeup artist asked her to remove her false eyelashes, she refused. “Without my eyelashes, I wouldn’t be Tammy Faye,” she said.
The Bakker business suffered a crippling blow in 1987, when it was revealed that Bakker had in 1980 had a sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a young church secretary, and had paid her $265,000 to keep quiet. He was stripped of his ministry.
In 1989, Bakker was convicted of federal charges that he had bilked followers out of $158 million by offering lifetime vacations at Heritage USA while knowing he could not provide them and that he had diverted about $3.7 million to support an opulent lifestyle.
The scandals forced the Bakkers to shut down their PTL program and eventually lose Heritage Village through bankruptcy.
Bakker’s wife vowed to stand by her man. When he was found guilty of fraud and conspiracy, she appeared at a news conference and, in tears, sang, “On Christ the solid rock I stand/All other ground is sinking sand.”
Three years later, she divorced Bakker, who by then was serving a 45-year prison sentence. In 1993, she married Messner, a wealthy contractor and former business associate of Bakker. Bakker, whose sentence had been reduced, was paroled in 1994. In 1996, Messner was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud.
In the Bakkers’ heyday, they were criticized for their lavish homes and extravagant spending on items like matching Rolls-Royces and an air-conditioned dog house. Her troubles with drug dependency and depression made her a target of tabloid headlines.
Gay men came to embrace Messner as a camp figure, making her the subject of gender-bending look-alike contests.