SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1543 (4), Friday, January 29, 2010
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TITLE: GM Sells Saab After Russian Bows Out
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Swedish carmaker Saab got a new lease of life after U.S. owner General Motors signed a binding agreement with Spyker — on condition that the tiny custom-built sports carmaker leave its Russian investor out of the equation.
Financing for the deal has not yet been approved by European Union regulators, but both companies announced the agreement confidently late Tuesday. Netherlands-based Spyker Cars will pay $74 million to GM for Saab, while the Swedish government will guarantee a loan of 400 million euros ($563 million) from the European Investment Bank. GM will also get preferred shares worth $326 million in the new company Saab Spyker Automobiles.
As part of the deal, Spyker CEO Victor Muller will purchase Russian investor Vladimir Antonov’s 30 percent stake in Spyker through Tenaci Capital, a company that he fully owns, Spyker said in a statement.
Antonov, along with two other members of the Spyker supervisory board, will give up their seats after the deal is closed. In addition, Tenaci will repay 57 million euros that Spyker owes to “financial institutions, controlled directly or indirectly by Antonov,” the statement said.
Negotiations between GM and Spyker had stretched out for weeks, and GM made it clear in its announcement of the deal that Antonov had been a major point of contention.
Restructuring the ownership without “the Russian investor” was “part of finding a sustainable solution for Saab. … I’ll just leave it at that,” John Smith, GM’s vice president for corporate planning, said in a telephone conference call late Tuesday.
Antonov’s Convers Group is “not directly” investing money into Spyker for the Saab deal, he added, declining to elaborate.
Smith previously expressed concerns about Russian involvement during negotiations with Magna and Sberbank over GM’s Opel unit. He said he feared that GM would be “shipping valuable intellectual property to destinations unknown” with the Opel deal, which was never completed.
GM’s fear is the same with Saab, that “up to date engineering, technology, architecture will be compulsively used or disused, or sold off by a Russian investor,” said Ian Fletcher, an auto analyst with IHS Global Insight.
It was not clear how much Antonov would collect for his 4.6 million shares in Spyker, whose stock price has soared by 160 percent since the beginning of the year, including by 40 percent on Wednesday. Spyker also might be inclined to overpay for his stake because it was crucial for reaching a purchase agreement, Fletcher said.
In any case, Antonov is likely to be getting a good deal, he said. “He may be out at the right time — nobody knows how successful this is going to be,” he said.
GM and Spyker are keeping mum regarding the circumstances of Antonov’s buyout and whether his presence was the deal breaker in Spyker’s first two bids, which GM turned away.
In the Spyker statement, CEO Muller extended “sincere gratitude to Vladimir Antonov for his formidable support during the past two years” that “allowed Spyker to get to the point that this transaction was made possible.”
Antonov’s Russian assets cover a handful of banks, including Investbank, which he controls through Convers Group together with his father, Alexander. Alexander Antonov was the target of an apparent contract murder last spring, surviving 18 gunshots on a Moscow street.
Antonov bought the Spyker stake in 2007, in the precrisis era of foreign vanity purchases by wealthy Russians, the most famous of which was Roman Abramovich’s acquisition of Britain’s Chelsea football team.
“Spyker cars are beautiful things, more like trinkets than sports cars, which may be what attracted him to invest,” Fletcher said.
A spokeswoman at Investbank, where Vladimir Antonov is on the managing board, declined to connect a reporter with Antonov on Wednesday and referred all questions to Spyker.
TITLE: Top Investigator Reaches Out to Investors
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel and Amy Beavin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The country’s top investigator said crime and corruption are hurting the investment climate and that the best solution would be to update legislation and create a new agency to tackle financial crime.
The rare admission from a law enforcement official was all the more unusual because it came from Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin, whose own agency has been accused of harming the investment climate by conducting corruption-inspired investigations against businesses.
President Dmitry Medvedev has made the fight against “legal nihilism” a hallmark of his presidency and has criticized law enforcement agencies for “nightmarizing” businesses.
But observers said Bastrykin’s suggestions would do little to assuage investors’ concerns that the law is being applied selectively.
Bastrykin, in an interview published Tuesday in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the government’s official mouthpiece, said his agency had a task to improve Russia’s investment climate, but it could not do it alone. He proposed that a new agency be created to fight financial violations.
“Maybe it would be good … to create a unified government agency, for instance on the basis of the Financial Monitoring Service,” Bastrykin said.
Alternatively, he suggested setting up subunits in existing ministries and agencies.
He quoted a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers last year that ranked Russia as the world’s leader in economic crime.
“What frightens foreign investors most in our country is the risk of their assets being taken away. That is what 64 percent of respondents said, and 48 percent were worried about corruption,” Bastrykin said.
He also complained that a lack of definitions in the Criminal Code allows for a wide range of wrongdoing. As an example, he cited Article 159, which deals with fraud.
“You can detect ‘an abuse of trust’ in a lot of actions if you want,” he said.
He suggested that white-collar crime should no longer be punished with prison sentences. “One should not equate murderers and rapists with people who have committed economic crimes,” he said.
Alexander Nadmitov, who heads a Moscow-based law firm specializing in corporate cases, said the main problem is that the law is not consistently enforced. “I can only welcome the decision to fill in holes in the current legislation. The more detailed the laws, the better. However, there should be no exceptions in how laws are applied,” he said.
Investors have frequently pointed to Khodorkovsky and his oil firm, Yukos, which was forced into bankruptcy and snapped up by state companies five years ago, as an example of how courts apply the law selectively.
Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Yury Shmidt said Bastrykin had failed to address concerns that there is no rule of law.
“One can write more laws, but they will not solve the problem of legal nihilism,” Shmidt said by telephone in St. Petersburg.
He said the main problem is that laws are applied in an atmosphere of corruption and without an independent judiciary. “So far the government is not prepared to sacrifice its own interests for the sake of the rule of law,” he said.
TITLE: Ecologists Concerned About State of Forests
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Enthusiasts from the international environmental group Greenpeace held a flash-mob Thursday outside the presidential administration reception office, as volunteers dressed up as tree stumps handed over a petition from Russian citizens asking for the country’s state forestry service to be restored.
Since Russia adopted its new Forestry Code, which has left Russia’s state foresters and forest wardens out of work, reports have been flooding in from all over the country about illegal forest devastation and land seizures. The situation in the Leningrad Oblast is one of the most alarming in Russia, along with the region of Altai and the Far East, according to Greenpeace.
“Due to its location next to the Finnish border and its wealth of timber, the Leningrad Oblast has found itself in a precarious situation,” said Alexander Yaroshenko, head of Greenpeace’s Forestry program. “The demand for timber is particularly high here, as is the temptation to get into the illegal business of unsanctioned logging. We have documented numerous cases of illegal land seizures and forest devastation here.”
Russia’s ecologists demand that the State Duma pass a law that would reintroduce the job of state forest inspector. At least 20,000 forest wardens are needed in order to provide even basic control over the country’s vast forestry resources, they say.
“So-called ‘black woodcutters’ are multiplying across the country as we speak, as everyone knows the forests are barely monitored,” said Maria Musatova, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace St. Petersburg.
The local branch of Greenpeace and other environmental groups regularly receive hundreds of complaints from residents of the Leningrad Oblast as well as from St. Petersburg residents who have dachas, or summer cottages, outside the city. Their letters complain of local woods being ravaged by “black woodcutters” and filling up with illegal garbage sites. Many hectares of local forests are cut down to make space for various kinds of construction sites, ecologists say.
The Leningrad Oblast occupies first place in Russia for the amount of forest land leased to private companies. A total of 117 plots of land covering 3,200 hectares are currently under the control of private entities in the area, according to Greenpeace.
In many cases, individual businessmen were allowed to participate in forestry auctions, although such practice is against the law.
Private enterprises located in the Leningrad Oblast often fell trees in order to illegally develop quarries. In the most recent case documented by ecologists on Dec. 29, 2009, a quarry was illegally developed in the Medny Zavod settlement of the Vsevolozhsk district just outside St. Petersburg.
According to statistics gathered by Russian ecologists, between 2005 and 2009, the federal budget lost out on at least 1.5 billion rubles ($50 million) as a result of illegal deforestation.
Musatova stressed it is vital that the forestry service does not become part of any state organization engaged in forestry management as it would create a conflict of interests.
After the Russian Environmental Ministry was abolished by then-President Vladimir Putin in 2000, its functions were handed over to the state agencies that manage the country’s natural resources. Ecologists complain the decision led to catastrophic consequences, as state officials routinely found themselves in the position of having to choose between protecting the environment and making a profit.
“Needless to say, the vast majority of bureaucrats decided the issue once and for all, and only cared about cutting a good deal,” said Musatova.
“If the state forestry service is not reinstalled in the very near future, no sane investor will put any money into the forestry industry, as there are simply too many risks and too few guarantees — unless you get involved with the criminals,” said Mikhail Kreindlin, a leading expert with Greenpeace’s Forestry program.
TITLE: Ivanov: Heroin National Problem
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Heroin has become a national pandemic, with the number of drug users soaring 20 times during the past 20 years, Federal Drug Control Service chief Viktor Ivanov said Wednesday.
“We have every reason to assert that Afghan heroin has become a national problem for Russia,” Ivanov said at a news conference, Interfax reported.
He estimated that up to 2.5 million Russians are drug users, 90 percent of whom are addicted to heroin.
He said more than 24,000 people are registered as drug users in Moscow, but the real number could be 10 times higher.
Federal Drug Control Service officials trumpeted their efforts to crack down on drugs at the news conference. Moscow police seized 338 kilograms of illegal drugs, including 240 kilograms of heroin, last year, said one official, Vyacheslav Davydov. He did not provide comparative figures.
Davydov said 856 foreigners were arrested for drug-related crimes, a 30 percent increase from 2008. Eighty percent of the detainees were from Central Asia or the Caucasus, and 20 percent were repeat offenders, he said.
Officials said the drug control agency planned to unveil a new strategy to fight drugs soon.
Davydov, meanwhile, complained that the Internet complicated the agency’s work because it provides easy access to information on how to prepare and distribute drugs.
He also said drug traffickers were growing more sophisticated and described how difficult they were to track.
“One person handles the so-called ‘traceless’ drug stashing. It could be in a cigarette pack or behind a radiator in an apartment entrance. Finding this stash is extremely difficult. Another connects the client and the dealer, a third collects the money and sends it electronically or through money transfers like Western Union,” Davydov said.
Ivanov reiterated earlier calls for a crackdown on Afghanistan’s heroin production, noting that the country produces twice as much heroin as was produced globally 10 years ago and urging drastic steps, including UN-backed measures.
TITLE: Arms Exporter Sees No Obstacle to Deal
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The state’s arms exporter announced Thursday that it had set a new sales record in 2009 despite the global financial crunch and said it saw no formal obstacles to selling weapons to Iran.
Anatoly Isaikin, head of Rosoboronexport, which enjoys a monopoly on selling finished defense hardware, said his agency’s 2009 revenues grew to $7.4 billion, or 10 percent more than in 2008.
“In 2010, we expect to earn no less than in 2009,” Isaikin told reporters.
Rosoboronexport’s revenues have soared 2.4 times since 2001, when it was first established.
Also, Rosoboronexport’s portfolio of contracts swelled a record $15 billion last year to reach $34 billion, Isaikin said.
Warplanes and helicopters made up for half of 2009 arms exports, while hardware for land forces accounted for 19 percent, foreign navies accounted for almost 14 percent and air defense systems accounted for more than 13 percent.
India held onto its crown as Russia’s top client, followed by Algeria, China, Malaysia, Venezuela and Syria, Rosoboronexport said.
Isaikin made a point Thursday of saying that Russia has a right to provide Iran with any weapon system because the Islamic Republic is not under any international arms embargo. He said the powerful S-300 air defense system that Iran covets is a defensive weapon.
Israel and the United States fiercely oppose a contract that Moscow has signed with Tehran to supply its military with S-300s, which would boost Iran’s capacity to fight off possible air strikes. The contract was signed in late 2005, but no deliveries have taken place so far.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Russia might support possible new sanctions against Iran that are being called by world powers to halt its nuclear program.
“It is clear that one can’t wait forever, and our partners are already talking about the need to discuss further measures in the UN Security Council,” Lavrov said.
TITLE: Ismailov Could Return to Open Luxury Hotel
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Property mogul Telman Ismailov, who left Russia last year after his Cherkizovsky Market was shut in a politically tinged crackdown, may be planning a return to Russia to build a new luxury hotel.
Ismailov is looking to bring the Mardan Palace chain to Moscow, Sochi and Istanbul, said Cumhur Ozen, head of the company’s hotel in Antalya.
“The spot for the Moscow hotel has been designated. Construction will start soon. We are still seeking a location in Sochi and Istanbul. Each of them will be as magnificent as our hotel in Antalya,” he said, the Hurriyet Daily News newspaper reported last week.
A receptionist who answered the phone at the Mardan Palace in Antalya on Tuesday said neither Ozen nor spokespeople for him were immediately available to comment. A spokeswoman for City Hall’s construction department could not immediately confirm that a location had been selected for a Mardan Palace hotel in Moscow.
Ismailov opened the 560-room Mardan Palace hotel in Antalya, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast in May, hosting celebrities including Paris Hilton and Richard Gere, as well as Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and his wife, Yelena Baturina.
The resort reportedly cost $1.2 billion to build and charges up to 15,120 euros ($21,300) per night for its best rooms.
Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly asked why no one had been arrested for $2 billion in contraband found at Cherkizovsky in 2008. The comments prompted a crackdown that ultimately saw the sprawling bazaar in eastern Moscow shut down for safety violations.
Putin appeared to confirm suspicions that the show of opulence had been ill timed.
“I don’t see any crime here — the question is whether it is done legally,” Putin said in December in response to a question about the hotel opening. “If there are resources for investment, it wouldn’t be bad to realize them in Russia. For example, one could invest money into building hotels in Sochi for the 2014 Olympics.”
It remains to be seen, however, whether the comments were an invitation back or a warning to others. Ismailov has steered clear of Russia since Cherkizovsky was shuttered.
Citing sources close to Ismailov’s AST Group, RIA-Novosti reported Tuesday that the businessman planned to return to Moscow by the end of the month to take up projects in Moscow and Sochi. But a source close to the Ismailov family denied that report, saying he was focused on his Turkish projects, Interfax reported.
The source close to Ismailov’s family told Interfax that the developments attributed to him in Moscow and Sochi no longer had “anything to do with him” and would be developed by other companies.
It was unclear whether the source was referring to new projects or to Ismailov’s finished properties, which include Moscow landmarks like the Leningradskaya hotel and the Praga restaurant.
The St. Petersburg Times was not able to reach AST, which does not list any contact information on its web site.
It is unlikely that Mardan Palace would build the same kind of hotel in Moscow, said Stanislav Ivashkevich, associate director of the hospitality department at CB Richard Ellis. “There is no sense in building the same kind of resort. It would be three times more expensive in Moscow,” he said.
There are still sites for a five-star hotel in central Moscow, most notably the undeveloped Golden Island, across the Moscow River from the Kremlin, Ivashkevich added.
Ismailov could also be planning a return to the retail market in the Moscow region, the RBK Daily newspaper reported Monday. His son Alekper Ismailov is in talks between AST Group and the regional government to purchase 50 hectares to build a new market, the report said.
The press secretary for the Moscow region’s economic department could not confirm whether the region was in talks with AST because she was not authorized to talk to the press.
TITLE: Chechen Cleared in Klebnikov’s Slaying
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Investigators have dropped charges against a Chechen suspect in the killing of Paul Klebnikov, the former editor of Forbes Russian edition, a news report said Wednesday.
Magomed Edilsultanov showed up voluntarily for questioning at the Moscow offices of the Investigative Committee, Rosbalt.ru reported. After questioning, he was released and the murder charges were dropped, the report said, citing an unidentified law enforcement source.
An Investigative Committee spokeswoman refused to immediately comment on the report.
Edilsultanov was among a group of Chechens accused by police of participating in the killing of Klebnikov, a U.S. journalist who was shot outside his office in an apparent contract hit in July 2004. He was 41.
Investigators believe that Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, a colorful Chechen businessman whom Klebnikov interviewed extensively for his 2003 book “Conversations With a Barbarian,” ordered Klebnikov’s killing.
Nukhayev has also been linked to the 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya. Investigators are currently preparing formal charges against him, Rosbalt said.
Two other suspects in Klebnikov’s killing, Kazbek Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev, were acquitted in a 2006 trial, while Nukhayev and another Chechen suspect, Magomed Dukuzov, remain at large.
Last December, yet another suspect, Marat Valeyev, was released from custody and cleared of charges because of an absence of evidence.
Edilsultanov was also accused in connection with the killing of former Chechen Deputy Prime Minister Yan Sergunin, who was shot in Moscow just two weeks before Klebnikov’s murder.
“The theory that he took part in the two high-profile murders could not be confirmed,” the law enforcement source told Rosbalt.
Meanwhile, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov accused self-exiled businessman Boris Berezovsky of ordering the killing of Natalya Estemirova, the Chechen human rights campaigner who was shot last year.
“Estemirova’s murder was engineered by the same person who killed Politkovskaya and [Kremlin critic Alexander] Litvinenko. I am absolutely convinced that this was the work of Berezovsky,” Kadyrov said in an interview with RT state television published Wednesday.
Berezovsky previously has been linked by Russian officials to Politkovskaya’s murder. He denies wrongdoing.
Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, the suspected organizer of Politkovskaya’s murder, said last year that investigators had urged him to falsely incriminate either Kadyrov or Berezovsky.
TITLE: PM’s Favorite Rocker Joins the State Duma
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Nikolai Rastorguyev, whom Prime Minister Vladimir Putin calls his favorite folk rock singer and who has no experience in politics, became a State Duma deputy with United Russia on Wednesday.
The front man for the rock band Lyube fills a seat vacated by Sergei Smetanyuk, who was recently appointed deputy presidential envoy to the Urals Federal District.
Rastorguyev said he was looking forward to starting his “interesting” new job.
“I will try to jump into the swing of things as soon as possible,” he said in a statement to The St. Petersburg Times.
A senior United Russia official, Andrei Vorobyov, praised Rastorguyev for providing Russian youth with a “patriotic education” with his music and said he expected the musician to continue his efforts in the Duma.
“This mandate will give him additional opportunities to systematically develop such programs, and we will support him in that,” Vorobyov said in a statement.
Rastorguyev, 53, will represent the southern Stavropol region in the Duma. He was on United Russia’s ticket in the 2007 Duma elections but did not get assigned a seat.
Rastorguyev is known to have a good relationship with Putin, who even invited the singer to his summer residence in Sochi for supper while the band was on tour there in the summer of 2002.
“Many people like Lyube, and this is understandable because they sing about us, about the country,” Putin told reporters at that time.
Putin has described Rastorguyev as his favorite Russian folk rock singer.
In a nod to Putin’s music preferences, state television played one of Lyube’s songs while showing Putin and President-elect Dmitry Medvedev walking out of the Kremlin after Medvedev’s election victory in March 2008.
Rastorguyev has called United Russia “the mighty party that brings to life all of Putin’s plans.”
Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst with the Institute of National Strategy, downplayed the notion that Rastorguyev’s political career would be serious. “He is just Putin’s favorite singer who got this job as a gift,” he said.
Lyube gained popularity during the Mikhail Gorbachev era and has often featured patriotic themes on stage. In concert, Rastorguyev often wears World War II-style military fatigues — a soldier’s coat, breeches and knee-high boots — as he sings an eclectic mix of humorous marches and pastoral ballads, often about the military and the marines.
In 1996, Rastorguyev wrote the song “Battalion Commander” and dedicated it to charismatic General Alexander Lebed, then a presidential candidate and later a Krasnoyarsk governor who died in a helicopter crash in 2002.
In another well-known song, he half-jokingly asserts Russian claims to Alaska, which the tsarist government sold to the United States in 1867.
Music critic Boris Barabanov noted that Rastorguyev’s appointment to the Duma puts him in the company of United Russia celebrities like Fyodor Bondarchuk, son of legendary film director Sergei Bondarchuk. Fyodor Bondarchuk directed the Afghan War film “The 9th Company,” which was praised by Putin.
“We have a leading patriotic filmmaker, and we have a leading patriotic singer,” Barabanov said.
Other celebrity deputies with United Russia include former gymnastic champions Alina Kabayeva and Svetlana Khorkina, as well as Soviet crooner Iosif Kobzon.
Rastorguyev is not the only member of Lyube to delve into politics. The band’s former guitar player Alexander Vainberg is deputy speaker of the Nizhny Novgorod regional legislature.
TITLE: Fall in Number of Children Stirs Population Fears
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The proportion of children in Russia’s population has shrunk by nearly a third since 1995 and is not expected to rebound any time soon, demographers said.
President Dmitry Medvedev last week touted the end of a 15-year drop in the country’s overall population, but the decline in children raises the specter of future demographic problems.
The number of children under 18 has fallen to 26.5 million now from 38 million in 1995 and 33.5 million in 2000, according to a new report by UNICEF and the State Statistics Service.
“For historical and demographic reasons, the child population in Russia decreased by approximately 12 million over the last 13 years. This is an average of 1 million each year,” said Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF’s representative in Russia.
“This in itself poses important development challenges, and optimizing the investment in childhood makes it even more important and urgent for the country,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
The country’s overall population has shrunk by 6 million since the Soviet collapse in 1991 because of economic hardship, rampant alcoholism and other factors.
“There were a lot of babies born in the 1980s but few in the 1990s, and now we can see the result of the decline,” said Anatoly Vishnevsky, head of the Demography Institute at the Higher School of Economics.
“Later the birth rate started to increase, but not by much,” he added.
Since the number of children is now low, the birth rate will not be able to increase for the next two decades, he said.
“The number of children might increase, but not significantly,” Vishnevsky said, adding that there will not be enough women for reproduction.
Last week, Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova warned that a host of negative factors needed to be tackled — including a looming drop in women in their fertile years and sky-high abortion rates — to overturn the country’s overall demographic decline.
Golikova told Medvedev that preliminary statistics for last year showed that the country’s population of 141.9 million had either remained stable or increased by 15,000 to 25,000 people.
Babies are also sicklier now than in 1996, the UNICEF report said. The percentage of babies born sick or who fell sick soon after birth reached 37.3 percent in 2008, compared with 28.5 percent in 1995, the report said. The most widespread children’s illnesses were those that affected their respiratory systems.
The number of children identified as disabled fell from 555,000 in 1995 to 506,600 in 2008.
TITLE: ‘Gold Medal’ In Cyber Fraud
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian hackers get a “gold medal” for fraud, but their Chinese counterparts carried out more than half of all the cybercrimes committed last year, according to Kaspersky Lab, Russia’s largest antivirus software developer.
About 52 percent of the 73 million attacks on the World Wide Web that Kaspersky recorded last year originated in China, the Moscow-based company said in its annual security report Tuesday.
Chinese hackers are now the world’s best, trumping those from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and Russia, although Russians retained the “gold medal” for fraud, Kaspersky said.
Russian hackers have mastered the mass-production of web sites that play upon users’ naivety and curiosity by offering services that purport to allow access to the e-mails and text messages of friends and family members, according to Kaspersky.
TITLE: VinLund Owner Fights Arrest
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian-American businessman Peter Vins says he could have apologized for calling the policemen who raided his company “bandits” and seen his legal problems limited to a $10,000 fine.
But Vins, a former Soviet dissident, refused and now faces up to six years in prison on tax evasion charges.
“Why should I apologize when even Medvedev and Putin are calling them this?” Vins said, referring to criticism of the notoriously corrupt police force by President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
“I want to win this case even though my business is near bankruptcy,” Vins said in a telephone interview from Riga, Latvia, where he is living after his supporters, who include several prominent human rights activists, advised him to stay away from Russia.
Vins’ tale covers familiar territory for many investors who have sought to do business in Russia over the past two decades. But what makes his case unique — and a possible litmus test — is that it is unfolding at a time when the Kremlin has declared war on corruption amid a series of embarrassing incidents involving corrupt police officers.
Vins, son of Soviet Baptist minister Georgy Vins, immigrated with his family to the United States in the late 1970s but returned to Russia in 1993 and opened the VinLund logistics company the following year.
Vins also holds extensive human rights credentials. He is a former member of the human rights organization Moscow Helsinki Group and the founder of the Andrei Sakharov prize for investigative journalism. The Vins family had been close to the family of the nuclear physicist and human rights champion, and in 2000 Peter Vins established the $5,000 award “For Journalism as an Act of Conscience.”
VinLund, meanwhile, expanded and prospered in the turbulent 1990s and more stable 2000s, attracting clients such as the French carmaker Peugeot and U.S. farm equipment producer John Deere.
But everything changed in September 2007 — five months before Medvedev first declared war on corruption and six months before he was elected president.
Plainclothes detectives raided VinLund’s Moscow offices in a search that mystifies Vins to this day. He said the crackdown might have been connected to his human rights work, ordered by a business rival or simply routine police work.
The detectives accused VinLund of working with companies that existed only on paper and of providing false accounting data to the tax authorities. While Russian law does not require a company to check the legitimacy of another company before working with it, the Supreme Arbitration Court encouraged such checks in a 2006 ruling. If a front company disappears, its tax problems become the problems of its partners.
Vins said the detectives did not identify themselves, behaved rudely, and one of them wrapped his hands around the neck of a female VinLund lawyer who tried to snap pictures of their leader with a cell phone.
“They behaved like criminals,” Vins said.
Vins only learned that the men were officers with the Moscow police force’s economic crimes department after he filed a complaint with the Moscow City Prosecutor’s Office shortly after the incident. He said he received a reply that his company was clean and could continue its work.
But in September 2008, Vins received another visit from officers with the economic crimes department. They acted politely, Vins said, and collected documents describing VinLund’s relations with clients.
Two months later, however, Vins was notified that one of his companies stood accused of transferring money to the accounts of nonexistant firms. In August 2009, a criminal case was opened against Vins on charges of evading $100,000 in taxes. At the police’s request, the Moscow City Court issued a warrant for Vins’ arrest in September.
The court is scheduled to consider an appeal against the arrest warrant in February, Vins’ lawyer Olga Strizhova said. If it upholds the warrant, the police will put Vins on Interpol’s international wanted list.
Vins fled Russia in late 2008, fearing revenge from police officials after he publicly complained of police harassment.
What prompted Vins’ ordeal — like many disputes between investors and the authorities — is a matter of speculation.
“My understanding is that he is being punished for making this case public,” said Boris Timoshenko, a representative of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a Moscow human rights watchdog that awards the annual Sakharov prize established by Vins.
More than 100 cases similar to Vins’ were opened under the same article of the Criminal Code in Moscow in January 2009 alone, said Pavel Larin, a lawyer with the Nalogovik consulting group who is unaffiliated with the Vins case.
“Inspections of a business by tax and law enforcement officials are often used to pressure the head of the company,” he said. “But their nature might not be just economic, but political, too.”
Incidentally, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for William Browder’s Hermitage Capital who died in a pretrial detention center in November after being denied medical treatment, had been charged with the same article of the Criminal Code as Vins.
Vins has written two letters to President Dmitry Medvedev in which he maintains his innocence and explains that he has tried to fight injustice “with legal methods.”
In one letter, he wrote that police investigator Sergei Tsibulin made him an offer before he sent his case to court: he would get off with a fine of 300,000 rubles ($10,000) if he returned to Moscow and apologized for describing Russian policemen as “bandits” in his letters to the media and Russian officials.
Tsibulin, reached by cell phone Monday, refused to comment on Vins’ claim or the case.
Other representatives of the Moscow police’s economic crimes department also declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing investigation.
Sakharov’s widow, prominent human rights activist Yelena Bonner, urged Medvedev in an open letter earlier this month to intervene. Bonner said she was writing the letter “in the name of Sakharov, who for many years defended Peter Vins, his father and his mother.”
Bonner, who lives in the United States, also wrote that she had advised Vins not to return to Russia in order “not to repeat the fate of Magnitsky,” the lawyer who died in detention.
Strizhova, Vins’ lawyer, hopes that new amendments to the tax and criminal law that went in effect this month might help her client.
TITLE: Police Say Economic Crime Cost $33Bln
AUTHOR: By Amy Beavin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Last year saw an eightfold increase in economic crime, the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee said Wednesday — a figure that raises eyebrows as the body fights off accusations that it harasses businesses.
The committee said in a statement that it had uncovered more than 428,000 economic crimes last year, including more than 74,000 large-scale crimes. The resulting losses exceeded 1 trillion rubles ($33 billion), a 745 percent increase from the same period in 2008.
Bribery alone increased by 13 percent in 2009, the committee said, and remains “one of the most widespread forms of corrupt activity investigated by the Interior Ministry.”
The surprisingly large jump in uncovered crimes could be explained in part by the economic crisis.
“People had to survive in the crisis, and they started to solve their problems in all available ways,” said Anatoly Golubev, who chairs the Committee to Fight Corruption, an interregional public organization. “Bribes and kickbacks are the easiest way for people to solve their problems.”
Golubev also said, however, that the statement could serve as PR. “Such reports never say what people really want to know — how much money has been returned to the budget,” he said.
The Investigative Committee, and the Interior Ministry more broadly, is facing its own internal battle with corruption, and increasing economic crime throughout the country may provide the body with the relevance that it needs to resist increasing external pressure.
President Dmitry Medvedev began a massive overhaul of the Interior Ministry last month, ordering that the police force be slashed by 20 percent and promising officers salary increases. As part of the reform, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev lost his right to nominate the head of the ministry’s investigative committee, who will now be nominated by the prime minister.
Earlier this month, Audit Chamber head Sergei Stepashin proposed dividing the ministry into three parts: one that would deal with regular law enforcement, another that would deal with more serious crimes, including corruption, and a third that would form a paramilitary force.
Stepashin has also called for the Interior Ministry’s dealings in the economic sphere to be curtailed, saying the fight against economic crimes should not be mixed with attempts to harass businesses.
The statement from the Interior Ministry comes one day after a recommendation by Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General’s Office, that a separate agency be created to handle economic offences.
In an interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta, Bastrykin suggested that economic crimes had increased in Russia to the point where special focus and training is necessary to investigate them.
Staff Writer Irina Filatova contributed to this report.
TITLE: New Customs Body May Oversee Union of States
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A customs union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan is looking to create a single body that would replace the three countries’ customs services, but a dispute is brewing over the distribution of customs duties, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said Wednesday.
The new body will “swallow” the countries’ customs services or control them as a watchdog, Shuvalov told Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the Customs Union Commission held its first meeting after an agreement on the customs union came into force Jan. 1.
“Earlier consultations resulted in the need to discuss the creation of additional supranational bodies — a customs body that will act on the territory of the customs union,” Shuvalov said, according to a transcript published on the government’s web site.
But talks are continuing about how to distribute customs duties collected on the three countries’ territory, Shuvalov said.
According to the current formula, Russia will get no less than 90 percent of the import duties collected at the territory of the customs union, Kazakhstan will get 6 percent to 7 percent, while Belarus’ share will amount to 3 percent to 4 percent.
The formula will be used as a test version starting from April and may be changed in the second half of this year if needed, Shuvalov said.
Shuvalov also said the Customs Union Commission was considering the establishment of a supranational treasury “that operates within the customs union.”
An organization representing Russian importers assailed the plan to create a new customs body as an unnecessary additional layer of bureaucracy.
“I don’t see a special need for a supranational body. Since there’s a single customs tariff and a customs code, there’s no need for additional regulation,” said Boris Fantayev, executive director of the Russian Union of Producers and Importers.
He said each country’s own customs service should be allowed to continue regulating shipments.
It would be easier to leave the three countries’ customs services intact and to create a supranational body that would regulate and organize their work, said Marina Lyakisheva, a customs law adviser at DLA Piper.
President Dmitry Medvedev and his counterparts Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan agreed in November to the creation of a unified customs tariff, which started Jan. 1, and a unified customs code, which will go into effect July 1.
Also Wednesday, Shuvalov complained to Putin that the U.S. had not taken any steps to solve the problem of accession to the World Trade Organization.
Medvedev has repeatedly said creation of the customs union would not affect Russia’s WTO membership bid, while WTO member states have said Russia might face problems.
TITLE: Reset in Danger of Being Set Back
AUTHOR: By David J. Firestein
TEXT: A year ago, when the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama initiated its “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations, two things were clear: First, the U.S. Congress, particularly the Senate, would have an outsized role to play in the process; and, second, the Democrats would likely have a fillibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, making the advancement of Obama’s major Russia policy overtures a bit easier than might otherwise be the case. A year later, the first proposition remains true, but Republican Scott Brown’s recent upset victory in the Massachusetts Senate race complicates the second since Democrats no longer have 60 seats in the Senate— the threshold that allows a party to pass legislation on a “fast track” by depriving the opposing party of its ability to filibuster. All of this means that there could be some turbulence in U.S.-Russian relations in 2010.
While the reset was partly about changing the tenor of U.S.-Russian relations, a lot of it was about policy. Congress is a decisive player on much of that policy. The Obama administration’s two major Russia initiatives — the follow-on agreement to the expired Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or the CTBT — will require Senate ratification.
START, the flagship arms control agreement between the United States and Russia and the centerpiece of Obama’s reset policy, should be the easier sell in the Senate. There is broad, bipartisan consensus on the basic thrust of the treaty, which seeks to limit nuclear warheads and delivery systems on both sides in a transparent and verifiable manner. The original START agreement passed in 1992 by an overwhelming margin of 93-6, easily exceeding the 67-vote threshold required for ratification.
But things have changed a lot since 1992. The honeymoon of the early and mid-1990s in U.S.-Russian relations is long gone. Russia has backtracked dramatically on democracy and media freedom, to the consternation of many in Congress. And the Eurasian giant has, in the view of many U.S. policymakers, repeatedly bullied smaller neighbors, including a series of provocations aimed at Georgia that played a role in the outbreak of the Russia-Georgia war of 2008.
Perhaps more important, after the polarizing presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both of whom served two four-year terms, U.S. foreign policy has become vastly more politicized than it was a generation ago, during the era of President George H.W. Bush. It used to be that “politics stopped at the water’s edge,” but that principle seems to have stopped at the 20th-century’s edge. When George H.W. Bush called on the Senate to ratify START in 1992, five of the six “nay” votes came from his fellow Republicans; only one Democratic senator balked. Those days of large-scale aisle crossing are gone. Today, virtually every foreign policy issue — from arms control to climate change to even humanitarian assistance to Haiti — seems to be viewed by many members of both parties through the prism of campaign politics.
The upshot is that START ratification is going to be an uphill battle for the Obama administration. Substantively, many Republicans, and some Democrats, have concerns about key provisions of the accord, particularly, those pertaining to verification provisions. In addition, many senators have expressed concerns that START shouldn’t be ratified unless they can secure guarantees that the reduced U.S. nuclear arsenal will be sufficiently modernized. Politically, the Republicans, emboldened by strong state-wide victories in recent months in Virginia, New Jersey and now Massachusetts, will be disinclined to hand Obama a significant foreign policy achievement in advance of midterm elections in the fall.
Getting the CTBT ratified will be even tougher. As a candidate, Obama made the CTBT a major focal point of his foreign policy platform, promising to “build consensus behind ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.” That consensus was elusive in 1999, the last time that the treaty was put to a test in the Senate, and will likely be even more elusive in 2010. In 1999, ratification failed by a margin of 48-51 — well short of the requisite 67 votes. The vote went down largely along party lines, with most Democrats supporting the agreement and most Republicans opposing it. In 2010, the congressional terrain looks equally forbidding for CTBT passage.
Congress is a major factor on other Russia policy issues as well. Russian accession to the World Trade Organization is a case in point. Congressional action would be required to upgrade Russia, the largest economy not yet represented in the WTO, from the Cold War-era lows of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to establish normal trade relations, which are required to secure U.S. agreement to Russia’s accession to the WTO. Russian WTO accession seems to be on the Obama administration’s congressional to-do list in 2010, but in the current cold trade climate — Russia just banned U.S. poultry imports, valued at $800 million a year — the issue is going to be as contentious as ever. That may be why Russian officials have sent mixed signals as to whether Russia itself will pursue WTO accession aggressively.
Congressional approval would also be required for the United States to enter into a “123” agreement with Russia on civil nuclear cooperation. This important area that had progressed nicely during George W. Bush’s last year in office was put on ice after the eruption of the Russia-Georgia war.
As far as U.S.-Russian relations are concerned, 2010 is truly the “Year of Congress.” It appears less likely, however, that it is going to be the “Year of Results.”
David J. Firestein, a career U.S. diplomat who served as deputy spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from 1998 to 2001, is director of Track 2 Diplomacy at The EastWest Institute, based in New York.
TITLE: North Caucasus Faux District
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: The main crisis gripping Russia is a crisis of government. When a government is unable to govern it pretends to govern, and Moscow proposed a record number of measures that could be termed “pseudo-governance” last week. The first was the creation of the North Caucasus Federal District.
The tsar’s appointed governor used to rule the Caucasus from his residence in Tiflis, now Tbilisi, and had an army to enforce his authority. The new presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, Alexander Khloponin, will rule from Pyatigorsk — and he has no army. Nor does he have any money. Thus, the formation of the North Caucasus Federal District only created jobs for several thousand more bureaucrats.
If the Caucasus is poorly governed at the regional level, it stands to logic that the president of a republic needs to be changed. If the Caucasus is poorly governed at the Kremlin level, it stands to logic that changes are needed in the Kremlin. But there is no point in creating another level of ineffective governance with the new federal district. With no army, money or specific authority at his disposal, whatever talents Khloponin has will not be enough to compensate for inadequate governance at the regional and federal levels.
Another great example of pseudo-governance is a proposal to reform the Interior Ministry by dividing its staff into the militia, the police and the national guard (formerly the riot police). Police officers have killed scores of people during Vladimir Putin’s rule. This obviously does not trouble Putin. He has never called to offer his condolences to the survivors of police brutality nor convened a special session to discuss the problem. In fact, it was Putin who created the system in which abuses by police and officials constitute the main method of governing the country, and it would be odd if he lifted a finger to dismantle it because of a few high-profile scandals. Under such conditions, all that can be done is to simulate reforms — by renaming the militia as the police.
But State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov gets the “Pseudo-Governance Award” for his proposal to solve the problem of money-losing regions by combining them with profitable regions. Russia’s current system of financial administration is based on Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin’s conviction that the federal center should take everything from the regions and then give them a pittance in return. As a result, not a single governor or mayor is motivated to encourage economic growth at home. Today, only 13 regions act as donors, and the subsidies that the other regions receive depend entirely on how skilled their financial officers are at finagling money out of Moscow. For example, in the flourishing Krasnodar region, experienced Governor Alexander Tkachev managed to secure 16 billion rubles ($532 million) in federal aid above the region’s budget of 160 billion rubles ($5.32 billion). But in the backward Volgograd region, the naive Communist and former Governor Nikolai Maksyuta for some reason confidently reported to Moscow that everything was fine and received only 1.5 billion rubles ($49.9 million) in federal aid beyond the region’s budget of 60 billion rubles ($2 billion).
It would be just as pointless to merge regions that are in the red with those that are in the black as it would be to create an “economic refuge” out of economically unviable regions from the Southern Federal District, slapping a new label on them called the North Caucasus Federal District. That would be like renaming the militia as the police.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Secrets of staying on the scene
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: “Unfettered freedom for nightclubs has ended,” St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said early last month, ordering a thorough fire safety check for every club or restaurant in the six to eight weeks to follow. Raids and media reports ensued, but the campaign appears to have come to an end, leaving dozens of businesses blacklisted and some closed for the time being. The campaign was a reaction to the Dec. 5 nightclub blaze in Perm, which left 155 dead.
Mikhail Sindalovsky, the director of the city’s oldest surviving music club, Griboyedov, and the drummer with the ska band Dva Samaliota, argues that such campaigns are ineffective, reminiscent of the country’s Soviet past and may be a symptom of totalitarian tendencies in modern Russia.
Partially located in a concrete Cold War bunker, Griboyedov was one of the first establishments to be targeted by fire inspectors. The club was visited by a brigade consisting of a fire inspector, representatives of the Emergency Situations Ministry and Prosecutor’s Office, and two television crews from the locally based Channel Five and the local branch of RTR Television.
“It was an exemplary inspection carried out on the very first day of checks, and if the fire inspector and other [officials] came to inspect the place, then the television people came to shut it down — they held out microphones and kept asking hopefully whether the club was going to be closed,” said Sindalovsky.
The club was found to be safe, but the television reports that ensued cited multiple violations.
“They edited everything and said they didn’t have enough time to record every violation, and that no one could guarantee the safety of people who would come here. It was shown on both channels, put on the web, and all the following reports were made using footage taken here.
“We didn’t know where it would end. There was panic across the country, and some big boss could have seen us on television and said, ‘What is this? Shut it down, kill them all.’ In the same way that Khodorkovsky was thrown in jail.”
Griboyedov was not closed, but another of the city’s music clubs, Glavclub, was. After an inspection, the 2,500-capacity music venue, where bands from The Tiger Lillies to Gogol Bordello and Keane have performed, was blacklisted and ordered by a court to close for 60 days.
As a result, Glavclub had to transfer concerts by international acts such as Reel Big Fish and White Lies to other clubs and stay closed during the Christmas and New Year holidays — the period when clubs make the most profit.
“It was easy for a judge to say, ‘Close it for two months,’” said Sindalovsky. “Why two? Why not one? They’re destroying small businesses, where 30 or 40 to 100 people work. They had paid all the scheduled artists in advance, and now they have to pay the rent and fines, and New Year has gone down the drain.”
Since its inception in 1996, Griboyedov has been visited by the authorities more than once — usually in the form of assault rifle-carrying masked men, who did not identify themselves and created quite a stir in the club. In 1997 The St. Petersburg Times ran a pair of spectacular photographs showing dozens of lightly-dressed club-goers lying face-down in the snow around the bunker during what later become known as an anti-drug raid.
“The OMON or some other special-task force beat people up, stole their possessions and ordered them to lie down in the snow,” said Sindalovsky.
“The same thing still happens now — they come to clubs with assault rifles. What do these morons hope to see, these mask-wearing thugs? They come to a club with a submachine gun; what are they are intending to do — fire it? Or is it simply part of their job, not to be parted from their gun?”
Sindalovsky expressed concern over the wisdom of breaking into a public place bearing firearms. “Imagine, you arrive and there’s a crowd of drunk people. Some drunken idiot could try and get hold of the gun. The shooting will start and they will shoot loads of people. It’s absurd. Who are these big guys who come to a club armed with submachine guns out to get?”
In December, when the fire prevention campaign was already raging, Matviyenko said that a blacklist of clubs where drugs are sold or used should also be compiled.
“Masked men have been to some places already and searched them,” Sindalovsky said.
State-owned television was prompt to react to the proposal, according to him.
“They zoomed in on a little bag on the floor [in another club], and the reporters said, ‘This club is notorious for drug trafficking, even the locals say so.’ Then they showed some redneck who said, ‘Yes, a lot of drug addicts gather there.’ It’s scary to live in a country like this!”
Sindalovsky argued it was the job of drugs squad officers to locate and catch drug dealers, rather than harassing clubs.
He compared the recent campaigns with the early 1980s anti-truancy campaign launched by then-Soviet leader and former KGB chairman Yury Andropov, during which the police carried out raids on food stores, film theaters and public banyas. Members of the public present were detained and interrogated as to why they were not at work.
“Remember how Andropov carried out raids against people who weren’t at work — they closed sections of the street during the daytime [to interrogate people.] It looks like things are moving toward exactly this,” he said.
“They don’t do their jobs, but they create the opinion among the public that they are fighting drugs in this way. Wherever there are people, there are drug addicts. Cases of drug transportation can be recorded in the metro. Young people study at schools and universities, and some of them use drugs. Take rednecks in the city’s suburb’s — heroin is all the rage among them.
“Why don’t they surround a block, comb it and force everybody down into the snow — it’s likely that they’d find somebody. But it’s not a fight against drugs — it’s nonsense.”
Sindalovsky said the only way of dealing with such attitudes was to inform the public.
“We can’t do anything, but people should know about it at least,” he said.
“They [the authorities] form public opinion. If they say that animals are raped at Uncle Durov’s Corner [a children’s animal theater in Moscow], people will think that that’s exactly what they do there.”
“I came across a volume by [German writer Erich Maria] Remarque on my way back from Germany, containing ‘Arch of Triumph,’ ‘The Night in Lisbon’ [novels set in Nazi Germany]. I read them when I was a child, a long time ago, but when re-reading them now I’ve interpreted them in a slightly different way.
“I don’t mean the books themselves, but about how fascism was taking root, how public opinion was being formed, anti-Jewish sentiment and so on. This is the same kind of thing.”
TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: Rock music and protest often go hand in hand, but not in today’s St. Petersburg. A Blue Ribbon campaign against the planned 403-meter Okhta Center skyscraper was stopped by the authorities at a sell-out concert by the popular local band DDT, whose leader Yury Shevchuk is an outspoken opponent of the project.
At a press conference several days before the concert, which was primarily a fundraiser for the House of Hope free rehab center, Shevchuk announced an anti-tower event planned to take place during the band’s Jan. 16 gig at Yubileiny Sports Palace.
The Blue Ribbon campaign was launched by the preservationist group Living City last year. Campaigners distribute blue ribbons as a symbol of St. Petersburg’s UNESCO-protected skyline, which protesters say has been put at risk by the project. Gazprom, whose headquarters the planned complex will house, plans to build the skyscraper close to the city center, across the River Neva from Smolny Cathedral.
According to Peterburgsky Chas Pik, Shevchuk described the project as a “bottle of oil.”
“The city doesn’t need this bottle of oil,” he said, adding that he would have not opposed the construction “three kilometers from St. Petersburg,” the newspaper reported.
But despite prior agreement with the band and promoter, as well as announcements in the media, activists were detained by the venue’s security guards and administration.
“Several people were detained as they tried to enter the venue with leaflets and ribbons, and then the rest, who had already entered and had been distributing them, were detained as well,” Living City activist Pyotr Zabirokhin said by phone on Thursday.
“They confiscated all the printed materials and ribbons from the detainees, and took two of them to the police facilities located in the venue.”
According to Zabirokhin, the security guards who made the detentions suspected that the leaflets contained “extremist materials.”
“The police looked at the leaflets and said, ‘Why, there’s no extremism,’ and let them go without writing a report.”
After representatives of DDT and promoter Stop Time interfered, the detainees were released, but the leaflets and blue ribbons were confiscated until the end of the show.
Some of the blue ribbons were however distributed and even thrown from the stage by SP Babai musician Mikhail Novitsky, while Shevchuk announced the event to the audience.
“In fact, it’s not fully clear what it was all about, because the administration claimed no agreement had been made [to distribute the materials,] and it could have been a misunderstanding; or some orders had been made to prevent the event,” Zabirokhin said.
This week’s concerts include Mad Sin (Money Honey, Friday), Arsonists Get All the Girls (Orlandina, Wednesday) and Depeche Mode (SKK, Thursday).
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Turkish delights
AUTHOR: By Elmira Alieva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The thinking is clear: There is no point in making futile efforts to copy Hollywood; it is better to do our own thing and depict our national character and mentality. This was the decision taken by Turkish directors whose best films are being shown in St. Petersburg this weekend.
The program of the first festival of Turkish cinema in St. Petersburg comprises six films, all of which have received awards at Cannes, Berlin, San Sebastian and other international film festivals. The event has been organized by the General Consulate of Turkey in St. Petersburg and Rodina cinema, with support from the St. Petersburg Cinema Press Federation.
“As far as I can remember — and I remember the last 40 years — there has never been such a festival in St. Petersburg,” said Vladimir Kuzmin, director of the St. Petersburg Cinema Press Federation. “Some Turkish films have been shown at other festivals, but there has never been a fully-fledged festival of Turkish movies.”
“Turkish cinema is on the rise,” said Kuzmin. “Five years ago a law was passed in Turkey to support cinema. However, most film production there is financed by private capital,” he said.
“Cinema production in Turkey is a profitable business, because domestic cinema is very popular with audiences. Such relative independence of financing allows Turkish directors to pose burning social questions in their films, and this fact, along with the improved skills of the directors, awakens interest in Turkish cinema abroad.”
The everyday life of Turkish people is the major topic of the selected films, which are all dramas and melodramas. “The thing about Turkish cinema is that it doesn’t hide its national character and mentality, which can be exotic, and makes the films interesting,” said Kuzmin.
“Piety” (2006), by Ozer Kiziltan, focuses on a religious man whose life is turned upside down when an Islamic group employs him as its debt collector; he is forced to wear European clothes and drive a car while resisting the temptations of the Western way of life.
Fellow Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director award at Cannes in 2008 for his family drama “Three Monkeys” about people who start by telling small lies for the sake of the family, but end up out of their depth in serious crime.
The festival also includes an older film, made in 1991: “The Hidden Face,” by Omer Kavur, which is a screen version of the novel by 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Orphan Pamuk. It is a story about differing perceptions of time in the East and West.
“I would recommend these films to lovers of serious cinema, to those who would like to get some idea about how ordinary Turkish people live, while at the same time reflecting on universal topics,” said Kuzmin.
Film buffs might be pleased to know that all the movies being shown as part of the festival were shot on 35-millimeter film. According to Kuzmin, fewer and fewer movies are projected from film; most movies shown at the cinema now are in DVD format. “However, only movies on 35-millimeter film, not on DVD, allow spectators to see cinematographic works in the way in which they were made,” he said.
The Festival of Turkish Cinema in St. Petersburg runs from Friday through Tuesday at Rodina cinema, Karavannaya Ulitsa 12. Tel: 571 6131. A full program is available at www.rodinakino.ru
TITLE: Last orders
AUTHOR: By Hardie Duncan
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Beneath a small business hotel on a busy stretch of Zagorodny Prospekt, a short walk from the Dostoyevskaya and Vladimirskaya metro stations, sits Kristoff restaurant: Two dim, moderately sized rooms with limited embellishments — beyond the requisite flat screen showing an MTV knock-off channel.
The web site had claimed the restaurant was open 24 hours, but upon entering, we were informed by the waitress we would have only an hour before closing time, at 10 p.m. A phone call later clarified that Kristoff normally closes on weekdays at, well, 11 p.m. Assenting to the strangely early closing time for a Friday, we were seated in a booth beside a window that failed to fully block the frigid night air.
The menu offers a broad range of Russian and vaguely European cuisine, from Spaghetti Carbonara (290 rubles, $9.50) to veal medalions in Dor Blu sauce (360 rubles, $12.) The bar selection is even grander, boasting a varied and reasonably priced list of beers, wine and cocktails. Sitting with a cold Heineken (130 rubles, $4.25) in the chilly booth was probably not the greatest idea, but luckily the first dishes were both warm and the minor highlights of an otherwise dull meal.
The cream of mushroom soup (190 rubles, $6.25) was presented appealingly, with a small symmetrical selection of mushroom slices laid out on its surface, adding a needed touch of woody color to the monochrome dish. The thick soup was palatable and substantial, but lacked distinct flavors. The mixed salad (290 rubles, $9.50), covered in a honey that helped cut the bitterness of the greens, and topped with a complex and gooey baked goat cheese, was a more informed selection.
The main courses — salmon steak in ginger sauce (380 rubles, $12.50) and pork a la Kristoff — were disappointments. The pallid salmon was topped with a pile of pickled ginger (the restaurant also boasts a sushi menu) that constituted the bulk of the “sauce” and was accompanied by tepid and mushy steamed vegetables. The pork, tough and overcooked, lived up to the Kristoff namesake.
Berry strudel (210 rubles, $7) was listless and a little too sweet, but an improvement over the main courses. The Althaus tea (60 rubles, $2), my guest informed me, was enjoyably florid and bright. At least the packaged goods were still safe.
A little after 10 p.m., more of the already dark restaurant’s lights were turned off, the silver lining being that the TV went off with them. The remaining patrons seemed oblivious to anything beyond the copious amounts of alcohol remaining in front of them, but my friend and I didn’t need to be asked twice.
TITLE: Embattled Obama Declares in Speech: ‘I Don’t Quit’
AUTHOR: By Jennifer Loven
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Declaring “I don’t quit,” President Barack Obama fought to recharge his embattled presidency with a State of the Union vow to get jobless millions back to work and stand on the side of Americans angry at Wall Street greed and Washington bickering. Defiant despite stinging setbacks, he said he would fight on for ambitious overhauls of health care, energy and education.
“Change has not come fast enough,” Obama acknowledged Wednesday night before a politician-packed House chamber and a TV audience of millions. “As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may be, it’s time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth.”
Obama looked to change the conversation from how his presidency is stalling — over the messy health care debate, a limping economy and the missteps that led to Christmas Day’s barely averted terrorist disaster — to how he is seizing the reins. He spoke to a nation gloomy over double-digit unemployment and federal deficits soaring to a record $1.4 trillion, and to fellow Democrats dispirited about the fallen standing of a president they hoped would carry them through this fall’s midterm elections.
With State of the Union messages traditionally delivered at the end of January, Obama had one of the presidency’s biggest platforms just a week after Republicans scored an upset takeover of a Senate seat in Massachusetts, prompting hand-wringing over his leadership. With the turnover erasing Democrats’ Senate supermajority needed to pass most legislation, it also put a cloud over health care and the rest of Obama’s agenda.
Obama implored lawmakers to press forward with his prized health care overhaul, in severe danger in Congress. “Do not walk away from reform,” he said. “Not now. Not when we are so close.”
Republicans applauded the president when he entered the chamber and craned to welcome Michelle Obama. But bipartisanship disappeared early, with Republicans sitting stone-faced through several rounds of emphatic Democratic cheering and as Obama took a sharp jab at GOP congressional strategy. “Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership,” he said.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, appointed by President George W. Bush, made a dismissive face, shook his head in disagreement and seemed to mouth the words “not true” as Obama said the court in a recent decision had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”
The president devoted about two-thirds of his speech to the economic worries foremost on Americans’ minds as recession persists. “The devastation remains,” he said.
Obama emphasized his ideas, some new but mostly old and explained anew, for restoring job growth, taming budget deficits and changing a Washington so polarized that “every day is Election Day.” Such roots of intense voter emotions once drove supporters to Obama but now are turning on him as he governs.
Declaring that “I know the anxieties” of Americans’ struggling to pay the bills while big banks get bailouts and bonuses, Obama prodded Congress to enact a second stimulus package “without delay,” urging that it contain help for small businesses and funding for infrastructure projects. Also, fine tuning a plan first announced in October, Obama said he will initiate a $30 billion program to provide money to community banks at low rates, if they boost lending to small businesses. The money would come from balances left in the $700 billion Wall Street rescue fund — a program “about as popular as a root canal” that Obama made a point of saying “I hated.”
Acknowledging frustration at the government’s habit of spending more than it has, he said he would veto any bills that do not adhere to his demand for a three-year freeze on some domestic spending. He announced a new, though nonbinding, bipartisan deficit-reduction task force (while supporting the debt-financed jobs bill). He said he would cut $20 billion in inefficient programs in next year’s budget and pore over it “line by line” to find more.
Positioning himself as a fighter for the regular guy, he urged Congress to require lobbyists to disclose all contacts with lawmakers or members of his administration and to blunt the impact of last week’s Supreme Court decision allowing corporations greater flexibility in supporting or opposing candidates. “We face a deficit of trust,” the president said.
In the Republican response to Obama’s speech, Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia showed no sign of his party capitulating to the president.
TITLE: Iran Hangs 2 For Alleged Attempt At Insurgency
AUTHOR: By Nasser Karimi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran — Iran on Thursday executed two men accused of involvement in an armed anti-government group, as the public prosecutor announced that new death sentences have been issued against opposition activists involved in protests over June’s disputed presidential election.
The announcements marked an escalation by the courts enforcing the clerical leadership’s heavy, monthslong crackdown aimed at crushing the opposition challenge. The prosecutor also said a new group of protesters and others would soon be brought to trial.
The two men who were hanged before dawn Thursday did not appear to be connected to the postelection protests — at least one of them was arrested before the election, according to his lawyer.
But state media depicted the two as part of the protest movement, a sign of how the government has used the crackdown on the unrest to pursue other enemies, lumping them in with the political opposition. The media’s depiction of the executions may aim to intimidate the opposition ahead of new street demonstrations expected in February.
In a further move likely aimed at cowing protesters, Tehran’s prosecutor announced that five people have been sentenced to death for involvement in the most recent major demonstration, on Dec. 27. That day saw the worst violence of the crackdown, with at least eight people killed in clashes between police and protesters and hundreds arrested.
The new verdicts raise to nine the number of people sentenced to death for involvement in protests, said the prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi.
He also announced that another group of the postelection detainees would go on trial on Saturday. He said the trial will demonstrate the role of “leftists, Bahais and those who were directed by foreign hands” in the postelection turmoil. He did not say how many new defendants would go on trial.
Iranian authorities regularly accuse the U.S., Britain and other foreign enemies of fueling the unrest in a bid to oust the country’s clerical leaders. They have also accused followers of the Bahai faith, which is illegal in Iran because it is seen as heretical.
The two men who were executed, Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour, were convicted by a Revolutionary Court of belonging to “counterrevolutionary and monarchist groups,” plotting to overthrow “the Islamic establishment” and planning assassinations and bombings, Dowlatabadi told state TV.
He said the two confessed during the trial and that an appeals court upheld their death sentences. He made no mention of the postelection protests in connection to the case.
Rahmanipour’s lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, said Thursday that the 20-year-old Rahmanipour was arrested in April on the charge of membership in an armed opposition group, the Royal Association of Iran.
TITLE: French Teen Rescued 15 Days After Quake Is Stable
AUTHOR: By Vivian Sequera and Ben Fox
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A 17-year-old girl pulled from the rubble in a stunning rescue 15 days after the earthquake was in a stable condition Thursday, and able to eat yogurt and mashed vegetables to the surprise of doctors, who said her survival was medically inexplicable.
Hundreds of thousands of other survivors hoped for a breakthrough of another kind — the delivery of badly needed food aid.
Key players in the Haiti earthquake relief effort, in what may prove to be a pivotal meeting Wednesday, decided to better coordinate by dividing up the shattered capital, giving each responsibility for handing out food in certain areas.
Food distribution thus far has often been marked by poor coordination, vast gaps in coverage, and desperate, unruly lines of needy people in which young men at times shoved aside the women and weak and took their food.
“These things should be done in a systematic way, not a random way,” Dr. Eddy Delalue, who runs a Haitian relief group, Operation Hope, said Wednesday of the emergency food program. “It’s survival of the fittest: The strongest guy gets it.”
Wednesday’s rescue of teenager Darlene Etienne from a collapsed home near St. Gerard University, 15 days after Haiti’s great quake killed an estimated 200,000 people, was the first such recovery since Saturday, when French rescuers extricated a man from the ruins of a hotel grocery store. A man pulled Tuesday from the rubble of a downtown store said he had been trapped during an aftershock, not in the original Jan. 12 quake.
Etienne is stable, and has been drinking water and eating yogurt and mashed vegetables, said Dr. Evelyne Lambert, who has been treating the girl on the French Navy hospital ship Sirocco, anchored off shore from Port-au-Prince.
Lambert said that Etienne has a 90 percent chance of survival.
“We cannot really explain this because that’s just (against) biological facts,” Lambert told a news conference. “We are very surprised by the fact that she’s alive. ... She’s saying that she has been under the ground since the very beginning on the 12th of January so it may have really happened — but we cannot explain that.”
Authorities say it is rare for anyone to survive more than 72 hours without water, let alone more than two weeks. But Etienne may have had some access to water from a bathroom of the wrecked house, and rescuers said she mumbled something about having a little Coca-Cola with her in the rubble.
Her family said Etienne had just begun studies at St. Gerard when the disaster struck, trapping dozens of students and staff in the rubble of school buildings, hostels and nearby homes. “We thought she was dead,” said cousin Jocelyn A. St. Jules.
Then — a half-month after the earthquake — neighbors heard a voice weakly calling from the rubble of a private home close to the destroyed university. They called authorities, who brought in the French civil response team.
Fuilla walked along the dangerously crumbled roof, heard her voice and saw a little bit of dust-covered black hair in the rubble. Clearing away some debris, he reached the young woman and saw she was alive — barely.
Digging out a hole big enough to give her oxygen and water, they found she had a very weak pulse. Within 45 minutes they managed to remove her, covered in dust.
TITLE: Human Rights Group: Hamas Targeted Civilians
AUTHOR: By Aron Heller
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM — An international human rights group on Thursday disputed Hamas’ claim that it did not target civilians during last year’s war against Israel, saying there was strong evidence the Islamic militant group intentionally aimed its rockets at Israeli towns.
The criticism from New York-based Human Rights Watch drew fresh attention to Hamas’ actions in the three-week war, during which about 1,400 Palestinians — most of them civilians — and 13 Israelis were killed. Most international criticism, including by Human Rights Watch, has been directed toward Israel.
Both Israel and Hamas face a Feb. 5 deadline to respond to allegations that they committed war crimes during the fighting. The report urged both sides to conduct independent investigations into the allegations, and both have signaled they will not comply, though they have not delivered formal responses.