SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1468 (30), Friday, April 24, 2009
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TITLE: Putin
To End Rule On Cash Tills
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government will ease life for small businesses by simplifying their taxes and ditching a requirement that they must all use cash registers, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday.
The cutoff level for small businesses to get access to the simplified tax system will be raised to 60 million rubles ($1.77 million) in annual revenues from the current 30 million rubles, Putin told the All-Russia Forum on Small and Middle-Sized Businesses.
The government will lose more than 100 billion rubles in taxes as a result, the Finance Ministry estimated.
The simplified tax regime envisages an entrepreneur paying only one tax — either 6 percent of revenues or 5 to 15 percent of the net profit. Most small and middle-sized businesses currently pay taxes on imputed income, which means that the tax inspector calculates their taxes with a complicated formula. Under the common tax system, companies pay revenue tax, property tax, unified social tax and value-added tax.
Putin said smaller businesses would get relief with a decision to scrap cash registers, which became mandatory in all shops in 2003 amid a state effort to boost tax collection.
“The cash registers are often more expensive than the goods that are sold in the shop,” Putin said.
Entrepreneurs use 2 million tax registers, which cost an average of 15,000 rubles ($442) each, Putin said. Overall sales rung up on them amount to 30 billion rubles per year, plus an additional 10 billion rubles to service them over the same period, he said.
“With that, the amount of [sales] revenue doesn’t matter when one pays taxes on imputed income,” Putin said.
Legislation on the cash registers will be drafted by July 1, Putin said.
The measure was welcomed by businessmen at the conference, who said cash registers have become a nightmare for them.
“You first have to buy the machine for 15,000 rubles, then regularly change the flash memory device, which costs 9,000 rubles — and pay for servicing it all the time,” Volgograd businessman Andrei Udakhin said on the sidelines of the conference.
“The data registered by the machine has never been used, because the amount of taxes we pay does not depend on that,” said Udakhin, who owns two minimarts employing 35 people.
Udakhin called the new tax measures “very useful and logical,” but he said small businesses still needed a lot of changes to the Tax Code. “It is very hard for small and middle-sized businesses to switch to the simplified tax system that, for one thing, requires you to have more than 150 square meters of commercial space,” Udakhin said. “Most small businesses don’t have that much.”
Business confidence is at a four-year low now, Economic Development Minster Elvira Nabiullina told the conference. Forty-four percent of small businesses call high taxes their biggest problem, she said.
Putin said an extra 15 billion rubles would be earmarked for regional funds that offer state guarantees as collateral for small businesses. The funds have received 2.5 billion rubles so far.
In another measure of support, at least 20,000 microloans of up to 1 million rubles each will be given out this year, Putin said.
Sberbank chairman German Gref said Tuesday that the state-controlled bank would introduce a microloan program, under which borrowers could obtain the funds in two to five days.
The state’s bailout of banks will be tightly connected with the number of loans they issue to small and middle-size businesses, Putin said. The government has earmarked 10.5 billion rubles to support small businesses this year.
Small businesses will receive 100 billion rubles through state banks in 2009, Vneshekonombank chairman Vladimir Dmitriyev said on the sidelines of the conference.
Vneshekonombank, or VEB, has said it will hand out loans for 30 billion rubles to small businesses this year, up from 9 billion rubles in 2008.
TITLE: Police Stage Murder of Pregnant Rector
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Three employees of St. Petersburg’s State Polar Academy — including a top administrator — have been arrested on suspicion of plotting to kill the academy’s rector after undercover police in the northern capital staged her murder.
Law enforcement sources leaked information to news outlets on Tuesday evening that the rector, Kermen Basangova, 34, who is eight months pregnant, was stabbed by an unidentified attacker about 6:30 p.m. and died shortly afterward in the hospital.
A woman who answered the telephone at the academy Wednesday, however, said Basangova was alive and well, and police said her killing had been faked in a secret operation to catch her would-be killers.
“We received information about a murder plot, and the decision was made to stage the crime,” a St. Petersburg police spokesman told The St. Petersburg Times. “After the crime was supposedly committed, three people were detained on suspicion of organizing the murder.”
The suspected mastermind of the plot was Basangova’s direct subordinate, first deputy rector Vladimir Lukin, who purportedly conspired with two other academy employees to kill Basangova, Alexander Klaus, deputy head of the Investigative Committee in St. Petersburg, told a news conference Wednesday.
Lukin was prepared to pay 360,000 rubles ($10,500) for Basangova’s murder and brought Mikhail Zhavoronkov, 21, and his father, Vladimir Zhavoronkov, 53, in on the plot, Klaus said, Itar-Tass reported.
Basangova told reporters Wednesday that she learned of the plot on her life a week ago but that she could not go into detail about the operation. She hinted at a motive, however, saying a review of the academy’s finances had revealed that 9 million rubles ($265,000) earmarked for repairs of a dormitory had been embezzled by people close to Lukin, Interfax reported.
Lawyers for Lukin and the other suspects could not be reached for comment Wednesday. The suspects have “to one degree or another” admitted their involvement in the plot, said Igor Paradeyev, deputy head of criminal investigations with the St. Petersburg police, Interfax reported.
Mikhail Zhavoronkov was arrested in a sting operation after handing money to the man he had hired to kill Basangova, according to the web site Fontanka.ru, which first reported Wednesday that Basangova was alive. Zhavoronkov’s father was detained later. Police set up the sting operation involving the would-be killer after learning of the plot earlier this month, Klaus of the Investigative Committee said. Basangova was elected rector of the State Polar Academy last year, replacing Lukin’s wife, Azurget Shaukenbayeva, Fontanka.ru reported.
The deliberate leak of the information about Basangova’s murder to the media on Tuesday was part of the operation to arrest the suspects, the police spokesman said by telephone.
The leak was picked up by national news agencies and television channels. The Moscow Times, the sister paper of The St. Petersburg Times, ran a news brief on p. 2 in Wednesday’s issue, citing an Interfax report.
Staging contract killings is a common method used by law enforcement authorities to draw the masterminds into handing money over to the would-be hit men. Authorities have even staged photographs of the victim’s supposed corpse to convince the mastermind that the murder had been carried out.
Paradeyev of the St. Petersburg police said only the most senior officials on the local police force and prosecutors were aware of the operation to stage Basangova’s murder. “The detectives who were working at the crime scene thought they were working on a real case,” Paradeyev said.
To keep the operation under wraps after the supposed attack, the rector was rushed to St. Petersburg’s City Hospital No. 26, where a police officer guarded the door of her room, refusing to let anyone in, Paradeyev said.
Basangova said that despite her late-stage pregnancy, she was not scared of participating in the sting. “I was worrying more about my relatives with weak hearts,” she said.
TITLE: U.S. Owner of Siberian Pizza Chain Detained, Posts Bail
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Novosibirsk court on Wednesday released on bail a U.S. businessman who has operated a chain of pizza restaurants in Siberia for more than a decade and is suspected of tax evasion, regional authorities said Wednesday.
Eric Shogren, owner of the New York Pizza chain, is accused of failing to pay more than 9 million rubles ($263,900) in taxes, Novosibirsk regional police spokeswoman Tatyana Bukova told Interfax.
Shogren is also being investigated in connection with other criminal cases, Bukova said, though she did not specify what the accusations in those cases entail.
If charged and convicted of large-scale tax evasion, Shogren, a well-known figure in the foreign business community, could face up to seven years in prison.
Shogren was detained Tuesday in connection with the tax evasion case, regional police spokesman Anton Surnin said by telephone.
Novosibirsk’s Leninsky District Court on Wednesday declined to place Shogren under arrest, releasing him on 1 million ruble ($29,500) bail on the condition that he not leave the city, regional court spokeswoman Marianna Glushkova told The St. Petersburg Times.
Investigators had asked the court to place Shogren in a pretrial detention facility, saying he was a flight risk.
The director of Shogren’s company Top Shelf, Yevgenia Golovkova, was released on 800,000 ruble ($23,000) bail, Glushkova said.
Shogren remained in detention Wednesday and was to be released at 9 a.m. Thursday, his wife, Olga Shogren, said in a telephone interview from Novosibirsk.
Shogren’s company has about 50 million rubles ($1.5 million) in debt and fell behind on its taxes and payments to suppliers after it was unable to refinance its loans, his wife said, speaking in fluent English with an American accent.
“Banks were already in crisis in May, and so they were calling back credit and weren’t giving any more,” she said. “That’s when we acquired most of the debts.”
Employees and suppliers of New York Pizza picketed in Novosibirsk in February over delays in payments, Kommersant reported. In September, court marshals raided Shogren’s restaurants, confiscating money from the registers to cover debts, Vedomosti reported.
More than 90 complaints have been filed against New York Pizza in the Novosibirsk Regional Arbitration Court since last year, including by tax and pension authorities, according to the court’s web site.
The company hopes to pay off its debts, Olga Shogren said. “We’re working on attracting investment groups and some investment capital, but it’s very difficult,” she said.
Shogren is also being investigated on suspicion of fraud, Kommersant reported in March, citing police investigators.
A native of Minneapolis, Shogren started up a joint car business with a Novosibirsk partner in the early 1990s. He moved to Novosibirsk a few years later and founded New York Pizza in 1996. The chain consists of 15 restaurants, according to its web site.
The web site says Shogren also runs five other restaurants, a cinema and a bakery. It also says Shogren has set up a farm business called Siberian Frontier Farms, whose board includes James Collins, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.
Reached by telephone Wednesday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Collins said he had heard that Shogren had been detained.
Collins said he was not familiar with the details of the case and declined to comment. He said, however, that he is “part of a board related to all [of Shogren’s] businesses.”
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said it could not comment on the case because of privacy laws.
The Moscow Times, sister paper of The St. Petersburg Times, interviewed Shogren in Novosibirsk in 2002. At that time, he said, New York Pizza was making several million dollars annually.
Shogren has dual U.S. and Russian citizenship, his wife said.
TITLE: Ex-Yukos Lawyer Gets Parole
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Tuesday granted parole to former Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, a mother of three whom supporters call a political prisoner ensnared in authorities’ attack on what was once the country’s leading oil company.
The Preobrazhensky District Court granted early release to Bakhmina, 39, who was serving a 6 1/2-year term after being convicted in April 2006 on charges of embezzlement and tax evasion.
She is one of several senior Yukos officials to be jailed since the company came under fire in 2003. Her bid to be released has become a cause celebre among prominent liberals and has even been backed by Kremlin supporters.
Several members of the Public Chamber have called for her release, as has former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Bakhmina was not present in court Tuesday. She and her infant daughter remained in a Moscow region hospital Tuesday, her lawyers and friends said.
Judge Irina Vyrysheva was visibly flustered at Tuesday’s hearing after Bakhmina’s lawyer, Semyon Ariya, handed her a photograph of Bakhmina and her two young sons. Blushing, Vyrysheva said she could not consider the picture in her ruling.
“This is a case that dishonors Russia,” Ariya told the courtroom before the ruling.
Prosecutors made no attempt to argue against Bakhmina’s parole, requesting, in fact, that she be released.
“The prosecution is not going to appeal the court’s decision,” state prosecutor Anton Davydov said.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Russian Museum Cuts
ST PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Russian museum has had its federal funding halved, according to its director Vladimir Gusev.
“We applied for 1.6 billion rubles ($47.5 million) of essential funding from the ministry of culture, but we have only been allocated 751 million rubles, 54 percent less than requested.”
Interfax reported that the museum’s total budget allocation has been reduced by 20 percent from 2008 figures, accounting for inflation. Furthermore, the director revealed that he has received a letter warning of further cuts in funding of around 15 percent in 2010-11.
Gusev claimed that the budget cuts will take their toll on the museum’s exhibitions. “We can’t even afford security. Everyone realizes that times are hard, but all the same, for the time being we have sponsorship and will be able to cope.”
Traffic Cop Charged
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A high-ranking traffic police officer has been accused of illegally dismissing driving offenses, the St. Petersburg Prosecutor General’s Office announced Wednesday.
A deputy chief of the State Inspectorate for Road Traffic Safety in St. Petersburg’s central region was charged with exceeding his authority in dismissing traffic violation reports that should have invoked further legal proceedings, Interfax reported. According to the allegations, the deputy chief decided on his own initiative to dismiss some reports as improperly filed, when in fact they contained sufficient evidence to be registered and their offenders prosecuted.
The charges arose as a result of a December 2008 Ministry of Internal Affairs investigation that confiscated 71 driving violation reports during a search of inspectorate offices. Judicial bodies are now taking legal action on fifty of the confiscated reports, all of which were written between January and December 2008.
Okhta Center Pole
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Ten percent more survey respondents in St. Petersburg support the construction of a proposed business complex than oppose it, the Agency of Social Information announced Thursday.
A recent survey of 2,000 Petersburgers showed the proponents of the plan to build Okhta Center complex across the Neva River from the Smolny Institute outnumber opponents by 10 to 12 percent, said agency director Roman Mogilevsky at a press conference Thursday.
The agency’s latest survey of 2,000 Petersburgers in March and April recorded 42 percent in favor, 33 percent opposed and 25 percent neither for or against with a 2.2 percent margin of error, Interfax reported.
The business center, planned for completion by 2016, would be located in the Okhta region along the Neva, opposite Smolny, and would include a 300-meter tower.
In most recent survey, 82 percent of respondents thought the complex would not affect their lives and around 10 percent said that they think the city's image for tourists will not suffer as the result of its construction.
A fifth of the respondents thought construction was already underway, despite the fact that St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko eliminated the funds planned for the construction project in her edit of the city’s 2009-11 budget.
Traffic Cops Tow Kid
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A St. Petersburg woman is suing a traffic police officer who towed her car while her baby was still inside, Interfax reported Thursday.
Local mother Tatyana Lukina has filed suit seeking compensation for harm from an officer of the State Inspectorate for Road Traffic Safety after he towed her car Wednesday with her one-year old child sleeping inside, announced her lawyer, Anatoly Malinovsky.
According to his account, Lukina left her car parked partially in a no-stopping area on Furshtadskaya street Wednesday and went inside one of the consulates located on the thoroughfare. Returning to find the car gone, she called emergency services and learned the car had been towed to a car pound at Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge. The mother arrived at the car pound by taxi 40 minutes later and found her baby still in the car.
The child is currently undergoing medical examination, Malinovsky said.
A similar incident occurred in February 2008, when a traffic police officer towed a car with an 8-year-old child inside, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Jazz, Jet Set Unite To Help City Homeless
AUTHOR: By Alec Luhn
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A mix of business and pleasure, philanthropy and social networking — it’s hard to pin down Saturday’s International Jazz Benefit to just one form of personal indulgence or public good work.
The Milost Foundation and the International Women’s Club of St. Petersburg will hold the benefit, which features three local jazz ensembles, on Saturday from 8 p.m. to midnight in the Atrium of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Organizers intend the evening to be a social event as well as a fundraiser — all proceeds will be donated to Nochlezhka, St. Petersburg’s largest non-governmental homeless shelter.
“The main goal is to raise money for a good cause, but one of the added benefits is … we want it to be an event where people can meet each other,” said International Women’s Club Event Coordinator Jennifer Gaspar.
“It’s an attempt to open up the closed expat circle to a wider base of people,” she added.
To this end, the guest list includes a melange of notable faces from St. Petersburg’s diplomatic and business communities, including the general consuls of the U.K., India, Turkey and Cyprus and the CEOs of local real-estate company Jensen Group and Russian paper producer Ilim Group. Also in attendance will be representatives of the U.S., Italian and Belgian consulates and the general managers of Coca-Cola and Ford Motor Company in Russia.
Local groups Radistka Kat (vocal jazz), Non Cadenza (acid jazz) and Swing Couture (gypsy jazz) are slated to perform at the benefit, which will feature a dance floor, according to Gaspar. Performance art theater Pezho will put on a pantomime show.
The International Women’s Club, a social and charitable organization comprising mainly expats, came up with the idea for the benefit a year ago, then enlisted the administrative help and business contacts of the local charity Milost Foundation, according to Gaspar.
The club chose Nochlezhka as the recipient of the aid due to their efforts to fight homelessness, which are especially important in light of increasing numbers of homeless during the financial crisis, Gaspar said.
“We came upon Nochlezhka as an organization we’ve known for years; we trust and respect their work,” she said.
Nochlezhka operates a 50-bed shelter on Borovaya Ulitsa, but houses up to 200 people by erecting tents on the shelter grounds, Gaspar said. The organization also runs a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and organizes official registration for homeless people so that they are entitled to get a job, medical attention and education.
According to a Nochlezhka press release, the organization will use the funds raised to renovate its shelter.
The ticket cost of 4,000 rubles covers food, as well as wine, beer and vodka. Tickets are available from Nochlezhka, the Milost Foundation or the IWC.
TITLE: Ingosstrakh Says Fraud Is Skyrocketing
AUTHOR: By Jessica Bachman
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Insurance fraud hit a high in the first quarter as a growing number of individuals felt compelled to take criminal measures to avoid paying off loans, Alexander Grigoryev, chairman of insurer Ingosstrakh, told journalists on Wednesday.
Grigoryev said arson property-loss claims are up fivefold this year and estimated that 80 percent of them are fraudulent.
“If we used to receive claims for one burned-down warehouse, now we are receiving five,” he said.
In almost all instances of fraud, the insured property was bought on credit, and the borrower likely couldn’t handle the payments, Grigoryev said.
A devalued ruble, climbing unemployment and salary cuts have caused loan-default rates to mushroom in the first quarter. The country’s top banks are forecasting a second wave of banking defaults, as overdue loans are expected to constitute 10 percent of banks’ portfolios by the end of the year.
“If a guy has a car that’s three years old and he has a car loan in dollars, well, if the car ‘burns up’ it’s an insured accident. The insurer pays the bank for the remainder of the loan and the owner is off scot-free,” Grigoryev said. “Later, he can apply for another loan because his credit history is unscratched.”
And it’s not only cars going up in flames this year.
“Most interesting,” he said, was the spike in arson claims for insured freight and other retail goods.
“There was a refrigerating unit that stored frozen meat products. It burned up, burned to the ground,” Grigoryev said, adding that the refrigerating unit was set to minus 18 degrees Celsius.
“Tell me, how can a freezer set at this temperature just burn up on its own? It can’t. It’s impossible, there isn’t enough oxygen for anything to burn, but somehow it did.”
Grigoryev also said Ingosstrakh should be valued at $4 billion to $5 billion if its majority shareholder, Oleg Deripaska, were to consider selling his stake in the company.
He dismissed comments by the director of Generali, an Italian firm which owns 38 percent of Ingosstrakh, who said the company would pay 300 million euros ($388.4 million) if it decided that it wanted a controlling interest.
“This is a ridiculous figure ... and it does not reflect reality,” Grigoryev said.
“[Generali] needs to understand how to go about negotiations with a serious majority shareholder and understand the real value of the company.”
In a recent interview, Pyotr Aven, the head of Russia’s largest private lender Alfa Bank, said the bank is ready to restructure Deripaska’s $800 million of debt if the businessman puts up his stake in Ingosstrakh as collateral.
TITLE: Prosecutors Clamp Down on Wage Arrears
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Prosecutors are under orders to bring the maximum possible charges against corporate executives who are delaying salary payments amid a sharp rise in labor law violations, a source in the Investigative Committee said.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has been told to take a harder line on labor violations, including wage arrears, and some directors have already been arrested and punished. Prosecutors should threaten managers with the maximum possible punishments — from fines to being banned from managerial posts, and if warranted, criminal charges, the source said.
The situation with wage arrears is not improving, and the Prosecutor General’s Office is stepping up its efforts to investigate such claims, spokeswoman Marina Gridneva said. In March, according to figures from the State Statistics Service, wage arrears rose 8.3 percent to 8.75 billion rubles ($258 million), with about 500,000 people not receiving their full salaries.
According to figures from the prosecutor’s office, in February two criminal cases were opened because of delayed wages; in March, five criminal cases were filed and eight directors were banned; in April, eight cases were filed, with two directors found guilty and six were banned.
According to figures given to Vedomosti by the Federal Labor and Employment Service, 34 executives were prohibited from holding management posts in the first quarter of 2009, and one was found guilty of criminal labor violations. In all of 2008, complaints over wage arrears led to 23 criminal cases, eight convictions and 149 disqualified mangers.
Prosecutors in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district are looking into a major case, in which a court ordered that Sergei Stepanov, the former deputy general director of Severnaya Ekspeditsiya, be held in custody. He is suspected of not paying 70 million rubles in salaries because of pecuniary self-interest.
Investigators suspect that Stepanov, who was acting as general director and knew of the unpaid wages, paid out more than 100 million rubles to suppliers. Court bailiffs froze company property worth that much to protect the employee’s rights.
Larisa Yeropkina, a spokeswoman for the Yamal-Nenets branch of the Investigative Committee, said Stepanov was the first corporate director arrested there for not paying wages.
Proceedings over wage arrears at the idling BasElCement Pikalevo factory have also gone to court. Prosecutors in Boksitogorsk on April 15 filed a suit on administrative charges against the plant’s director, Anatoly Maslikov, who faces disqualification for 2009 arrears of around 17 million rubles.
TITLE: Yukos Could Bankrupt the Kremlin’s Reputation
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Kiselyov
TEXT: Nearly two months have passed since a second round of charges was brought against former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The proceedings in Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court allege that Khodorkovsky somehow managed to embezzle not only all of the oil that Yukos extracted during the company’s existence but also laundered all of the firm’s profits, including everything Yukos paid to employees, invested in the modernization of equipment or searching for new oil deposits and the amounts spent on improving the social infrastructure of cities where Yukos was drilling for oil. Now, everyone understands that the absurd charges against Khodorkovsky are politically motivated.
Meanwhile, a completely different “Yukos affair” is unfolding in the West — one that could inflict even greater harm to Russia’s reputation.
Last week, the Stockholm Court of Arbitration agreed to hear a complaint by several Spanish investment funds demanding compensation from Russia for losses caused by the government’s forced Yukos bankruptcy. The official sum they are seeking has not been disclosed, but the Covington & Burling legal firm representing the plaintiffs has said more than $10 billion has been lost. This sum only covers investors who held Yukos securities and who live in countries that have bilateral agreements with Russia covering the protection of investments.
Meanwhile, there is a much larger legal claim dating back to 2005, although few people know about this lawsuit because both sides have tried to keep it under wraps. In this case, former Yukos investors are the plaintiffs and Russia is the defendant, and the damages being sought are up to $100 billion. The legal claims rest on Article 26 of the Energy Charter Treaty, which protects investors in the energy sector by prohibiting discrimination as well as biased and arbitrary legal proceedings. According to the plaintiffs, Russia violated Article 26 by dismantling Yukos through the selective application of laws and illegally expropriating the company’s assets. This is by far the largest damages claim in the history of international arbitration.
In the event of an arbitration ruling in a foreign court against the Russian government, Moscow won’t be able to simply ignore the decision. It is possible through legal channels for plaintiffs to recover damages by selling Russian government property located abroad. Recall the 1998 arbitration decision in Stockholm that awarded German entrepreneur Franz Sedelmayer 4.9 million euros ($6.4 million) after he argued that the Kremlin’s property department confiscated his St. Petersburg security company and luxury mansion headquarters in 1994. In a precedent-setting case in March 2008, a German court ruled that Sedelmayer had the right to auction off Russian government property located in Cologne to collect damages. There is a clear difference in size between the Sedelmayer’s award and the Yukos investors’ claim of $100 billion, but what is important in the Sedelmayer case is the precedent that was set for enforcing a court decision against the Russian government in a foreign jurisdiction. This precedent could help Yukos investors collect damages in the event of a favorable arbitration decision in a foreign court.
The lawsuit was filed with the Permanent Court of Arbitration located in the Peace Palace in the Hague. The process itself is an ad hoc arbitration process, which gathers only in order to review the specific case in question. This is a widespread international practice, specified by the rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. Three arbitrators consider the merits of the case. The plaintiff selects one arbitrator, the defendant another, and together they choose the third who presides over the process. In this case, both parties agreed upon Canadian Yves Fortier, a lawyer and former diplomat who has a reputation of being the best arbitration judge in the world. For their arbitrator, Yukos investors chose Charles Poncet, a lawyer with 20 years of experience in international arbitration. The Russian government chose as its arbitrator Stephen Schwebel of the United States, former president of the International Court of Justice. Also representing the interests of Yukos investors is the legal team of Shearman & Sterling, headed by arbitration lawyer Emmanuel Gaillard, an acknowledged expert in this field. It was Gaillard who won a case in Dutch courts in 2008 that set a very important precedent in the Yukos litigation. In this lawsuit, Yukos’ liquidators were forced to pay $850 million to Moravel, the Dutch subsidiary of Yukos majority shareholder GML (formerly Group Menatep). The dispute regarded a loan that Yukos failed to repay Moravel once the government dismantled Yukos after a highly questionable bankruptcy auction.
The fact that Russia has hired the prominent law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton to represent its interests at an annual cost totaling millions of dollars indicates that the Kremlin is very concerned about the case. At issue here is more than just the gigantic sum of the legal damages. The process could set an important precedent in the argument over whether Russia is obligated to obey the provisions of the Energy Charter Treaty that it signed in 1994 but never ratified.
There was a time when the Russian authorities treated the energy treaty seriously, but recently they claim that it is not binding because Russia never ratified the treaty. But Article 45 of the treaty obligates signatories to obey the provisions even while it is waiting to be ratified. What’s more, that same clause makes clear that if a country signing the Energy Charter does not want its rules to become applicable prior to ratification, that country must officially declare its reservations at the moment of signing. But Russia never did this. (There are dozens of cases in which Russia has upheld agreements that it had signed but not yet ratified. The classic example is the Baker-Shevardnadze agreement demarcating the international boundaries in the Bering Strait that was signed during the Soviet period.)
The question of whether the Energy Charter Treaty is binding for Russia was the main subject of a preliminary hearing held in the Hague in late November and early December 2008. If the court finds that the energy agreement is not binding, there will be no grounds for the lawsuit brought by former Yukos investors against Russia.
Precedents are important in international arbitration, and one that was established in August does not work in Russia’s favor. Arbitrators who convened at the request of a Cyprian company making claims against Bulgaria decided to review the case on the basis of the Energy Charter Treaty, even though Bulgaria — like Russia — had only signed the document without ratifying it. Similar decisions concerning the applicability of the agreement prior to its ratification were made in the case of the Petrobart company of Gibralter against Kyrgyzstan, and in the Greek firm Kardassopoulos’ case against Georgia. Thus, chances are very good that the case of the Yukos investors’ case against Russia will be heard by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague.
Dutch arbitrators will find it difficult to ignore all of the precedent-setting court rulings supporting the applicability of the Energy Charter Treaty in cases similar to the Yukos investor lawsuit. The ultimate ruling in favor of Yukos shareholders is easy to predict, although it would not come sooner than some time in 2010.
Yevgeny Kiselyov is a political analyst and hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Raining on Chechnya’s Parade
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Federal authorities ended counterterrorist operations in Chechnya as of midnight April 16. Thank God for that. President Ramzan Kadyrov and his local forces deal with Chechnya’s problems much better than the forces sent from Moscow, which only infuriate the local population.
At least the situation with insurgents is no worse in Chechnya than it is in Ingushetia and Dagestan. In the Chechen city of Zandag, there is an active group of 20 to 30 insurgents operating under field commander Magarbi. In Nozhai-Yurtovsky, Chechnya, three commanders control about 100 insurgents. In the Shatoisky district of Chechnya, Tarkhan Gaziyev has about 30 insurgents, and 15 to 20 more operate under Said-Emin Dadayev in the Sharoisky region. The combined total is obviously more than the 70 insurgents that Chechen officials claim they are battling, but it is still a modest figure.
An insurgency needs the support of the people to succeed. As little as 10 insurgents who have the people’s support are equal in strength to an entire squadron or battalion, but 10 rebels without that support are useless. Chechen insurgents have more difficulty gaining the support of the local population than do those in Ingushetia and Dagestan.
None of the insurgents operating from the mountains are battling for Chechen independence. They are fighting for Allah: Their worldview matches that of Osama bin Laden, and if they come to power they will set up a system based on the Taliban model.
Although Kadyrov’s methods for fighting the insurgents are inhumane, they are effective. The patrimonial system is based on collective responsibility but prohibits murdering someone for no reason. Meanwhile, as Chechen troops burn down insurgents’ homes, the number of insurgents is beginning to decline. In neighboring Dagestan, however, the counterterrorist operations are still directed from Moscow using federal forces. As the brutality of these forces intensifies, the effectiveness of their methods decreases, further multiplying the number of insurgents.
It’s good that the operations were ended last week; there was only one problem with the timing. Two days before operations were called off, the division chief of the Vympel special forces group stepped on a mine and died from his injuries. His wife, who didn’t want to let him go on this mission, was hospitalized for stress-related illness soon after he left. That is why after the explosion, when his legs were blown off and his stomach was ripped open, he told the doctor, “Don’t tell my wife.” He could have been saved, but the helicopter that was sent to evacuate him couldn’t land because of thick fog. When the Vympel chief heard the sound of the helicopter retreating into the distance, he told his men to “stick together.” Within minutes, he died without fear -- in the same way that Russia’s best officers have died in the Caucasus for the last 300 years.
To avoid ruining a joyous celebration -- essentially marking the official end of two Chechen wars since 1994 -- the Vympel officer was buried quietly and secretly in the same way you would bury a cat that was just killed by a car.
The federal authorities could have announced the end of the counterterrorist operations several weeks after a top official from Russia’s elite special forces was blown up by a landmine. But you do not hold a wedding two days after a funeral.
This makes it especially vile and proves that the end of counterterrorist operations does not mark Russia’s victory over the insurgents, but Chechnya’s victory over Russia.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Echoes of the past
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Rock musicians have to get out and do something, rather than linger in their comfortable little worlds, says Mikhail Borzykin, one of Russia’s most politically-minded rock musicians. His band, Televizor, has just released a new album and is getting ready to showcase it at a large concert on Saturday that will also mark the local band’s 25th anniversary.
“It’s not enough just to sing — it’s not heard anymore,” Borzykin, 46, a vehement critic of the Kremlin and a frequent sight at oppositional rallies, said at a press conference at Orlandina club last week.
The new album — the band’s first in five years and perhaps its most powerful yet — is called, tellingly, “Deja Vu,” and contains Borzykin’s most recent, political songs, some of which were performed at rallies and concerts, such as the outdoor show “Rock for Freedom” last August.
“Deja vu, // They have returned // And we’ve vanished without a trace,” he sings in the title track. “Freedom // We were able to die for her // Man, I saw her recently // Advertizing powder for vampires.”
“It is no accident that the album is called ‘Deja Vu,’ because the spiritual and psychological atmosphere today is very similar to that of the early 1980s,” Borzykin said.
“The impunity of the police and the KGB is the same as it was; whatever a policeman did in 1980, he went unpunished. They beat, drove out and prosecuted people criminally, just as they do now. The authorities were immune, uncontrollable and absolutely immoral, and eventually, many started to understand this.”
Televizor formed as a keyboard-driven, “new wave” band in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, in 1984, and Borzykin remembers well the spirit of the time, when many young people were inspired by rock music, which helped them to break out of Soviet boredom and oppression.
“It was a time when interest in this new music, which was totally atypical to the Soviet Union, was so inspiring that people got together in large groups, and it was enough to say that you listened to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones for everybody to understand that this was a like-minded person that you could speak to,” Borzykin said.
But however vibrant the rock scene was at that time, rock musicians and fans were an isolated minority. “Sovok [literally a “shovel,” the derisive term for Soviet-minded people and Soviet ways] was all around, and it hated rock musicians and despised them as bums and drop-outs. When you walked around in black clothes, you could get beaten up just for looking that way. But in 1987 the whole situation changed cardinally, and the masses rushed to listen this same music — it was very amusing.”
When in 1986 Borzykin went political and wrote his classic songs such as “Fed Up,” “Your Daddy Is a Fascist” and “Get Out of Control,” he first attracted the attention of the censor, and Televizor’s live performances were repeatedly banned.
“In 1986, my fellow musicians, who are now famous, criticized me for performing uncensored songs, because the Rock Club [a KGB-controlled organization of “amateur” rock musicians] could have problems because of me, and said that I was a fool to believe that the Communist Party could be overthrown, that the KGB was such a powerful organization that nothing could be done about it,” he said.
“In 1988, those same people would come up to me, shake my hand and say, ‘Well done, you weren’t scared, and now it has become easier for all of us, so you were right. So no one can tell.”
In the album, Borzykin takes different aspects of current Russian life, creating a grim panoramic view. In a song called “A Silly One,” he challenges the perception that if they listeners sit quietly, they will avoid getting into trouble.
“When a jerk in a jeep hits your father // And he is the son of the defense minister // Nobody will touch him // The OMON police truncheons will be the pay-off for the right to say all this.”
This is a reference to then-defense minister Sergei Ivanov’s son, who knocked down and killed a pedestrian on a zebra crossing in Moscow in 2005. Charges against him were dropped.
The song “Cops Kill Young Ones” was inspired by cases like the murder of Yury Chervochkin, a 22-year-old National Bolshevik, who died after being brutally beaten in Serpukhov near Moscow in 2007. An hour before Chervochkin was found unconscious, he had called a news agency for whom he worked and said he was being followed by several men, whom he recognized as police officers from the anti-extremism department.
“There have been several such cases in which people were followed by the police and then killed,” Borzykin said.
“But in their language, ‘to kill’ (ubivat) also means ‘to cripple,’ to beat so severely that the person would require medical treatment. When they detained some antifascists in Moscow, they said, ‘Now we’re going to kill you.’ So there are two meanings to the word.”
A character in the song “Stay Home” does not go to protests because he thinks he is “wise,” but time shows he was just stupid. “Stay home, if you are scared // But then don’t ask // ‘Why?’ and ‘What for?’/ You were a blockhead, you stayed home,” goes the song.
Borzykin himself has been taking part in oppositional rallies since St. Petersburg’s first Dissenters’ March, a large-scale protest rally organized by the pro-democracy coalition the Other Russia, in March 2007.
“I went out and joined it because I’ve had enough,” he said.
“I just went to express my disagreement, and have been to all the Dissenters’ Marches except maybe two when I was away. The marches gather people who protest against in-fill construction, against parks being destroyed, against bureaucrats violating the law. They attract around 50 public organizations as well as ordinary people from the street, there are totally remarkable Siege of Leningrad survivors — 80-year-old women, highly cultured — who are still able to resist the OMON police, without hysterics. I haven’t seen any outrageous behavior there, which surprised and appealed to me. That’s why I express my disagreement in this way.”
Two songs deal with Borzykin’s once like-minded fellow musicians, who have become supporters of the Kremlin, like Konstantin Kinchev of Alisa, who took part in an official concert on Red Square, or Boris Grebenshchikov, the state medal-decorated founder of the group Akvarium. Reputed to be a friend of the Kremlin’s chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov, Grebenshchikov has backed Vladimir Putin’s rule in interviews by arguing that Russia is not ripe for democracy.
“I would like to be kind // And I would like to lie // But we’re on different sides of the barricades,” he sings in “Deja vu.” In “Stuff and Nonsense,” Borzykin suggests that such musicians deliberately deceive themselves and their fans to make life easier for themselves.
“When you’re deceived, you can // Be reputed to be a wise man and great poet // And increase your own wealth and that of the king // And receive medals for it.”
Now, in the late 2000s, Borzykin once again has to deal with censorship and bans, just as he did in 1986. Last year, the local channel 100TV banned a televised live show by Televizor that it had previously scheduled, but when a scandal emerged over the matter, its editor Andrei Radin denied there was political censorship on his channel, claiming that it was done because Borzykin’s lyrics contained profane words.
“They postponed the show twice, and the third time they called us and asked for lyrics,” Borzykin said.
“We provided the lyrics to three of our most recent songs, ‘Nail Down the Cellar,’ ‘Spectacles’ and ‘Stay Home,’ and then the editor of this music program called me and said, ‘Well, you understand that this is not a political program, we can’t play this.’
After the situation was reported on Ekho Moskvy — a radio station allowed to take more liberties than most — Radin made a statement saying that Televizor’s concert had been cancelled due to the language rather than to political reasons, Borzykin said.
“But, in my view, the words that one of the three songs contained were actually euphemisms and vulgarisms, which is proved by all kinds of dictionaries. But thanks to 100TV, we now have a reputation for being foul-mouthed,” he said.
When performing at the Rock for Freedom outdoor concert in August, Borzykin was threatened onstage with detention by a City Hall official, a former FSB officer in charge of security, if he sang the line “Your Putin Is a Fascist” that he had added to his 1980s song “Your Daddy Is a Fascist.” The OMON police were brought to the stage, but Borzykin was hurried away by his fellow musicians after the set.
Although Televizor rarely appears on television channels and radio stations, last week Ekho Moskvy played the group’s song “Gazprom Worker,” a song ridiculing Kremlin rulers as “neo-Orthodox Christian Chekists” and satirically describing St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, who was a Communist Party bureaucrat in Leningrad in the 1980s, as “Empress Matviyenko.”
Comparing the Soviet period of the early 1980s with its ailing Communist leaders who died out to give way to an equally ailing successor who only tightened the screws, to the late 2000s in which the country is ruled by a duo of leaders, resulting in even official television commentators getting confused between the President and the Prime Minister, Borzykin says the public mood is now somewhere around the level it was at in 1984.
“We haven’t yet reached the point where people have started to react to the authorities with a sneer — now it’s like a quiet whisper in the kitchen, but I believe we’re slowly moving toward 1985, 1986 and 1987 [Gorbachev’s glasnost years],” he said.
“I hope time gradually takes us there, cyclically.”
Televizor will perform at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Lensoviet Palace of Culture, located at 42 Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, M.: Petrogradskaya, Tel.: 346 0438. www.televizor.spb.ru
TITLE: Chernov’s
choice
TEXT: The weeks when SKIF, the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival, comes to town, are often the year’s most interesting and full.
Headlined by acts like the indie rock band Deerhoof, Japan’s experimental noise rock/metal band Zeni Geva and ex-Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, the festival also features a number of international and Russian acts that might be worthwhile.
Even more is happening beyond the confines of the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center.
Patrick Wolf will come to perform at A2 on Friday. The 25-year-old British solo artist, whose influences range from cabaret and classical to folk and electronica, is seen by some as a new sensation.
While the world is waiting for his upcoming album “The Bachelor,” due out next month, the NME gave Wolf a rave review for his concert in Cambridge, England last month. “The Wolf boy’s teeth are sharper than ever,” it exclaimed.
According to The Observer, Wolf is “Britain’s most innovative, radical, creative and, yes, ridiculous, pop star, whose overt sexuality, visual flamboyance and unusual lyrics set him apart from all his contemporaries.”
In an unprecedented move, A2 club released a statement announcing that no journalists would be allowed in for free.
Plaid, also performing in the city, is an older band stemming from London’s experimental post-techno scene of the 1990s. Comprising Andy Turner and Ed Handley, the duo will perform at Sochi on Friday.
Lou Rhodes, a singer and songwriter, was part of Lamb, an electronic, trip-hop/drum-and-bass-influenced band formed with Andy Barlow in 1994.
After the band split in 2004, Rhodes trashed electronica and became a folk singer, like her mother.
Although it was announced in February that Lamb would reform to take part in summer festivals in Britain, Rhodes will perform her folk set at BubbleBar on Saturday.
Lithuanian pop singer Alina Orlova, who sings in Lithuanian, English and Russian, is last year’s discovery.
Orlova will perform at Zal Ozhidaniya on Saturday, following Auktyon on Friday.
Internationally, the weekend will be rounded up by Exploited. The British punk veterans will play Glavclub on Sunday.
But next week will also see a Russian debut from Kebous, the band founded by Laurent (Laulo) Bousquet of the French folk-punk band Hurlements d’Leo. Kebous will perform at Sochi on Thursday.
Some leading local bands have also set dates this weekend. Televizor will perform a concert to launch a new album, book and concert film as well as to celebrate its 25th anniversary. See article, pages 5 and 6.
A trio of other local favorites will also perform on Saturday: Kolibri at A2, Iva Nova at The Place and Markscheider Kunst at Zoccolo.
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Unveiling new talent
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Deerhoof, Zeni Geva and ex-Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit will headline the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival (SKIF), which will be held in the city on Friday and Saturday.
Although the festival has shrunk compared to last year’s event, it still offers exciting and diverse music, ranging from indie rock to complex musical experiments.
Formed in 1991 in San Francisco, Deerhoof’s music is not easy to define. “Melodic beauty, as if out of a half-remembered dream, is set against flashes of brilliant innovation that seem to be as much of a surprise to the band as to the listener,” reads their biography on the web site of the Kill Rock Stars label.
Coming from the Japanese punk scene, Zeni Geva perform experimental noise rock, while drummer Liebezeit, a founding member of Krautrock legends Can, will join forces with electronic musician Burnt Friedman to indulge in what they call “Secret Rhythms” — rare, non-Western rhythms.
“I’ve always tried to invite bands that haven’t played in Russia before, and even Russian bands that haven’t yet played in St. Petersburg,” said Natasha Padabed, SKIF’s program director.
She said the acts taking part in SKIF will be interesting to a wide range of the public, from 20-year-old hipsters to prog-rock fans in their fifties.
Now in its 12th year, the festival is held in memory of local musician Sergei Kuryokhin and is presided over by his widow, Anastasia Kuryokhina, who is also the director of the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Arts Center, which was opened on the premises of the former Priboi film theater and is now SKIF’s home.
It was established in New York in 1997 and moved to St. Petersburg the following year.
Concerts are held both in the main room of the venue, where films used to be screened, and in the foyer. Tickets cost 500 rubles in advance and 600 rubles on the door ($15-$18) — potentially a better offer than some club gigs.
“By St. Petersburg’s standards, it’s not expensive at all,” Padabed said.
“When a foreign band performs at a club like The Place, tickets cost no less than 700 rubles, and well-known local band gigs can cost 400 rubles, but we have lots of bands.”
SKIF13
Friday, April 24
MAIN HALL: Z’EV 8 p.m.; KK Null & Z’EV 8:40 p.m.; Ruins Alone 9 p.m.; Zeni Geva 9:30 p.m.; Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit 10:45 p.m.; (SHIFT) 12:15 a.m.; Mujuice vs Dzhem 1 a.m.; Avaspo 2:30 a.m.; Raindear? 4 a.m.
FOYER: Gdeva 8 p.m.; Obshchezhitiye 9:15 p.m.; OvO 10:30 p.m.; Yobkiss 11:30 p.m.; Kania Tieffer 12:45 a.m.; 8Rolek 2 a.m.; MDPN & MADESH
3 a.m.
Sat., 25 April
MAIN HALL: Shogun Kunitoki 8 p.m.; Deerhoof 9:15 p.m.; Pivot 10:30 p.m.; Sir Alice 12 a.m.; Stella 1:15 a.m.; Baaba 2:30 a.m.; 188910 4 a.m. FOYER:
Eject 8 p.m.; Frode Gjerstad & Stale Birkeland 9 p.m.; PosehPosew 10:15 p.m.; Moremoney 11:30 p.m.; Cassiopeia 12:45 a.m.; Otomoto 2 a.m.
All events are held at the Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Center, located at 93 Sredny Prospekt, M.: Vasileostrovskaya or Primorskaya. Tel.: 322 4223, 322 2425. Check www.kuryokhin.ru for updates and schedule.
TITLE: Flying high
AUTHOR: By Luke Ritchie
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Reveling in a pleasing mixture of green, brown and beige, while besieging the diner’s vision on all fronts with butterfly shapes and pictures, as well as a somewhat misplaced garden gnome, Makhaon represents a fairly average (albeit excellently priced) restaurant offering Russian cuisine in the city center. Dedicated to the delicate Makhaon butterfly, (though the reason is not entirely clear), the restaurant consists of three areas — a bar, backroom, and a cozy main room with sofas downstairs.
While the first two rooms are fairly standard, the downstairs room offers greater opportunities for combining the restaurant’s good, cheap food, fairly quick service and capacity to host social functions such as children’s parties. Makhaon also boasts the cheapest prices in St. Petersburg for Franiskaner beer, at 180 rubles ($5).
The waitress hung onto our every request — as long as it was in Russian. Sadly, the music of the night proved to be a regurgitation of Ibiza-style dance music, not entirely appropriate for its delicate, well-lit surroundings. Luckily, the restrooms offer an excellent reprieve.
English menus can be found at Makhaon, but diners should be aware that the prices displayed there are out-of-date, and several of the dishes listed there are no longer available.
The food itself was of a high quality, considering the price, though the eggplants done “in a Cherkessk style” suffered from a general blandness behind their earthy textures and fragrance. The shrimp soup (240 rubles, $7.17), a wonderful composition rich in tomatoes with a real zing to it, contrasted with the traditional northern creamy smoked salmon soup (230 rubles, $6.88) to show the versatility of Makhaon’s flavors, while both were served with traditional lavash bread. Our waitress recommended the ‘Boss’ steak, a flavorsome, tender fillet of steak, covered in a mild pepper sauce and a bargain at 510 rubles, $15.25, and a soft, tender morsel of trout fillet (390 rubles, $11.66) that melted gently in our mouths.
As time progressed towards the dessert, we made an important discovery. Our waitress gently dissuaded us from ordering the ‘Makhaon’ dessert in favor of the cheesecake (180 rubles, $5.38). The dish, although not up to the standard of a true cheesecake, was passable, priced well and creatively decorated. In general, desserts seem to be Makhaon’s weak point.
Drinks, on the other hand, were a true delight, with Bavarian Franziskaner beer and Czech Staropramen lager both on offer, though the web site and English menus still falsely advertise the presence of Irish Kilkenny cream ale. Also of interest were the numerous coffees and fruit juices available, including Jamaican coffee and an apple, carrot and celery mix fruitshake.
Prices for a substantial main course generally range from 250 rubles to 650 rubles, though those with money to burn might opt for the 920 ruble ($28) Argentine steak. All in all, a full course meal for two will equal around 1,800 rubles ($54) without alcohol. A business lunch is available from noon to 4 p.m. for 320 rubles ($9.00), including a starter, main course, side dish and salad.
Makhaon will not leave you with butterflies in your stomach, but something far more substantial and satisfying.
TITLE: S. African Dilemma: Two Wives, One 1st Lady
AUTHOR: By Michelle Faul
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KWANXAMALALA, South Africa — There’s little question who will lead South Africa after Wednesday’s national election. The real mystery lies in who will be the country’s first lady.
As Jacob Zuma, the man tipped to be the country’s next president, voted in his rural Zulu homeland Wednesday, one of his two current wives stood to the side watching patiently as he was mobbed by cheering crowds and reporters.
But Nompumelelo Ntuli, 34, Zuma’s newest and youngest wife, was soon attracting her own crowd of admirers. Women whispered, “Isn’t she beautiful!” as Ntuli, decked out in an apricot and blue tie-dye outfit, beamed happily.
“Jesus is Lord!” is all she would say in response to questions.
Zuma, 67, a Zulu traditionalist and an unabashed polygamist, has married at least four women over the years. Only two are still with him: Sizakele Khumalo, whom he married in 1973, and Ntuli, whom he wed last year.
Of the other two, Kate Mantsho Zuma committed suicide in 2000. He divorced the other, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, in 1998, although she remains a trusted aide and as the country’s foreign affairs minister is expected to join his cabinet. He is said to have more than 10 children.
South African law recognizes such traditional marriages, though fewer and fewer younger South Africans are entering into them because they are seen as expensive and old-fashioned. It remains common among several tribes, though, including the Zulus and Swazis.
To this point, neither of his wives has played much of a public role in his life or politics.
Khumalo presides over the family compound near the school where Zuma voted in KwaNxamalala. She is known to be shy, and was not spotted Wednesday.
Ntuli, who uses her maiden name as is customary in polygamous marriages to differentiate among the wives, has been slightly more active outside the home. She organized a prayer meeting in southeastern South Africa earlier this year, calling for political tolerance, and established a community development foundation.
With Zuma’s African National Congress party predicting an overwhelming victory in the parliamentary election, whose results are expected late Thursday, the first lady question is making headlines. Parliament elects South Africa’s president, putting Zuma in line for the post when the new assembly votes in May.
Neither Zuma or the ANC have offered any answers to the question, saying the matter of his marriages is personal.
Zuma, of course, would not be the first leader in the world with more than one wife. In the Gulf, the number of a ruler’s wives and who among them is paramount are a constant source of rumors. Publicly known first ladies in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and even Saudi Arabia do charity work and some are outspoken women’s rights’ activists — though their pictures never appear in the newspapers.
TITLE: Wade Scores 33, Heat Rebounds To Win 108-93
AUTHOR: By Paul Newberry
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATLANTA — Remember how bad Dwyane Wade and his Miami teammates looked in Game 1 of the playoffs? They were that good in Game 2. Wade scored 33 points, 13 straight to close the first half before he banked in a 3-pointer with 2 1/2 minutes left to finish off the Atlanta Hawks in a 108-93 victory Wednesday night that evened the series before it headed to south Florida.
After scoring only 19 points to open the best-of-seven series Sunday in a 90-64 blowout, Wade eclipsed his point total by halftime.
“He set the tone,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said. “Before I came out to talk to the team, right before the game, there was some joking and laughing in the locker room and I heard him tell everybody to shut up and get their minds on the game.”
The Hawks should have known this wouldn’t be their night when “Spirit,” an actual hawk that flies down from the rafters during the pre-game introductions, decided to hang around for the start of the game. The game had to be halted for a couple of minutes when the fierce-looking bird landed on the top of the backboard; he finally flew to his handler and was led out of the building.
Turns out, the real hawk showed more aggressiveness than any of the players wearing Hawks across the front of their jerseys until the fourth quarter, when Atlanta finally came to life.
After trailing by as many as 18, the home team twice closed within five points — but never got over the hump. Wade delivered the decisive blow when, with the shot clock running down, he threw up a long 3. The shot was errant, but it banked in off the backboard and was just as good as a swish.
Wade’s shot pushed the Heat to a 101-91 lead, and the Hawks were done.
The crowd started heading for the exits, except for a handful of Miami fans who hung around to serenade Wade with chants of “M-V-3!” When the horn sounded, Wade went over and shook hands with Atlanta rap star T.I., sitting at courtside as he waits to begin his yearlong sentence for weapons charges.
Unlike the loss in Game 1, when only one other Miami player scored in double figures, Wade had plenty of help this time. Daequan Cook scored 20 points, going 6-of-9 from 3-point range to make up for an 0-for-5 showing beyond the arc on Sunday night. Jermaine O’Neal scored 19 points, giving the Heat a presence on the inside. Michael Beasley added 12 and Udonis Haslem 10.
Mike Bibby led the Hawks with 18 points, but the home team shot only 44 percent from the field and struggled at the foul line, making 19-of-30.
Game 3 is Saturday in Miami.
The Hawks, who made home-court advantage their No. 1 goal coming into the season, will now have to do something they couldn’t do a year ago: win a playoff game on the road. Atlanta surprised eventual champion Boston by extending the Celtics to seven games but lost four blowouts in Beantown.
If that trend continues, the Heat will be moving on to the second round.
Led by Wade, Miami began to pull away in the second quarter. He capped his 13-point spurt with three straight 3-pointers, giving him 21 points — more than he had in all of Game 1 — heading to the locker room.
The Hawks tried to guard the Miami star with several players. None had much success.
Joe Johnson picked up his fourth foul early in the third quarter and had to sit the rest of the period. Flip Murray might as well have thrown up a white towel. Maurice Evans wasn’t much better, shaking his head in disbelief at one point when Wade swished another jumper.
Led by high-flying Josh Smith, Atlanta ran the Heat out of the building in Game 1. The Heat was held to a season low for points as the Hawks equaled a franchise record for fewest points allowed in a playoff game.
But, after two exhaustive days of practices, meetings and film sessions, Miami looked like a much different team. The Heat played with much more effort, started hitting some shots and established a half-court game that worked much better than trying to run with the Hawks.
They frustrated Smith, who had a couple of dunks but was held to 17 points. They held Johnson, Atlanta’s leading scorer, to 16 points on 5-of-13 shooting.
Miami was on the verge of a blowout, but the Hawks closed the third quarter on a 7-0 run. Murray had a steal and layup, then hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer after a nifty bit of passing left him open outside the arc.
The arena was in a frenzy when Hawks closed to 94-89 on Murray’s three-point play, and Smith scored on a drive to make it 96-91. After Haslem hit a jumper to push the lead back to seven, the Hawks came up empty on three straight possessions.
Finally, Wade had seen enough. His ricochet 3 ended any thoughts of a comeback.
TITLE: Keane Back In Game
As Boss
At Ipswich
AUTHOR: By Angus MacKinnon
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — Roy Keane’s eventful football career took another unexpected twist on Thursday when he was appointed the new manager of Championship club Ipswich.
The former Manchester United and Republic of Ireland midfielder has signed a two-year contract at the Suffolk club, who sacked former boss Jim Magilton on Wednesday after it became clear that Ipswich had no chance of securing promotion to the Premier League this season.
Keane, 37, has been out of work since leaving Sunderland in December but recently indicated that he was ready for a new challenge.
“I truly believe that I am joining a club that has the potential, ambition and infrastructure to once again be a Premier League side,” the Irishman said.
“The club’s owner and chief executive impressed upon me their total focus on achieving this quest at the earliest opportunity and I can’t wait to get started.”
Having taken Sunderland from fourth from bottom of the Championship into the Premier League in 2006-07, his first season in charge, Keane knows what it takes to get teams into the top flight of English football.
But the abrupt manner of his departure from Sunderland raised questions about whether his character — uncompromising to admirers; insular and volatile to his critics — is suited to the multi-faceted task of managing a football club.
After he left Sunderland, his old manager at Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson, was among a number of figures who questioned whether he would ever return to management.
Keane subsequently explained that the decision to leave had been triggered by a breakdown in his relationship with Ellis Short, an American investor who had started to question the way the Irishman was running the club at a time when Sunderland were struggling on the pitch.
Whatever the truth of what went on at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, the way events were perceived meant Keane was unlikely to be offered the chance of managing a Premier League club.
In a recent interview with the Irish Times however he stressed that he was willing to take a step back down to the Championship and move from his home in the Manchester suburbs, which, to the irritation of Short, he had not done for Sunderland.
At Ipswich, he is expected to be backed with substantial funds with the owner, Marcus Evans, having already invested 12 million pounds (17.4 million dollars) on new players.
That investment did not produce the desired results under Magilton, who had been in charge since June 2006 and left with the club in ninth place in the table, 12 points adrift of the final play-off spot.
TITLE: Scores Killed in Suicide Bomber Blasts in Iraq
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BAGHDAD — At least 70 people were killed in two suicide bomb attacks in Iraq on Thursday as the military announced the capture of the Al-Qaeda chief in Iraq.
In the deadliest strike, at least 45 people, including several Iranian pilgrims, were killed when a suicide bomber struck a restaurant in a town northeast of Baghdad, a military official said.
Another 28 people, including children, were killed in a suicide attack on a police patrol in southeastern Baghdad, defense and interior ministry officials told AFP.
The bloodshed was unleashed as the Iraq military announced the arrest of one of the country’s most wanted men, the head of the Iraqi wing of Al-Qaeda which calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq.
“Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was arrested today in Baghdad,” Baghdad security spokesman Major General Qasim Atta told AFP.
“It was Iraqi forces who arrested him based on an intelligence tip-off from someone,” he added.
Security has improved dramatically in Iraq over the past two years as local and U.S. forces crack down on Al-Qaeda fighters, but attacks targeting security forces are still common in some parts of the country, including the capital.
On Thursday, at least 45 people were killed on when a suicide bomber struck a restaurant in a town near the restive city of Baquba, a military official said.
The official said another 55 people were wounded in the attack on the restaurant, which was packed with Iranian pilgrims on their way to the Shiite holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad.
The attack took place in the town of Muqdadiyah northeast of Baquba, the capital of the ethnically and religiously mixed Diyala province, which still sees sporadic attacks despite security improvements elsewhere in Iraq.
In southeastern Baghdad, another 28 people were killed in the attack on a police patrol in the mixed district of Al-Riyadh, officials said.
“Iraqi police were distributing aid to displaced families when a suicide bomber blew himself up,” an interior ministry official said. “At least 10 police and five children are among 28 dead.”
Fifty-two people were also wounded in the blast, defense and interior ministry officials said.
A second interior ministry source said the suicide bomber was a woman, but this could not immediately be confirmed.
A hospital official told AFP that families were fighting to discover if their relatives were listed as dead on a casualty list.
Sixteen people, including the 10 policemen, five children and a woman, were confirmed dead at the hospital, he said, with 25 wounded receiving treatment there.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki warned on Sunday at a meeting of senior security officials that the danger from “terrorist cells” was far from over.
His remarks followed an upsurge in violence over recent weeks after several months in which there was a steady reduction in the number of attacks.
“We have succeeded in re-establishing security, but maintaining it is more difficult,” Maliki told the meeting of senior police officers.
Iraq’s 560,000 police and 260,000 soldiers are to assume greater responsibility for security as U.S. forces withdraw from all cities by June 30 and from the country as a whole by the end of 2011.
Violence has plummeted over the past two years as American and Iraqi forces have allied with local tribes and former insurgents to bring calm to vast swathes of the country.
However, more than 100 people have been killed since the start of April, according to an AFP count based on reports from security officials.
TITLE: Fishy Warning Left on Doorstep Of Newspaper
AUTHOR: By Kristen Gelineau
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SYDNEY — Journalists have a lot to be nervous about lately: layoffs, furloughs, newspaper closures. But reporters at an Australian paper may have received the scariest threat of the day when a live shark was left on their doorstep.
Police said the two-foot creature was spotted early Wednesday by a man who was leaving a McDonald’s restaurant next door to the offices of The Standard in the small Victoria state town of Warrnambool.
When police arrived, the animal — believed to be a relatively harmless Port Jackson shark — was still breathing, Warrnambool police Sgt. Tom Revell said Thursday.
So officers borrowed a bucket of water from McDonald’s, placed the shark inside it and drove to a nearby pier, where they released the creature back into the ocean.
But why would someone dump a shark outside the newspaper?
“We’ve got no idea why,” Revell said. Nor does the newspaper’s chief of staff, Glen Bernoth, who learned of the bizarre incident in a middle-of-the-night phone call from a friend who’d heard about it on his police scanner.
“Naturally, I assumed it was some sort of prank or something, but I’d been asleep for a couple hours,” Bernoth said with a laugh Thursday.
TITLE: Organizers of Vancouver Olympics in Court
AUTHOR: By Jeremy Hainsworth
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Vancouver Olympic organizers were in court Wednesday, arguing that the decision to exclude women ski jumpers from competition next year is not theirs to reverse.
Fifteen ski jumpers are in a Canadian court this week seeking a ruling that women be allowed to compete in the event at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Three men’s events are planned at February’s Games but none are scheduled for women.
The women — from the U.S., Canada, Slovenia, Austria, Germany and Norway — say that their exclusion by the International Olympic Committee is a violation of Canadian human rights laws. But VANOC lawyer George Macintosh said the IOC’s decision on what sports are included in the Games is governed by Swiss law.
“The IOC controls every imaginable aspect of an Olympic Games,” he said.
The IOC says women’s ski jumping simply doesn’t have enough international competitions to merit inclusion. VANOC spokeswoman Renee Smith-Valade told reporters they jumpers will have to wait until 2014 to compete as the program set in 2006 cannot be changed.
American jumper Lindsay Van, who won the first women’s World Championship in February in the Czech Republic, said the IOC’s attitude is patronizing and that the Games should be subject to the laws of host countries.
“Why in Canada would we follow Swiss law?” she said. “I find it disgusting they’re not trying to improve the Games by extending gender equity to ski jumping.”
The women want the court to rule the men’s ski jumping be canceled if they are not allowed to compete.
The women's lawyer, Ross Clark, Monday told British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon the exclusion of female jumpers was “a direct assault on their human dignity.”
The lawsuit, however, is against the Vancouver Organizing Committee and not the IOC.
Macintosh told Fenlon the decision on included sports is not VANOC’s to make.
Clark said the Canadian government and British Columbia governments effectively control the Games and that therefore VANOC must comply with Canadian law.
Macintosh said no one level of government has effective control of the Games and the host agreements signed with the IOC make the international sport body the supreme Games regulatory body.
“The IOC controls VANOC,” he said. “No government does.”
He said the host contract the IOC signed with Vancouver in 2003 is not negotiable.
Clark said the organizers on Monday were “blindly accepting” IOC rules which “perpetuates the historical prejudice against women.”
VANOC told the court it fears that a victory for the women could mean the IOC would never again award an Olympics to Canada.
TITLE: China Demonstrates Its Naval Prowess
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BEIJING — China paraded its warships and nuclear submarines Thursday in an unprecedented display of maritime might attended by 14 other nations to mark the 60th anniversary of its navy.
Fifty-six Chinese subs, destroyers, frigates, missile boats and planes were displayed off the eastern port city of Qingdao just weeks after tensions flared following a naval stand-off with the United States in the South China Sea.
The review — only the fourth to take place since 1949 and the first on such a large and international scale — was opened by two of China’s nuclear-powered submarines, the first time in history they have been unveiled to the public.
President Hu Jintao boarded the destroyer Shijiazhuang, after having sought to reassure the heads of foreign navy delegations that China’s maritime power posed no threat to anyone.
“Both now and in the future, no matter to what extent we develop, China will never seek hegemony,” he said, in comments reported by the official Xinhua news agency.
But Jean-Pierre Cabestan, professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University, described the event as “a show of force, of power”.
“It’s a public relations display with a double message — China as an integrator, showing it is keeping with the rules of the international game, but also showing it is now in the big power arena,” he said.
Ships from 14 countries, including the United States, Russia and France, took part in the fleet review, which Chinese officials have said is aimed at promoting understanding about China’s military development.
“Suspicions about China being a ‘threat’ to world security are mostly because of... lack of understanding about China,” Ding Yiping, deputy commander of the navy, told Xinhua this week.
China has always stressed its military build-up, watched with a wary eye by the United States — which accuses the Chinese of a lack of transparency — does not pose a threat to other countries.
A number of recent incidents at sea have heightened tensions.
In March, the U.S. complained that Chinese boats had harassed one of its ships in the South China Sea, forcing it to take action to prevent a collision.
China denied the claim and accused the U.S. vessel of “illegal activities”.
Early this month, China’s dispatch of civilian patrol vessels to waters around disputed islands in the same sea — the Spratlys — sparked concern from the Philippines, which also claims sovereignty over the archipelago.
China’s increasing maritime confidence was also reflected in its decision to send ships to the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, for an anti-piracy assignment in the first potential combat mission for its navy beyond its territorial waters.
And the navy’s commander-in-chief, Admiral Wu Shengli, said this month China would develop a new generation of warships and aircraft to give it much longer-range capabilities.
But Cabestan said China’s navy still lagged behind other countries, with no aircraft carriers despite plans to build some.
“In terms of technology they are still far behind the Americans, the Japanese, or even the Russians, but in tonnage, they have now become the first navy in Asia,” he said.
The United States, which has sent navy chief Admiral Gary Roughead and the destroyer USS Fitzgerald to the event, would be watching the parade very closely, Cabestan said.
TITLE: Todd Woodbridge Slams India Tennis Decision on Venue
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: SYDNEY — Former Davis Cup great Todd Woodbridge has criticised the International Tennis Federation’s insistence that Australia play a tie against India in Chennai despite security concerns.
Woodbridge said the ITF’s stance was “totally irresponsible” and had the potential to end the Australian star player Lleyton Hewitt’s participation in the competition.
The ITF last week rejected Tennis Australia’s request the Asia-Oceania Group I play-off be moved to a neutral venue outside India in the wake of November’s Mumbai terrorist attacks.
Woodbridge said the ITF had not listened to concerns about the May 8-10 tie, even though other events such as the Indian Premier League had been moved to neutral venues.