SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1558 (19), Tuesday, March 23, 2010
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TITLE: Stockmann’s Glass Giant Arouses
Controversy
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Stockmann Group has announced the completion of the main stage of construction of its new retail complex on Nevsky Prospekt amid protests from the media and general public about the appearance of the new buildings.
The object of controversy is a planned nine-story, 35-meter glass structure that will rise above one of the two newly constructed buildings, which were supposed to be exact replicas of the two 19th-century buildings demolished by Stockmann in late 2006 and early 2007.
Architecture experts and preservationists say a number of laws and regulations were violated in the course of the construction, resulting in a view of the city’s main thoroughfare being destroyed because the new buildings at the intersection of Nevsky and Ulitsa Vosstaniya will differ from the original ones. The project’s critics have blamed both Stockmann and St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko who backed the project.
At a press conference Friday, Stockmann representatives told the media that the company had all the necessary permits and that the former facades would be recreated exactly, but these statements only added to the controversy. Two journalists who had previously written critical articles about the project claimed they were denied entry to the event, and security staff tried to send away picketers from the preservationist organization Living City. Deputy Governor Alexander Vakhmistrov, who had been announced as a participant in the conference, failed to appear.
“I can’t answer on their [the city authorities’] behalf — please call them and ask why they didn’t come,” said Jussi Kuutsa, development director for Stockmann Group’s international operations, in response to a question from a journalist.
The current law limits the height of buildings in the area to 28 meters, but Kuutsa insisted that the permit for a 35-meter tall construction was obtained by the site’s previous owner as early as 1999.
This height permit was absent from the list of official permits given to journalists at the press conference. The list comprised only documents issued since 2005, when Stockmann Group bought the site. Kuutsa declined to say who had signed the permit, saying he did not have it with him, and advised journalists to look for it in the city’s archives when asked to make it available to the media at a later date.
“When there’s a permit, it’s very easy to justify yourself — it’s enough simply to demonstrate it, while the fact they are not showing anything suggests there are legal problems,” Alexander Kononov, deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Association for the Protection of Monuments (VOOPIK) said Monday.
“It’s clear that they broke the law at some point. This project and the limitations applied to this site just don’t go together.”
Two journalists said they were not admitted to the press conference, which was held in the unfinished building at 116 Nevsky Prospekt.
Novaya Gazeta’s Tatyana Likhanova uploaded a recording of the conversation she had with an organizer to Zaks.ru and the web site of the Baltic Informational Agency.
“As your position is negative towards this project, distorting the facts, we don’t want to see you at this event,” she was told by an unidentified organizer at the gates to the construction site.
When asked about the incident, the press conference’s chair said that every journalist who had registered by phone or email was admitted. Likhanova said Sunday that both she and Zaks.ru’s Irina Kravtsova had registered by phone and received confirmation as early as Wednesday afternoon.
Controversy has surrounded the project since the two 19th-century buildings at 114 and 116 Nevsky Prospekt were demolished in 2006 and 2007.
“When this project began, the buildings were under state protection; both had heritage status,” Kononov said.
“Number 116 was basically stripped of state protection so that it could be demolished to make way for this project, while 114 was stripped of protection after it had already been demolished.”
Kononov said the glass structure rising over the buildings would destroy the iconic appearance of Nevsky Prospekt.
“This part of Nevsky has been unequivocally ruined by this crude high-tech architecture,” he said.
“It looks awful when viewed from Pushkinskaya Ulitsa, which is directly opposite numbers 112 and 114, while from the corner of Nevsky and Ulitsa Marata, the view is absolutely terrible — as you come out of the metro, there’s an anomalous, absurd structure instead of the regular and harmonious historic view of this section of Nevsky.”
In December 2006, Matviyenko reassured concerned citizens that the buildings would be rebuilt in their original appearance. “I have every reason to say that the historic appearance of Nevsky Prospekt will be completely restored and preserved,” she said on the “Dialog with the City” program on Channel Five.
According to Stockmann’s web site, the department store being built on the site will contain over 70 stores on seven floors, as well as a delicatessen, a three-story underground car park for 550 vehicles, a food court, cafes, rooftop terrace restaurants, a fitness center and spa.
The top two stories of the glass structure will be offered to companies as a “choice selection of office suites with commanding views of the city.” Called Stockmann Nevsky Center, the retail and office complex, at a cost estimated at $250 million, is scheduled to open in November.
TITLE: Rallies Calling for Putin’s Resignation Fizzle
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — About 20,000 protesters denounced government policies and called for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to resign at dozens of rallies over the weekend, organizers said Sunday, far less than the tens of thousands of people they had hoped to attract.
Opposition groups had hoped for a large turnout that would increase the pressure on the government after they attracted 12,000 people to a Kaliningrad rally in January that rattled the federal authorities.
But only small crowds showed up for Saturday’s so-called “Day of Wrath” protests in about 50 cities, stretching from Kaliningrad on Russia’s westernmost edge to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast.
In Kaliningrad, about 5,000 people held tangerines in outstretched hands, chanting for Kremlin-appointed Governor Georgy Boos and Putin to resign, Solidarity leader Vladimir Milov said. Protesters chose tangerines instead of posters to prevent a police crackdown on the unsanctioned rally, he said.
The tangerines also symbolized Boos, and protesters were supposed to crush them afterward.
YouTube footage of the rally showed some protesters wearing facemasks to symbolize a lack of freedom of speech.
Local authorities, who had authorized the January rally, refused to grant permission for Saturday’s protest, citing a scheduled agriculture fair. But police officers made no effort to break up the event.
Plans for the protest prompted Boos to hold talks last week with a local opposition leader, Konstantin Doroshok, who heads Solidarity’s Kaliningrad branch. Boos agreed to hold a televised call-in show to answer residents’ questions, and Doroshok promised to cancel Saturday’s demonstration.
The call-in show was held Saturday and lasted about four hours. But Solidarity’s main office said the rally would be held because Doroshok had made the promise without its approval.
Solidarity leaders Milov and Alexander Rylkin flew to Kaliningrad to take part in the protest but were detained on arrival on suspicion of robbery, Milov wrote in his LiveJournal blog Sunday. The two were released before the rally.
“We were assured that the rebellious spirit is still strong in the city,” Milov said.
In Moscow, several hundred people gathered for an unsanctioned protest on Pushkin Square that was broken up by police. About 60 people were detained, the opposition said.
Larger protests were held in Vladivostok and Irkutsk.
More than 2,000 people showed up for the rally in Vladivostok, which local authorities initially banned but later authorized, Solidarity said in a statement.
A similar number of people rallied in Irkutsk, where United Russia mayoral candidate Sergei Serebrennikov lost to Viktor Kondrashov, who was nominated by the Communist Party, in March 14 elections. Many of the protesters decried Putin’s approval of the reopening of the region’s Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mills, which will dump waste into Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake.
Six people were detained, local news agencies reported.
The federal government and the main television channels, which are all state-controlled, ignored the rallies.
The Interior Ministry said ahead of the rallies that it would deploy 5,000 police officers nationwide to oversee them.
State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said Friday that the rallies were funded by unspecified foreign powers. He said the money was being channeled through nongovernmental organizations and being used to pay people to participate in the rallies.
“Here we get the taste of a color revolution,” he said in an online interview with Gazeta.ru, referring to the nonviolent public protests that led to regime changes in Georgia in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2004.
Putin and other senior government officials have made similar claims in the past and heralded legislation through the Duma aimed at preventing NGOs from using foreign funds for political purposes.
TITLE: U.S. Institute Awards City’s Math Genius $1M
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The respected U.S.-based Clay Mathematics Institute has awarded a $1-million prize to the reclusive St. Petersburg mathematician Grigory Perelman for proving a mathematical theorem known as the Poincare conjecture.
No reaction has yet followed from the scientist, who in 2006 turned down the prestigious Fields Medal awarded by the International Mathematical Union, which is seen as the world’s highest honor in mathematics. In refusing the prize, the St. Petersburg mathematician questioned the jury’s professionalism.
Perelman, who has kept a low profile despite widespread international recognition for his work, is currently unemployed.
Nearly five years have passed since the mathematician, who ranks 9th in the rating of 100 living geniuses published by The Daily Telegraph, lost his job at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in St. Petersburg when his colleagues did not re-elect him as a member. Perelman has refrained from discussing these issues with the media but his friends who spoke on condition of anonymity told reporters the scientist has been devastated and deeply traumatized by his break with the institute.
Perelman, 43, now lives in a tiny apartment in the district of Kupchino in the south of the city. He shares the apartment with his aged mother.
Even before his dramatic split with his scientific alma mater, Perelman had been notoriously reclusive. When he solved the Poincare puzzle in 2002, the mathematician simply posted the contents of his findings on the Internet and did not seek any publicity.
The conjecture, formulated in 1904 by the French mathematician Henri Poincare and often described as “one of the most burning mathematical questions of all time,” essentially claims that any three-dimensional space without holes in it is a sphere. Many distinguished mathematicians had struggled with the problem.
James Carlson, president of the Clay Mathematics Institute, said in a statement posted on the institute’s web site that “the resolution of the Poincare conjecture by Grigory Perelman brings to a close the century-long quest for the solution. It is a major advance in the history of mathematics that will long be remembered.” Carlson also added that CMI and the Institut Henri Poincare (IHP) will hold a conference to celebrate the Poincare conjecture and its resolution on June 8 and 9 in Paris.
The Poincare conjecture was one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems established by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. The prestigious awards were launched to record some of the most difficult problems that mathematicians were vigorously tackling at the turn of the second millennium.
As the award’s ideologists put it, the prize was also meant “to elevate in the consciousness of the general public the fact that in mathematics, the frontier is still open and abounds in important unsolved problems, and to emphasize the importance of working toward a solution of the deepest, most difficult problems.”
Scientists from across the globe praised Perelman’s historic achievement.
“Fifty years ago, I was working on Poincare’s conjecture and thus hold a long-standing appreciation for this beautiful and difficult problem,” Fields medalist Stephen Smale told the CMI web site. “The final solution by Grigory Perelman is a great event in the history of mathematics.”
According to Donal O’Shea, Professor of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, and author of “The Poincare Conjecture” study, “Poincare altered twentieth-century mathematics by teaching us how to think about the idealized shapes that model our cosmos. It is very satisfying and deeply inspiring that Perelman’s unexpected solution to the Poincare conjecture, arguably the most basic question about such shapes, offers to do the same for the coming century.”
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Moscow Air Crash
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Eight people were injured, two seriously, after an airliner crash-landed one kilometer from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on Monday.
No one was killed in the incident, Russia’s federal civil aviation agency, known as Rosaviatsia, said in an e-mailed statement. The plane, arriving from Hurghada, Egypt, was attempting to land in difficult weather and poor visibility, the agency said.
Metro Shooting
MOSCOW (SPT) — A Moscow police colonel was detained after he fired two shots from an air gun, injuring two people, amid an argument with a male passenger who refused to give up his seat on the metro, Interfax reported Friday.
The officer, Alexander Kurochkin, who was not wearing his uniform, fired the rubber bullets on the platform of the Timiryazevskaya metro station after he and the male passenger exited the train at about 8:30 p.m. Thursday, the report said.
The bullets hit a woman in the chest and another in the shin. The woman with the shin injury was hospitalized.
Kurochkin also struck the male passenger in the nose, Interfax said. Kurochkin had ordered the man to give up his seat to an elderly woman, but the passenger had refused, the report said.
Kurochkin was detained on the spot, and subsequent tests showed he had not been drinking. He has apologized and offered to pay damages, Interfax said.
The two female passengers have declined to press charges. Investigators are considering charging Kurochkin with hooliganism.
TITLE: Putin Presses Clinton for Lower Hurdles for Trade
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. administration lower hurdles to Russian investment and offered U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a list of trade complaints during a meeting Friday.
Putin told Clinton in public comments before the talks that trade between the two countries last year collapsed from $36 billion to $16 billion because of the global recession.
“This is a very low level and far from the possibilities,” Putin said, according to a transcript posted on his web site.
He complained that five Russian companies were subject to sanctions initiated by the State Department and that Cold War-era trade restrictions remained in place.
“To this day, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment is still in place,” he said.
The restrictions, which prevent Russia from obtaining “normal trade relations” status, have been a bone of contention in Moscow’s cumbersome negotiations to join the World Trade Organization.
Putin raised WTO membership next with Clinton, saying talks were going in circles. “We have been negotiating for 17 years now. Just three questions remain. And we keep running around that triangle,” he said.
The prime minister also said Russian firms investing in the United States needed more support from Washington, and he singled out Norilsk Nickel and Severstal as examples. “They need signals that they are welcome,” he said, adding that this was also true for U.S. companies investing in Russia, like General Electric and Boeing.
The United States ranks eighth in terms of accumulated investment in the country, Putin said, adding that he wanted the figure to increase.
Clinton told Putin that in talks with President Dmitry Medvedev earlier Friday she had discussed the possibility for greater cooperation between Russian and U.S. technology companies.
Clinton called for reducing trade barriers and reiterated U.S. support for Moscow’s WTO accession. She also discussed a potential Russian bid for a multibillion-dollar U.S. aerial-refueling fleet.
After the talks, Putin’s deputy chief of staff said the prime minister thought that the much-discussed “reset” of mutual ties had already improved the atmosphere but not yet the substance.
“Now is the time for decisive change in the substantial part of our bilateral relations,” Yury Ushakov told reporters, Interfax reported.
Ushakov also said Putin told Clinton that Moscow’s WTO membership depends only on the United States. “He said that if there was political will in Washington, the problem could be solved,” Ushakov said.
Moscow’s WTO talks have been overshadowed by a brawl with Washington over U.S. poultry.
Russia, once the largest importer of U.S. chicken, barred the meat as of Jan. 1 after slashing the allowable amount of chlorine that producers can use as a disinfectant.
Russia’s food safety watchdog said Friday that the country would start importing Thai poultry as an alternative, Bloomberg reported.
On a more positive note, the government said it might lift import duties on foreign-made passenger jets, including those produced by Airbus and Boeing, when a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan begins to function on July 1, Vedomosti reported Friday.
Clinton, who was in Moscow for negotiations in the Middle East Quartet under the auspices of the United Nations, was originally not expected to meet with Putin because he was traveling. The talks in Putin’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence were later tacked to the end of her schedule, giving the impression that Putin had left it unclear whether he would receive her. It was their first official contact since Clinton became secretary of state last year.
During talks with Medvedev and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Clinton failed to reach any breakthrough on the two most salient bilateral issues, negotiations over a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and U.S. efforts to impose sanctions against Iran.
Clinton said Geneva-based treaty negotiations were “nearly finished” and that both sides hoped to sign the new treaty early next month. “We hope to have a signing ceremony … in early April,” she said in an interview with Bloomberg TV posted on the State Department’s web site.
Clinton and Lavrov refused to say Friday where the signing would take place, and Ushakov merely said it would take place in Europe.
Kommersant reported that Moscow had pushed for Kiev as a symbol for the new Ukrainian government’s pro-Russian course but Washington opposed the idea and said the signing would take place in Prague.
On Iran, Putin told Clinton that sanctions were possible but warned that they might not solve the problem and were maybe even counterproductive, Ushakov said.
Putin also managed to irritate Clinton on Thursday when he announced that Russia would launch Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor this summer.
TITLE: Gryzlov Says Medvedev, Putin to Rule After 2012
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will continue ruling Russia in a tandem after 2012, when Medvedev’s first presidential term expires, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said Friday.
“There can’t be any contradictions in the Medvedev-Putin tandem by default. That is why they will work in this tandem after 2012,” Gryzlov said in an online interview with the Gazeta.ru news portal.
Gryzlov was responding to some of the more than 3,000 angry questions and caustic remarks directed at him and United Russia that had been submitted by readers over the course of a week.
The interview was initially scheduled for Wednesday, and Gryzlov — often described by critics as “the Android” for his low-key personality and perceived servility to Putin — faced sharp criticism when he decided to skip it at the last minute, citing a Security Council meeting on global warming.
Gryzlov also said Friday that a program called Clean Water to install water filters that he co-invented in buildings nationwide would go ahead despite criticism that his dual involvement as a patent holder and a lawmaker who decides the state budget marked a conflict of interest.
He said his critics in the media “serve the powers that do not want our citizens to live long, quality lives.”
Gryzlov blamed unspecified foreign powers for growing anti-government street rallies, saying foreign money was being funneled through nongovernmental organizations to pay people to participate in the rallies.
“Here we get the taste of a color revolution,” he said, referring to the nonviolent public protests that led to regime changes in Georgia in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2004.
Asked about his infamous statement that the Duma was not a place for discussion, Gryzlov complained that journalists had distorted his original appeal to stop parliamentary “battles” that sometimes resulted in fistfights.
Gryzlov dismissed suggestions that bureaucrats had forced citizens to vote for United Russia or had bought their votes during regional elections on March 14. He conceded that some bureaucrats had pressed their subordinates to vote, but he said they could not check whether the votes had been cast for United Russia, which he and Putin lead.
As for offering money for votes, as some media have reported, Gryzlov said this would be “too expensive.”
Gryzlov praised United Russia — which is routinely accused of stifling any dissent — for “creating real powers” out of the Communist, Liberal Democratic and Just Russia parties — the only parties other than United Russia that have seats in the Duma. The Communist and Liberal Democrat parties are a decade older than United Russia, and their representation in the Duma and regional legislatures has dwindled as United Russia developed into the ruling party.
“We live in a beautiful state,” Gryzlov said as he concluded the interview.
TITLE: Spanish Arrests Expose a New Kind of Mafia
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — When Spanish police announced the arrest of about 80 reputed mobsters across Europe last week, many media reports trumpeted the development as the latest crackdown on the Russian mafia.
But soon the reporting shifted and introduced a hitherto little-noticed phenomenon in the West: the Georgian mafia.
The leader of the organized crime group’s Spanish operations was identified as Khaber (or Kakhaber) Shushanashvili, and the gang was said to be in contact with convicted Georgian crime boss Zakhar Kalashov, who has been imprisoned in Spain since 2006.
Austria reported the biggest number of arrests — 25, including prominent reputed Georgian mobster Zaal Makharoblidze. The gang, made up mostly of asylum seekers, was responsible for 30 percent of a recent spate in burglaries in Vienna, said Franz Lang, director of Austria’s Federal Criminal Investigation Office.
Russian media were quick to notice the change.
“The Russian mafia turned out to be Georgian,” read a headline in the Trud mass-circulation daily newspaper.
Russia Today, the state-controlled English-language television channel, suggested a lapse in Western reporting.
“Initial reports suggested that those detained belonged to the so-called Russian mafia, as people of former Soviet states are often mistakenly referred to as Russian in the West,” a presenter said in a March 15 news broadcast.
Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow’s outspoken representative to NATO, said the reports reflected a deep bias. “Apparently for the Western media Georgia is always a good thing and Russia is always a bad thing,” he wrote in his Twitter blog.
The Russian-Georgian divide has been especially bitter since the two countries fought over South Ossetia in 2008, a war in which Russian officials accused Western reporters of siding with Georgia.
But the mafia stereotyping is also deplored by some Western journalists. “I think there is a lot of prejudice and a great deal of inappropriate use of the term ‘Russian mafia,’” said Pilar Bonet, Moscow bureau chief of the El Pais daily. “I really recommend that the Russian ambassador to Spain protests and even goes to court when this happens.”
Russian officials have long criticized Western crime reports about Russians. Timur Lakhonin, head of the Interior Ministry’s Interpol section, said in December that the whole concept of the Russian mafia was nothing but a myth. “There is no data showing any existing organized crime structures that consist of former Russian citizens,” he told reporters.
Yet Georgian officials also frown at the notion of putting blame on their country.
Georgi Kandelaki, deputy head of the Georgian parliament’s international affairs committee, said the whole dispute was pointless.
“The fact that they caught Georgian criminals operating abroad shows that the [criminals] have no way of operating in Georgia,” he told The St. Petersburg Times on Sunday.
Kandelaki added that organized crime from his country is the most vibrant in Russia. “Look at the Georgian thieves-in-law — their number in Georgia is close to zero and most of them are in Moscow,” he said.
So-called thieves-in-law form a fraternity of criminals that maintains its own code of behavior, laws, courts, leaders and initiation rites and disdains all institutions other than its own.
In fact, captured Georgian thieves-in-law have surfaced in national media reports recently. On Friday, Interfax reported that the Moscow police had arrested Merab Gogia, a 56-year-old suspected mobster, on suspicion of selling illegal drugs.
Speculation has also been mounting that Moscow might extradite Tariel Oniani, an ethnic Georgian believed to be one of Russia’s most powerful mobsters, to Spanish authorities. Oniani was arrested during a dramatic helicopter raid outside Moscow in July 2008 as dozens of reputed crime bosses gathered on a yacht to settle a rift.
Spain has reportedly requested Oniani’s extradition, along with three other suspects, Leon Lann, Konstantin Manukyan and Vladimir Tyurin.
A Spanish Embassy spokesman said Friday that he would not comment on extradition issues.
Yevgeny Vyshenkov, a former police detective and organized crime expert at the St. Petersburg-based Agency of Journalistic Investigations, said issues like ethnicity and citizenship matter little in a global problem like organized crime. What is important is where mobsters decide to operate, he said.
“Most of them live in Russia, mainly in Moscow, and have their assets in the capital,” Vyshenkov said.
TITLE: N. Koreans Seek to Defect in Russia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea — The North Korean’s note, scrawled in pen, was simple: “I want to go to South Korea. Why? To find freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of life.”
The ex-logger, on the run from North Korean authorities, handed the note over to a South Korean missionary in the Russian city of Vladivostok last week in hopes that it would lead to political asylum.
Just before he was to meet Thursday with the International Organization for Migrants, a team of men grabbed him, slapped handcuffs on him and drove off, rights activists in Moscow said Friday. He was spirited away to the eastern port city of Nakhodka, where he is sure to be handed back over to North Korean officials and repatriated to his communist homeland, activists said in Seoul.
Police in Vladivostok refused to comment. A senior South Korean diplomat in Vladivostok said he had no information. Officials from the U.S. consulate in Vladivostok could not be reached for comment.
The 51-year-old would be the third North Korean logger in Russia in a week to make a bid for asylum. On March 9, two other North Koreans who had fled their jobs as loggers managed to get into the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok.
RIA-Novosti reported last week that two North Koreans climbed a fence, ran past the guards and entered the consulate, saying they wanted political asylum. Itar-Tass carried a similar report.
The incidents focused attention on the precarious existence of tens of thousands of North Koreans sent by the impoverished regime to work in Russia.
Russian government figures from 2007 put the number of North Korean laborers at 32,600, most of them working in logging in the remote east.
The Reverend Peter Chung, a Seoul-based activist, said there are about 40,000 North Korean loggers in Russia but that some 10,000 of them have fled their work sites. Some are finding work as day laborers, while others are in hiding as they try to map out how to win asylum in foreign diplomatic missions.
North Korea has been exporting workers to make hard cash since natural disasters and mismanagement destroyed the country’s economy in the 1990s. Laborers have been sent to Russia, Mongolia, eastern Europe and elsewhere, South Korea’s Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo said.
The logger seized Thursday in Vladivostok represents a grim picture of life as a lumberjack in remote Russian outposts, said Chung, head of the Seoul rights group Justice for North Korea.
The man, surname Kim, told activists he first went to Russia in October 1997, leaving behind a wife and two daughters, and worked there for four years. He went back to Russia in 2006, said Kim Hi-tae of the International Network of North Korea Human Rights Activists in Seoul.
The North Korean described the conditions as unbearable. His government took half his meager wages, while the North Korean company operating the logging camp took 35 percent. He kept just 15 percent — about $60 a month — an arrangement that rendered him “virtually a slave,” he told activists.
He eventually fled the logging camp, taking odd jobs to survive. He also became a Christian, Chung and Kim Hi-tae said, which could draw severe punishment, even execution, back home.
The successful asylum bid of two other former North Korean loggers inspired Kim to make a similar attempt, Chung said.
He turned up at a safe house that day, saying he wanted help seeking asylum. The missionary asked for a statement, so he scribbled down his name, date of birth and hometown in Korean.
“Wife, two daughters. Sent to Russia in October 1997,” he wrote. He dated it March 9, 2010, and signed his name with an emphatic period in his characteristic North Korean script.
The note was obtained by The Associated Press after being scanned and sent by e-mail from Vladivostok to Seoul. Activists asked that he be identified by his surname only to protect his family.
The group Human Rights in Russia said on its web site that a North Korean named Kim who had sought help from the International Organization for Migrants was waiting in a car outside a Vladivostok hotel to speak to rights officials.
“At this time, another car pulled up to the hotel. Several men in civilian dress got out of it and told the driver of the car that his ‘passenger is a criminal,”’ the group’s statement said. They put handcuffs on Kim, sat him in their car and drove off.
It was unclear who took him, and where they went, the statement said.
The taxi driver who said he took Kim to the hotel Thursday morning said from Vladivostok on Saturday that he and Kim were waiting in the car for about 10 minutes, when suddenly about five or six Russian men came and put handcuffs on Kim and took him away in their car. The taxi driver only identified himself as Alexander.
A tapped phone call to the South Korean or U.S. consulate may have alerted authorities to Kim’s plan, the Seoul activists said.
TITLE: Putin ‘the Engine’ Driving Russia’s Bid for World Cup
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ZURICH — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is “the engine” driving forward his country’s bid to host the football World Cup in 2018, Sport, Tourism and Youth Policy Minister Vitaly Mutko said.
Mutko said Putin could help present Russia’s case at FIFA headquarters on Dec. 2 before a vote to decide the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosts.
“He is the engine of this bid,” said Mutko, speaking in an interview after a meeting of FIFA’s ruling executive late last week.
He is one of 24 committee members who will choose the two winning candidates.
Putin is a proven winner in sports politics. His English-speaking part in Sochi’s presentation to International Olympic Committee members three years ago was judged crucial in swinging votes that got the Black Sea resort hosting rights for the 2014 Winter Games.
“He does everything that he can to support our bid,” Mutko said through a translator. “The same is applicable to the president of our country.”
Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev have met FIFA president Sepp Blatter in Moscow in recent months, leading many to consider Russia a favorite in the 2018 contest that is likely to be awarded to Europe.
FIFA insists that all candidates have government support to host the four-yearly event that earns billions of dollars for the game’s governing body and invariably costs billions in infrastructure expenses to stage.
Mutko said Russia’s bid was a national priority.
“The World Cup is a fundamental factor in the development of the country,” he said. “Even if Russia will not win the right to host the World Cup, we will continue to develop sports infrastructure, stadiums and hockey palaces.”
He said state funds would not be overstretched by adding the World Cup to extensive construction projects in Sochi and Kazan, which will host the 2013 World University Games.
“They are proof to FIFA … that if Russia takes up certain commitments, it fully fulfills them,” Mutko said.
Bid leaders have not put a price on the widespread modernization needed in its proposed 14 host cities clustered in five areas of western Russia: the northern, southern, central, Volga River and Urals Mountain regions.
Details will be published when Russia and its nine rivals present their bid books to FIFA in Zurich on May 14.
Mutko accepted that the three other European bids — England, Spain-Portugal and Netherlands-Belgium — were ahead with existing stadiums, transportation links and hotels.
But he said Russia offered a greater legacy by developing the sport and opening new markets in the former Soviet republics of Europe and Central Asia.
The World Cup “should go to new regions and open new frontiers,” said Mutko, adding that Russia wanted to make more friends. “We want to show to the world the new Russia, open and hospitable in every sense.”
Russia, Australia, England, Japan, United States, along with the Spain-Portugal and Netherlands-Belgium joint bids, have applied to host either the 2018 or 2022 World Cup. Indonesia, Qatar and South Korea are bidding for 2022 only.
TITLE: City Hall Prepares to Sell Maly Gostiny Dvor
AUTHOR: By Nadezhda Zaitseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: After receiving Maly Gostiny Dvor from the Federal Property Management Agency last year, City Hall has announced plans to put the building, which is located in the historic center of St. Petersburg, up for auction.
According to a resolution from the Committee for City Property Management (KUGI) dated Feb. 18, bidding for Maly Gostiny Dvor will take place sometime between the first and third quarters of this year.
An announcement about the auction will be made in the near future, with the lot’s starting price set at 290 million rubles ($9.9 million,) said Alina Kuberskaya, a representative of the city’s property fund.
“The auction is planned for June 17, during the Petersburg Economic Forum,” she said. “The lot comprises 45 separate premises and two staircases; essentially, it is one large gallery,” Kuberskaya explained, adding that two 46-square meter apartments that hadn’t been bought up kept the property from being auctioned as a building with a plot of land.
A long-term rental agreement, however, is proving to be a major encumbrance to the sale of Maly Gostiny Dvor. “All of the premises being put up for auction were let to the Petersburg Real Estate Agency (PAN) through 2046, and rental payments for the entire period were made in advance,” said Kuberskaya. PAN signed an agreement with KUGI to create a shopping and hotel complex in the building, but work on the project never began.
In December of last year, St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Arbitration Court ruled in favor of KUGI to evict one of Maly Gostiny Dvor’s tenants, Tsentr Plius. Known as the Ingria intersectoral association until 2002, Tsentr Plius had agreed in 1991 to rent six premises totaling 932 square meters for a period of 49 years.
Viktor Tamarenko, director of Tsentr Plius, said earlier this year that his company did not plan to leave the building, as it had legal foundations for staying there. According to Tamarenko, his contract exempted Tsentr Plius from 18 years of rent payments because the company spent 798.6 million rubles ($27.2 million) on remodeling between 1994 and 1996.
KUGI has been attempting to evict Tsentr Plius since 2007. A representative of the company said earlier this month that it would continue with court proceedings. But Anton Buchnev, deputy director of St. Petersburg’s property fund, believes Tsentr Plius has little chance of changing the court’s decision. “When the building is put up for auction, the company will be evicted,” Buchnev said.
Maly Gostiny Dvor covers 10,646 square meters located at number 26 on the embankment of the Griboedov canal. City Hall was given the building in spring last year, along with 49 other federal monuments, including Bolshoi Gostiny Dvor, the Yusupov Palace and Kronshtadt Fortress. KUGI chairman Igor Metelsky promised to put some of them up for sale.
According to a KUGI decree, the winner of the auction must sign a conservation obligation with the Committee for the State Control, Use and Protection of Historic and Cultural Monuments. “Maly Gostiny Dvor’s functional possibilities are not limited, but the most effective use for the building would be as a shopping complex,” said Buchnev.
PAN is considering taking part in the auction, according to its director Andrei Krylov, who added that the starting price was good. Ivan Berkoltsev, director of development for the Piter concern, agreed: “For this kind of building, it’s inexpensive.” But Berkoltsev has doubts that buyers will be interested in a building with a tenant, particularly one who has made advance payments. “That kind of a purchase could only interest the tenant himself,” he said.
TITLE: Ruble, Stocks Suffer On Decline in Price of Crude
AUTHOR: By Denis Maternovsky and Jason Corcoran
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The ruble fell the most against the dollar this year and Russian stocks retreated Monday as oil, the country’s chief export, fell below $80 a barrel on concern a winding down of stimulus measures will cause the global economic recovery to falter.
The Russian currency weakened 1.1 percent against the dollar at 29.6138 by Monday afternoon, headed for the biggest drop since Dec. 29. Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer and GMK Norilsk Nickel, its biggest miner, retreated more than 2 percent, leaving the 30-stock Micex Index poised for its largest fall in a month.
“Today’s correction is due to oil and other high-yielding currencies turning lower,” said Ivan Tchakarov, a London-based economist at Nomura Holdings on Monday.
Crude for April delivery slipped as much as $1.76 percent to $79.01 in New York on speculation that governments around the world may follow India in raising interest rates, damping the recovery in global fuel demand. In the past month surging commodity prices have bolstered investor appetite for the ruble and forced the central bank to ease the corridor within which it intervenes against the euro-dollar basket 22 times.
Oil prices have risen from as low as $33.98 a barrel in February 2009 to as high as $83.95 on Jan. 11, improving the revenue prospects for the world’s biggest energy exporter. Bank Rossii has a policy of moving its target trading band by 5 kopeks each time it buys $700 million to slow the ruble’s appreciation.
The ruble retreated 1 percent to 40.0235 per euro, leaving the currency 1 percent weaker at 34.2884 against the central bank’s target currency basket, its first decline since March 15 and its biggest drop this year.
There is “a rising anticipation of a more robust response from the central bank as the ruble is reaching increasingly uncomfortable levels,” Tchakarov said.
A stronger ruble hurts manufacturing and constrains economic growth so the central bank should step up interventions to stop it from advancing too quickly, Deputy Economy Minister Andrei Klepach told reporters at a conference in Moscow last week.
“From the point of view of the economy, the ruble shouldn’t strengthen like this,” Klepach said.
The regulator bought about $18 billion of foreign currency between Feb.18 and March 19, according to Renaissance Capital in Moscow. Bank Rossii uses the currency basket to manage swings that hurt Russian exporters and producers.
The ruble is up 2 percent against the euro and 0.5 percent against the dollar in the past month, the fifth best performance among 26 emerging market currencies tracked by Bloomberg.
The currency basket is calculated by multiplying the dollar’s rate to the ruble by 0.55, the euro to ruble rate by 0.45, then adding them together. The ruble remains within the 26 to 41 band the central bank pledged January 2009 to defend.
TITLE: Nokia Plans Ambitious Expansion in Russia
AUTHOR: By Diana ben-Aaron
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Nokia, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, plans to expand its own-brand stores in Russia over the next few years as part of its bid to hook consumers on services such as maps and music.
“We’re targeting potentially 120 stores in two and a half years to have good coverage of cities with 50,000 citizens and more,” Victor Saeijs, head of Eurasian sales for the Espoo, Finland-based company, said in an interview.
The number would include Nokia’s existing 40 stores in Russia, including its best-performing flagship store in the Pushkin Square district of Moscow. The company is also working with carriers to sell services and work out data usage fees for smartphones on prepaid plans. Mobile TeleSystems, Russia’s largest mobile-phone company, offered a three-month free data package with the N97 smartphone last year to encourage users to try out extras such as navigation and photo sharing.
“Unlimited data plans don’t really exist at the moment like you see in European markets but I have no doubt it will come and hopefully by the end of the year,” Saeijs said. “We’ll be working with the operators to stimulate them to do this because we know that’s the way to get a bigger services uptake.”
Nokia will introduce phones that can accommodate two different SIM cards, he said, confirming the company’s announcement at an investor meeting in December. Dual-SIM cards are a popular feature in prepaid markets where people may have numbers on different services to take advantage of deals.
Industry average handset prices in Russia are expected to rebound in the second half of this year and 2011 after falling as much as 30 percent last year because of the financial crisis, Saeijs said. As the financial crisis depressed phone sales, Russian mobile retailers consolidated into bigger chains, including stores run by carriers MTS and VimpelCom.
The growth of smartphones will help the rebound, Saeijs said. Smartphones increased to 23 percent of total ruble mobile-phone sales in Russia in January from 14 percent last year, according to market researcher GfK.
Nokia will terminate its contract with one of its biggest Russian distributors, TeleLogistic, at the end of June, because of the consolidation and what Saeijs said were “good reasons not to continue the contract with this particular distributor.”
Having its own stores permits the company to show a wider range of handsets and to demonstrate services, Saeijs said. The company opened stores in Perm, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnoyarsk and Samara this month, working with local partners.
“It’s a very device-centric brand and we want to move toward being seen much more as a brand that brings devices, services and solutions to consumers,” he said.
Nokia has sold the most Comes With Music packages in Russia after learning from rocky rollouts in other markets, Saeijs said, declining to give figures. Comes With Music bundles a handset with 12 to 18 months’ unlimited track downloads from Nokia’s music store for a flat rate.
Russian buyers are downloading local music for 25 percent of their track picks and Saeijs believes that could double in a few months, supporting the company’s investment in deals with local labels. It’s now focusing on map services, where it has detailed information for 28 Russian cities, he said.
The so-called 8000 series or premium models, which included metal-toned slider phones, have worked to position Nokia as an “aspirational” brand in the Russian market, rather than a mass brand, Saeijs said.
Saeijs, a Dutch national who joined Nokia in 2000, has also sold consumer electronics in Russia for Philips Electronics NV.
Nokia is the most trusted mobile-phone brand for 53 percent of Russian consumers, according to a survey published this year by Reader’s Digest. That’s up from 44 percent three years ago.
“Here in Russia, handsets still have a panache,” Philip Townsend, an analyst at Moscow-based brokerage Metropol, said in an interview. “For example, people who can’t afford a Mercedes and are driving around in some beat-up car will tend to go for go for upmarket handset. But they’re moving away from Nokia because handsets made by Samsung or many other makes as well are becoming much more upmarket and more widely respected.”
Nokia shipped more units than any other manufacturer in every quarter last year and increased its market share “nicely” in Russia in 2009, Saeijs said, rebutting a report by Moscow analyst Mobile Research Group that Samsung had overtaken the Finnish vendor in the fourth quarter.
“Whatever quarter you take in the last year, in volume and even more in value, Nokia’s the clear market leader,” Saeijs said. He declined to give figures.
TITLE: PM Seeks Price Probe for Farmers
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday called on government agencies to look into rising prices for fertilizer and oil products while promising 100 billion rubles ($3.4 billion) in subsidies to the agricultural sector.
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, the Agriculture Ministry and the Energy Ministry will look into every case of unfair price hikes for oil products, Putin said at a meeting on the agriculture sector. He added that the government would provide a 10 percent discount on the wholesale prices on such products for agricultural enterprises.
The service’s deputy head, Andrei Tsyganov, said the watchdog would look into the prices for oil products and that action would be taken if groundless price hikes were found.
In western Russia, diesel oil has already increased 1,000 to 1,300 rubles per ton over the first two weeks of March, he said, while in Siberia and the Far East it has risen as much as 2,300 rubles per ton.
Putin ordered the anti-monopoly service and First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov to report back on the situation within a week.
At the meeting, Putin also said the agricultural sector will receive 100 billion rubles ($3.14 billion) in subsidies.
“In 2010, moare than 100 billion rubles will be spent on the support of agriculture from the budget alone. Meanwhile more than 25 billion rubles will be spent on the needs of the spring sowing,” he said, adding that the state will also reimburse up to 4.7 billion rubles in chemical expenses this year.
In 2009, the government greatly increased its subsidies to the sector, giving 183 billion rubles, a 30 percent increase from the year before, but the support only increased output by 0.5 percent.
He also said state-owned Rosselkhozbank, one of the main lenders for the sector, had lowered its interest rate for seasonal loans to 12 percent for agriculture producers.
The meeting was held in preparation for the spring sowing season, which has been delayed because of the extended winter weather.
TITLE: Ukraine Softens Its Stance On Operation of Gas Pipelines
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ukraine’s new government is close to completing work on a bill that would let Gazprom and European Union companies join the country in operating its vast gas pipeline network, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Andriy Kluyev said Friday.
The announcement could lead to a breakthrough in gas supply negotiations between Moscow and Kiev, which have been fraught with disputes in recent years, including two that disrupted supplies to Europe. Ukraine wants cheaper gas to take the burden off its reeling economy and deficit budget, and offering partial control of the nation’s gas pipelines is one of Kiev’s strongest bargaining chips with Moscow.
“It’s no secret that we’re currently in active contact with, first of all, our Russian colleagues,” Prime Minister Mykola Azarov told reporters Friday, referring to the prospects of changing the terms of the gas trade. “Our goal is to revise the unfavorable contract that is in place.”
He said state energy company Naftogaz Ukrainy would have to pay the bulk of the country’s gas bill for March, with the budget contributing a “maximum of 10 percent.” He said earlier in the week that the bill would be $700 million, 15 percent higher than in February.
Later this week, Ukranian Fuel and Energy Minister Yuri Boiko is to hold talks on the gas trade with his Russian colleagues.
Ukraine’s government is facing the painful prospect of having to cut spending by 20 percent in the next four months compared with the same period last year, largely because of the huge bill it will receive for gas imports, Citigroup said in a note to investors Friday.
The quick drafting of the bill, done in less than a month since President Viktor Yanukovych took office, may be a sign of how desperately Ukraine needs to cut a deal.
Kiev’s current supply contract was negotiated by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who lost to Yanukovych in a tight presidential vote last month and has bitterly opposed the consortium plan as a threat to Ukraine’s national interests.
Yanukovych is moving quickly to reach a deal because of the fleeting nature of coalitions in Ukraine’s parliament, where supporters of the new president now enjoy a majority, said Pavel Baev, a professor at Norway’s International Peace Research Institute.
“I don’t know what kind of president Yulia Tymoshenko would have made, but she will be a menacing tiger in opposition,” he said by phone from Oslo. “He needs to hurry while the effect of his victory is still there; strike while the iron is hot.”
Ukraine inherited a law from the previous Orange government that bans the lease or sale of the gas transit system to foreigners. The legislation blocked earlier talks on Gazprom and EU involvement in running the pipelines in exchange for investment to maintain them.
Kluyev said Friday that Ukraine would retain ownership of the pipelines, handing them over to the consortium as a concession.
State-run Gazprom, Russia’s gas export monopoly, sends 80 percent of its exports to the EU through Ukraine. Kiev now pays an EU-level price of $305 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas, which experts there say is much more than the rate Gazprom charges other, more distant customers in Europe.
TITLE: Church Backs Lower Gas Prices for Ukraine
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian Orthodox Church made a request to the government that it lower gas prices for Ukrainian chemical companies, saying it was a “sensible initiative” to assist the companies, which help the Ukrainian church.
The request was made in a letter from Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the church’s department for cooperation, to Gazprom’s chairman, First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov.
The letter said the head of the Ukrainian Union of Chemists, Alexei Golubov, had requested Patriarch Kirill’s help in the matter. The letter, published on the web site of Ukraine’s Unian news service, calls on Zubkov to “keep in mind the substantial help given by the Ukrainian chemical industry to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate.”
In the first quarter, Russia raised gas prices for Ukraine to $306 per 1,000 cubic meters from $208 in the fourth quarter of last year. The Ukrainian chemical firms need prices to fall so they can compete with Russian chemical firms, which get cheaper gas.
Before the crisis, the chemical industry accounted for 8 percent of Ukraine’s gross domestic product.
Last year, Kirill made a much-heralded trip to Ukraine, where he tried to heal a schism between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate and the church under the Kievan Patriarchate. The latter split off from the Moscow Patriarchate in the 1990s. During the trip, Kirill proposed taking on Ukrainian citizenship so he could spend as much as half a year there to maintain religious influence.
“We’re not lobbying here. … We passed on the request, considering that it looked reasonable enough,” said Pavel Shashkin, secretary of Kirill’s economics and ethics council.
Currently, Ukrainian chemical companies are at a standstill, “people are sitting around without work because they are unable to cooperate with Russian companies in terms of processing gas,” he said.
TITLE: Levitin Proposes the Reintroduction of Road Funds
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Pismennaya and Maxim Tovkailo
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Transportation Ministry wants to return to the use of separately administered funds to pay for road construction, but the Finance Ministry opposes the idea, saying it would lead to corruption and be impractical to finance.
Transportation Minister Igor Levitin said last week that the proposal to create road funds had been submitted to the government. In December, President Dmitry Medvedev ordered that the proposals be drafted, said Svetlana Kryshtanovskaya, an aide to Levitin.
This would not be the first time that Russia has financed the roads industry through specialized funds. In 1991, the Supreme Council of still-Soviet Russia approved the law on road funds, which pooled money raised from a variety of transportation-related taxes.
In 2001, the federal road fund was liquidated after the government decided to switch to direct budget financing. With the cancellation of road tolls from Jan. 1, 2003, the regional road funds were also eliminated.
“There were a great many instances of theft from the road funds,” a Finance Ministry official said. “It’s a very corrupt sector, a real trough for regional officials.”
During the early 2000s, a number of officials were arrested on suspicion of stealing from the funds, including Irkutsk Deputy Governor Sergei Voronov, Smolensk Deputy Governor Yury Balbyshkin and Viktor Burov, the Kaluga region’s roads minister. Eliminating the funds required a colossal effort because of resistance from the regions, the Finance Ministry official said.
Kryshtanovskaya conceded that the funds were sometimes misused, but she said their elimination led to a chronic deficit of financing for new roads. “In 2000, the state spent about 2.9 percent of gross domestic product on roads, but in 2005 it was 1.1 percent,” she said.
The Transportation Ministry is proposing to create road funds at the federal, regional and municipal levels, which should accumulate money for the construction, renovation and maintenance of public roads, Kryshtanovskaya said.
Last year, 328 billion rubles ($11.2 billion) of federal money was spent on roads, and in 2010, 274 billion rubles has been allotted. Road funds would make it possible to sign 12-year contracts — the time period before the first scheduled road renovation is due — for the construction and maintenance of motorways, Levitin said. Currently, contracts can be for no more than three years.
The federal fund would raise money from import duties on cars and tires, valued-added tax from the sale of imported cars and other tax revenue, Kryshtanovskaya said. Trucks weighing more than 12 metric tons would pay to use public roads; roadside stores, cafes and gas stations would be taxed; and payment would be required to install billboards or other infrastructure along the road. The fund could also be used to finance Avtodor’s construction of toll roads, she said.
The Transportation Ministry wants to finance the regional funds with the transportation tax and excise taxes on fuel, value-added tax on the sale of fuel, tires and Russian-made cars, as well as an 8.3 percent tax on profit, Kryshtanovskaya said. The municipal funds would get half of the land tax, plus payments for rented land and part of individuals’ communal services payments.
Medvedev will hold a meeting on roads policy soon and the proposal will be discussed, an official in the presidential administration said. The proposal could use some work, said an unenthusiastic source in the Cabinet.
“There are no painless taxes that could be paid into the road funds,” the Finance Ministry official said.
The proposal does come with risks, said Sergei Belyakov, head of the Economic Development Ministry’s investment policy department. “For example, the risk of underfunding other parts of regional budgets,” he said.
The Budget Code does not allow specific revenues and expenses to be linked, said Sergei Aristov, the Tver region’s economic development minister. But he said he liked the ministry’s proposal, since it would clarify the sources and volumes of road financing.
In 2010, the Tver region will spend about 2 billion rubles ($68.5 million), or 6 percent of its budget, building, renovating and maintaining roads, Aristov said.
Kryshtanovskaya said the regions, in particular, did not have enough money for their roads. “In 2009, revenue from regional budgets from the profit and transportation taxes and excise taxes on fuel were forecast at 332 billion rubles, while the regions needed 1 trillion rubles in roads funding,” she said.
The idea might work out, since there really is a shortage of money, said Ilya Rachkov, a partner at law firm N?rr Stiefenhofer Lutz. The road funds were discredited in the 1990s, but that does not mean the idea itself is bad.
It would be easier and more effective to oversee the money for roads through funds, said Senator Vladimir Fyodorov, former head of the traffic police.
TITLE: Currency Exchanges Face Oct. 1 Deadline
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Voronova and Alexei Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Beginning in October, stand-alone currency exchange booths could vanish under a Central Bank plan, but the same facilities could remain open as banks’ transaction windows if they employ a second person and can provide additional financial services.
Street exchange points will be required to become cash-transaction desks or fully-fledged bank branches or the Central Bank will close them on Oct. 1. Under draft proposals published by the regulator, no new currency exchange booths can be opened, also effective from Oct. 1.
Banks already have a variety of office formats, such as service branches, cash-transaction offices and lending and payments offices. Currencies can be exchanged at a regular bank branch, and so the stand-alone exchange points must disappear, the Central Bank has told banks.
The regulator made the decision amid falling demand for exchange points and frequent complaints that consumers are cheated by exchange-booth tellers.
In January 2010, the public’s total demand for foreign currencies — the sum of currencies purchased at exchange points, received through conversions and withdrawn from foreign-currency bank accounts — fell by 39 percent to $4.6 billion compared to a month earlier. The figure is also 69 percent lower than it was at the start of least year, when the dollar rose 20.5 percent against the ruble and the euro gained 10.2 percent.
The closure of exchange points will mean better service for consumers, since fully-fledged banks have much stricter oversight of their cashiers, said Sergei Leontyev, director of Binbank’s sales network.
He warned, however, that the cost to consumers could increase. Universal banks cannot offer competitive exchange rates because of their higher costs compared with “specialized players” on the market, he said.
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has already decided to look into the matter.
Exchange booths that are not breaking the law and not cheating customers should not have to suffer, said Yulia Bondaryova, director of the anti-monopoly service’s financial oversight department.
Consumers should have a choice, otherwise the cost of a service — in this case, currency exchange commissions — will rise sharply, Bondaryova said. The anti-monopoly service is ready to discuss the matter with the Central Bank, both before Oct. 1 and after, when the effects of the ban will be clearer.
Leontyev said Binbank would only have to inform the Central Bank that it was reclassifying exchange points, which would not require any major expenses.
Reclassifying exchange booths as stand-alone, cash-transaction desks would mean that the bank would, at the very least, have to expand the operations to include deposits, withdrawals and transactions with traveler’s checks, one banker said. Such an office would require at least two employees, he said.
TITLE: Skolkovo Chosen As Site for ‘Silicon Valley’
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday that Russia’s centrally planned version of Silicon Valley would be built in the Moscow region town of Skolkovo, eschewing existing technoparks and instead building a new supermodern technology town from scratch.
“I made the decision — we will build this center where we have already laid the groundwork for doing it quickly. Speed matters, so we will build it in Skolkovo,” Medvedev said at a meeting with students who had received a presidential scholarship.
The new town will have five “presidential” priorities for modernization: energy, IT, telecommunications, biotechnology and nuclear technology, Medvedev said.
Kremlin aide Arkady Dvorkovich had previously named Skolkovo as one of five possible locations for the center, and media reports had suggested that the town was a favorite. Other potential sites discussed with Medvedev were Tomsk, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, Obninsk and Dubna, Dvorkovich said.
The idea to create the center was Medvedev’s, the president’s first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, told Vedomosti last month. Medvedev hopes to create a town for young, creative scientists and businessmen, but without luxury apartments “where people walk their Rottweilers and drive Hummers,” Surkov said.
The development of the project will be spearheaded by Rusnano chief Anatoly Chubais, and work on the project could begin as early as this year, Surkov said, adding that the project would be financed in part by dipping into the government’s 10 billion ruble ($340 million) modernization and innovation budget.
The town of Skolkovo, located just west of the Moscow Ring Road, is home to the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, a premier business school founded by a coterie of Russian businesspeople and high-placed government officials. The area has long been considered a prestigious area: formerly home to politburo officials, billionaire Roman Abramovich, who donated land for the business school, is planning to build a golf course in the area.
The decision came as a surprise for authorities in the Odintsovo district, where Skolkovo is located, a spokesperson for the Odintsovo administration said. The spokesperson added that local authorities had not yet been informed of the details of the project or the possible location of the scientific center.
This is not the first time the government has tried to create a high-tech center for innovation in order to attract engineers and scientists. Four special economic zones in St. Petersburg, Tomsk, Dubna and Zelenograd have all been called new centers for research and development in the fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, nuclear technology and telecommunications.
Critics have said building a new facility from scratch is a waste of resources, as many of the technology centers already have all the necessary infrastructure in place and are currently underused or not utilized at all.
A spokesman for the presidential administration could not be reached for comment. A spokeswoman for the Economic Development Ministry, which has partial oversight over special economic zones, would not comment on the ministry’s involvement in the project.
Staff writer Alexei Anishyuk contributed to this report.
TITLE: Growth Planned on Reactor Market
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia plans to raise its share of the growing global market for constructing and operating nuclear power plants to 25 percent, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday, as a “nuclear revival” in many countries pushes up demand for its services.
The country currently accounts for only 16 percent of the market but has “extremely ambitious plans” in the sector, he said.
State corporation Rosatom is competing with France’s Areva, Japan’s Toshiba and Canada’s Cameco on the market. A total of 56 reactors are currently under construction worldwide,. A reactor can cost as much as $8 billion to build.
Putin also said the long-delayed Bushehr nuclear plant in Iran will start operating this summer. Vladimir Pavlov, chief of construction at the plant, said at a meeting with Putin that the launch was scheduled for July.
Putin held a meeting on the nuclear power industry after overseeing the opening of a new reactor in Volgodonsk, in the Rostov region, that will begin operating at its full capacity of 1,000 megawatts in October. Nuclear energy is experiencing renewed interest from governments around the globe as a clean source of power, despite concerns over storage of radioactive spent fuel, and Russia is hoping to capitalize on the trend.
“We have secured a substantial number of orders, but we need to move on,” Putin said at the meeting.
Rosatom is unlikely to line up construction deals in developed-world countries such as the United States, which is currently rethinking its nuclear power policy. In January, U.S. President Barack Obama promised $55 billion in federal loan guarantees from next year’s budget to help build new nuclear plants. Instead, Rosatom has courted countries such as Vietnam, China, India and Turkey, which also have plans for increased consumption of nuclear energy.
Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko said Russia expected to sign a contract with China later this month or next month for the construction of two more reactors at the Tianwan plant. Together, the reactors will cost 1.3 billion euros ($1.8 billion), a source in China said last month, Interfax reported.
China leads the way in the so-called “nuclear revival,” with 21 reactors being built, followed by Russia with 11, South Korea with six and India with five. The United States has the most reactors in the world, with 104, but the reactors use old technology and are no longer cost-effective. The last one went on line about three decades ago.
Many countries, such as Sweden, have reversed their attitude toward nuclear energy. In a recent poll, 52 percent of Swedes said the country should continue operating nuclear power plants, despite a referendum in 1980 requiring that they all be phased out by this year.
In Volgodonsk, Putin officially ordered the launch of the first nuclear plant constructed as part of a program to expand the share of nuclear-generated energy to 20 percent from the current 16 percent by 2020 by building 26 new reactors.
The next two reactors at the plant may start operating in 2013 and 2015, Kiriyenko said.
TITLE: Australia Approves Uranium Exports To Russia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CANBERRA, Australia — Any Australian uranium sales to Russia would meet nonproliferation requirements, but the government remains firmly against sales to India, Trade Minister Simon Crean said Friday.
On Thursday the government rejected a 2008 parliamentary report’s recommendation that Australia not proceed with an agreement to sell uranium to Russia.
The report had expressed concerns that the uranium could be stolen or diverted for weapons use.
The government said it has not yet made a final decision on whether to ratify the agreement, signed in 2007 by former Prime Minister John Howard and then-President Vladimir Putin.
But it said the agreement was in compliance with Australia’s long-standing condition that the country’s uranium be used only for peaceful purposes.
“We have taken considerable time on our part to ensure we’re satisfied, the International Atomic Energy Agency is satisfied, that the strictest of safeguards are in place,” Crean told Australian Broadcasting on Friday.
TITLE: French Paper Reborn Under Russian Owner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS — A small and shrinking newspaper with roots going back to the French Resistance was reborn this week thanks to a risky 50 million euro ($68 million) bet by the 25-year-old son of a Russian billionaire.
France-Soir, the smallest of France’s national news dailies, printed 500,000 copies of its newly revamped daily on Wednesday, more than 20 times its normal circulation.
It also cut the cover price nearly in half, in a promotional launch intended to continue for a month.
The paper’s relaunch is being accompanied by a lavish 20 million euro publicity blitz in an attempt to convince readers that the once nearly bankrupt tabloid again merits a spot on Paris’ newsstands alongside rivals like Le Parisien, Le Monde and Le Figaro.
Alexander Pugachyov, whose billionaire father Sergei is a close friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, bought France-Soir last year and has since gone about expanding the newsroom from about 40 journalists to about 100, a spokeswoman for the paper said.
The paper’s initial newsstand price of 50 centimes (69 cents) is half that of Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui en France, the country’s biggest-circulation national news daily. The paper’s daily circulation is between 150,000 and 200,000, the spokeswoman said, which would put France-Soir in fourth place among the country’s big national dailies.
Very little is known about the younger Pugachyov, other than the fact that he was raised in Monaco and has no previous experience running a newspaper. He does, however, have a French passport, something his father doesn’t. That allowed the Pugachyovs to get around a French law limiting foreign ownership of media companies.
The elder Pugachyov made his fortune in banking in the early 1990s. He owns two of the largest military and civil shipbuilding yards in St. Petersburg. Ongoing exclusive talks between Paris and Moscow toward the possible sale of four French warships could benefit the Pugachyovs, as the ships could be built in the elder Pugachyov’s shipyard, according to Russia expert Arnaud Dubien of the IRIS think tank.
Alexander Pugachyov was unavailable for an interview Wednesday, the France-Soir spokeswoman said.
The situation recalls the purchase last year of London’s venerable but money-losing paper The Evening Standard by another Russian tycoon, Alexander Lebedev.
France-Soir was launched in 1944, after the Liberation. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was one of France’s biggest-selling dailies, with circulation reaching a peak of more than 1 million copies daily.
In recent years, the paper has suffered even more than the rest of the loss-making, shrinking French newspaper industry. Last year, its circulation dropped to only 23,000, according to figures from media tracking body OJD.
The Pugachyovs’ interest in buying a down-market and stumbling daily “is a real question,” Dubien said.
With such a small circulation, “the thesis of influence, I don’t believe it for a second,” Dubien said. “Or else he is confusing the France-Soir of today with the France-Soir of the 1960s.”
And with such a large investment in the embattled media landscape, “it’s also clearly not to make money — he’s not going to make money with France-Soir,” Dubien said.
“I think it’s more a question of the need to give the son something to do,” Dubien said. “He has ambitions to be a press baron, there was a once-prestigious newspaper for sale, and voila.”
TITLE: Retail Sales Rise, Below Forecasts
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian retail sales rose for a second month in February as higher wages fueled consumer spending, the State Statistics Service said Friday.
Sales rose an annual 1.3 percent after a 0.3 percent increase in January, the statistics service said in an e-mailed statement. The median forecast of 13 economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for an increase of 4.2 percent. Sales fell 3.5 percent on the month.
“We expect retail sales to improve in the coming months, reflecting the improvements in people’s incomes,” Alexandra Yevtifyeva and Dmitry Fedotkin, analysts at VTB Capital, said before the release. “The ongoing drop in inflation and the likely stabilization in unemployment will also contribute to income growth and confidence.”
Household spending may bolster economic growth, which will probably reach 4 percent to 4.5 percent this year, Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach said last week.
TITLE: Analysts See Movement on Labor Market
AUTHOR: By Elmira Alieva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The local job market did not have an easy time in 2009. Both employers and employees pursued one main goal – survival. Companies tried to reduce their expenses by all available means, including by making employees redundant and cutting salaries and social packages. It was not unusual for one employee to take on the responsibilities of two or three people.
It’s an employer’s market now, say specialists. The competition between job hunters continues to grow, since the number of job offers is outstripped by demand. The financial crisis has been a stressful time for employees. Worried by the unstable situation on the labor market and by the deficit of job offers, employees have little choice but to tolerate their working conditions. It is far less common now for employees to quit their job without securing a new one first.
“Even if they are dissatisfied with their job, employees fear entering the open market, because there have been many cases when good specialists searched for a new job for more than a year, due to their own fastidiousness and due to caution on the part of companies,” said Tatyana Tangisheva, business development director at HPS Group.
Signs of revival
Things finally appear to be looking up, however. HR specialists agree: The beginning of this year saw the labor market begin to stir.
“From what I hear from my Consort Group partners in Moscow, the HR market started recovering this year at a reasonably moderate pace, with their portfolio doubling in size during the last two months,” said Yury Mikhailov, managing partner at Consort Petersburg. “They believe it may get back on track in six months or so provided there are no major cataclysms in the economy, both in Russia and worldwide.”
“The labor market has started to make its first, still cautious, steps towards increasing demand for staff,” said Irina Babenko, senior consultant at Consort Petersburg. “Many of our clients have resumed the recruitment of personnel, and most of them plan to end a moratorium on recruiting new personnel by the middle of the year.”
“The positive trends relate to the fact that in 2010 the labor market became more active; most companies have already taken measures to cut expenses and now they are looking for strategic development,” said Yelena Kolkova, general director of Staffwell in St. Petersburg. “However, a negative trend is that there are companies that have decided to freeze their projects during 2010 to 2011.”
Companies aim to replace employees who have proved to be inefficient during the crisis. They are looking for senior managers who will offer a new effective approach to business management in a changing economic situation. There is still a shortage of highly professional specialists, however.
“The economic crisis hasn’t produced new specialists,” said Babenko. “Companies whose strategy is to be the leader of their sector continue to hunt for outstanding heads in different sectors, and they are ready to offer them pre-crisis levels of compensation.”
Growing Demand
According to a recent survey conducted by Antal Russia on labor market trends, there has been significant growth of the number of vacancies for financial experts since the end of 2009, especially in the pharmaceutical and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sectors. Analysts are also observing a growth in accountancy recruitment. New vacancies appear in start-up companies more frequently, especially in retail, FMCG and cosmetics, as well as in the manufacturing sector. Employers in retail banking are looking for talented professionals in risk management and bad debts restructuring and collateral.
“Strong market players are looking for managers to develop new products,” said Tatyana Bartyuk, senior consultant for Antal’s banking team. “Banks aiming to develop are hiring personnel to open new branches, and some banks which fired too many front-of-office personnel are now filling these gaps with new people.”
The number of sales vacancies also continues to grow – there is an increase in demand for good sales professionals.
According to Alexei Trushin, principle consultant at Antal’s marketing recruitment department, the demand for marketing research managers remained stable in 2009 at large FMCG companies as well as marketing agencies.
“The demand for such professionals remains high and the general market growth is stimulating the growth of interest in them.”
“The situation on the IT market had stabilized somewhat by the start of 2010,” said Yulia Solyaeva, consultant at Antal’s IT recruitment department. “The most activity has been observed amongst businesses which are more dependent on IT, such as banks, investment companies and phone network operators.”
According to Antal, stability is being observed in the area of HR. The transformation of HR functions had come to an end in many companies by the beginning of 2010. “Now we are generally looking for people to fill vacancies which have opened because of structural changes in HR,” said Yelena Birykova, head of Antal’s HR recruitment department.
Changing expectations
The salary expectations of job hunters have changed. In times of crisis, candidates look for stability, and today, a company’s brand could have a greater value than remuneration. Employees resolve to change their current job when they feel dissatisfied with poor working conditions, low salaries, a lack of social guarantees and lack of opportunity for professional development.
“Many candidates are prepared to take a pay cut if the offer comes from a stable company that has a good client order book and a fixed position on the market,” said Babenko.
Stability, a company’s plans for development, the potential for professional self-realization, official registration of employees and level of remuneration are the major expectations of job hunters.
The expectations of employers have also changed. Their requirements have become stricter, and they look for professionals who are able to cope with a variety of problems aggravated by the crisis.
“In St. Petersburg there are quite a lot of big manufacturers and head offices of international companies. We can say that the main employers are major international and Russian companies, and medium-sized businesses,” said Tangisheva.
“Large international companies continue to offer social packages, but there is a tendency to cut down social packages in smaller Russian companies,” said Lyudmila Gordeyeva, consultant at Consort Petersburg.
Candidates who are unable to fulfill their expectations in St. Petersburg sometimes move to other cities. Moscow is a popular destination.
“Many professionals from St. Petersburg moved to Moscow after losing their jobs, where they were welcomed with delight by Moscow employers, because though they possess the same level of competence, they ask for smaller salaries,” said Tangisheva.
“In Moscow the active market remains saturated with candidates, but the quality of candidates is lower than employers’ expectations; and candidates in professional demand prefer not to change their job, because they have support from their current employer,” she added.
The general revival of the local labor market echoes the situation on the global market, but at a more moderate pace.
“Consort’s IESF (international executive search federation) partners worldwide are telling us that the global HR market began bouncing back in the last quarter of 2009, and that they are also seeing a considerable increase in activity in the search industry,” said Mikhailov.
“St. Petersburg’s market has always been less dynamic and more volatile and is showing signs of a slow recovery from the past year’s slump, and I believe it might take another year to get back firmly on its feet (though it is not close to reaching the pre-crisis level or volumes yet,)” he added.
TITLE: Salary Expectations Increase
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Despite the advantage that the financial crisis has given employers, who, thanks to the economic downturn, can now choose from a broader range of specialists while offering lower salaries, the beginning of 2010 has shown slight improvement in job seekers’ interests, particularly in certain vacancies, St. Petersburg’s recruitment experts say.
“In the years leading up to the crisis, the economy of St. Petersburg was developing at a high speed,” said Yevgeny Nesvetailov, director of the city’s branch of Manpower recruitment company. “Many fields kept increasing their potential. This factor definitely influenced the structure of the job market. Companies had to compete for their employees by offering better conditions and agreeing to the demands of candidates, who often demanded an inflated salary.
“However, the crisis has changed all that. The labor market began to favor employers when demand for jobs exceeded offers. Difficulties in finding a job forced applicants to lower their demands, including their salary expectations, to meet the requirements of employers,” said Nesvetailov.
Nesvetailov said the salary expectations of applicants decreased by approximately one third and began to correspond more closely to their qualifications and experience.
In their turn, employers took advantage of the crisis as an opportunity to hire more professional, active and mobile employees. Salary offers decreased by 15 to 20 percent, he said.
“Today employers want to see professionals in all positions, from laborers to highly qualified specialists,” said Nesvetailov. “We have noticed that most companies are not prepared to hire a person without work experience. There is also higher demand for specialists with wider skills, including not only professional knowledge but also additional skills such as knowledge of English, and possessing a driving license and a car. Personal characteristics such as the ability to adapt quickly to new conditions and make the right decisions under pressure are in high demand too.”
Darina Kalinina, business development manager at BusinessLink Personnel, said companies have toughened their requirements for candidates.
“They wish to get ‘cheaper’ specialists with the necessary skills and experience,” said Kalinina. “This can lead to a long and sometimes fruitless search.”
Kalinina said that in recent months, the job market was showing some revival and the salary expectations of applicants had grown to some extent.
“In 2009, most candidates would agree to work for smaller salaries, hoping to get a position in a stable company. But today this situation is changing and salaries are once again in the lead,” Kalinina said.
Nikolai Shalaev, regional director for northwest Russia at Ancor, said that in 2007, candidates expected a salary increase of 30 to 50 percent when changing jobs.
“Today the situation has changed and people have become more flexible,” he said. “However, today candidates still expect that a new job will provide them with a 20 percent rise in their income.”
Nesvetailov said that while in current conditions a job search may take a long time, applicants should use that time for self-education.
“Today it is necessary to invest in one’s own education to increase one’s competitiveness on the labor market,” he said. “If previously, companies organized additional studies for their employees, today educational programs have become a resource for personal professional growth,” Nesvetailov said.
“We also advise job hunters to be active in placing their resume on the main job sites, keeping track of appearing vacancies and answer them, apply to recruitment companies. It’s important to use all possibilities and what is more important – not despair,” he said.
Kalinina said there were three main rules for a successful job search, including realistic self-appraisal, the understanding that finding a job is hard work, and having a clear aim.
“It is important to evaluate your knowledge, skills, experience and requirements in accordance with the current labor market situation,” Kalinina said.
“Finding a job in 2010 is a very difficult task, but perfectly possible. Success depends on the quality of the preparatory stage of your job search. First of all, set your goals and plan your strategy. Decide what is more important to you: The company’s image, stability, salary, working conditions and job content,” she said.
Nesvetailov said in 2010, Manpower expects a systematic rise in demand for specialists among employers. Some fields will certainly recover, he predicted, but active growth of the job market like that seen in 2008 is expected no sooner than in three to five years, he said.
Kalinina said that BusinessLink Personnel “sees undoubted revival of the labor market and a growth of activity this spring.” Rapid market recovery cannot however be expected, she added.
TITLE: Foreign Experience
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It doesn’t take international companies entering the Russian market long to notice that health and safety standards here are far more relaxed than in most Western countries. Health and environmental safety (HSE) training for local employees is usually a key focal area for foreign companies, and was one of the issues discussed at a seminar on Friday devoted to the safety of doing business in Russia, organized by St. Petersburg International Business Association (SPIBA.)
Kristian Jul Rosjo, HSE director for Statoil E&R Russia, said differences between Russia and Scandinavia in attitudes to HSE were in evidence.
“When we inspect construction sites, we find that people [in Russia] don’t use helmets,” he said.
“They don’t follow our safe driving principles. They have a very fatalistic attitude that ‘we can’t change anything.’ We believe we can prevent all kinds of injuries and accidents; it’s just a matter of understanding them,” he said.
Rosjo added that some aspects of HSE that are taken for granted in Scandinavia had to be included in Russian training sessions.
“In Scandinavia, we all have a fire extinguisher in our house, everyone knows how to operate them, but in Russia, we have to train people on how to use them,” he said.
Other staffing issues discussed at the seminar included crime committed by employees and how to prevent it, particularly in the context of the economic downturn.
Daniel Twerenbold, regional director for Park Inn Hotels in St. Petersburg, said Park Inn hotels had seen more fraud among staff since the start of the recession, citing a recent incident in which a member of staff stole 800,000 rubles ($27,000.)
“We’ve also seen an increase in prostitution — even among room maids and staff members,” he said.
In order to discourage staff from stealing, employees are subjected to random checks of their coats and belongings, he said.
Attention was also paid, however, to the value of recruiting local professionals.
“When we were starting out here, we didn’t have knowledge of Russia — only of Finland, and we didn’t know what we could implement here,” said Jarvenpaa. “So first we found out who did know the market. We recruited local professionals. Now we employ 320 people here, only six of whom are expats.”
Jarvenpaa said Sokos’ local employees had also proven to be extremely helpful and competent in the company’s Finnish hotels.
“During the Christmas period, we had renovation work going on in our local hotels, so they closed for 20 days. Our staff went to work in our Finnish hotels, because most of our guests there at this time of year are Russian, and our Finnish employees don’t usually speak Russian.
“In previous years, we’ve had many problems with our Russian guests. We’ve even had to call the police into our hotels in the past, because there was no mutual language. This time, with the Russian staff, there were no problems. The main issue is communication.”
TITLE: Making Staff Training Pay
AUTHOR: By Yelena Zborovskaya, Yelena Dombrova and Anatoly Tyomkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Last summer, VTB24 bank opened its own training center in St. Petersburg, said Nadezhda Revenkova, head of the bank’s new facility, though she declined to state the volume of investment in its establishment. Previously, expenditure on the rental of premises for holding training sessions accounted for 3 percent of the training and development budget. As well as that saving, Revenkova said, the center has allowed the bank to greatly reduce the use of trainers from Moscow, resulting in further savings on their travel and accommodation expenses.
Banks began to actively develop regional training centers from 2006 to 2008, which coincided with the expansion of the retail banking sector in the regions, said Alexei Stepanov, director of Alfa Bank’s corporate training center.
The Power Machines group opened its own licensed training center in 2009, allowing the group to maintain its expenditure on obligatory training at 2008 levels, despite the fact that the number of employees being trained actually doubled, said Maria Aleyeva, a spokesperson for Power Machines. The proportion of employees undergoing training every year has risen from 60 percent to 98 percent. In 2009, Promsvyazbank significantly cut its education budget, with personnel now being trained in-house, said Yevgenia Matveyeva, the head of the personnel department at the bank’s St. Petersburg branch.
All employees receive training at the company’s expense, though time spent training is taken as vacation, said Alexander Pavlov, director of the northwest branch of the X5 Retail Group.
Lyubimy Krai spends about 1 percent of its turnover on training, and saw a 20-percent increase in expenditure on training in 2009, said Yelena Streltsova, general director of the confectionery company. The firm doesn’t hold large-scale training sessions, instead relying on the firm’s own personnel and its skills management director.
SHL consulting company questioned representatives from about 100 Russian companies in 2009, of whom 80 percent of the companies carried out internal training. About 9,000 rubles ($307) is spent on training per member of staff, said a spokesperson for one of the banks consulted. The general training programs among the bulk of companies in any one sector are very similar, and the skills and the knowledge acquired give personnel the chance to move into higher positions, said Oksana Pochtivaya, director of the personnel recruitment department at Avanta Personnel in St. Petersburg.
In professional banking training (knowledge of products and services, developing sales and service skills), in-house trainers who can track changes and have a vested interest in results are preferable, said Alfa Bank’s Stepanov.
According to VTB24’s Revenkova, as well as corporate trainers, personnel from the bank’s sales outlets also train their colleagues. The sales staff spend about 10 to 20 percent of their time training junior colleagues, and their reward for this can amount to 30 percent of their total quarterly wages, depending on the quality and quantity of training sessions given, she said.
The introduction of a culture of coaching and guidance with the participation of senior managers can’t be achieved through bonuses, Stepanov said.
One day of external training costs 50,000 to 70,000 rubles ($1,705 to $2,387) though the cost of programs has fallen by about 30 percent during the last year, according to Alexei Kislov, the general director of Restteam, a training company. The cost of hiring an external trainer has fallen by 30 percent to 50 percent to $81 to $338 per hour, according to Pochtivaya.
According to Kislov, the business training market has lost two thirds of its value. Training for mid-level personnel has been stopped almost entirely, and the length of study periods has also been cut, with training programs that used to take several days now being held in the space of a day.
According to the SHL research, only 8 percent of companies monitor the effectiveness of their development and training programs. Having an in-house trainer for basic courses is more effective and cheaper than outsourcing, as the trainer can better tailor courses to meet the specific needs of the company and will work for a fixed rate, said Olga Rabkina, head of the Petersburg branch of SHL. In calculating a company’s expenditure, few take into account the wages of the personnel being trained and the losses caused by their absence during training.
TITLE: Adding Value via HR
AUTHOR: By Rick Macy
TEXT: A few years ago, I met with an HR manager from a Russian telecom company in Moscow. I was hoping his company would select my company to deliver some corporate training courses, and they did. I remember that the HR manager, Ivan, told me that whenever you start a company, the most important department is the HR department. The people working there, he said, know how you should structure a company, how you should build compensation in a company, and so on. I bit my tongue when I heard this opinion. Why?
A fair amount of my career has been spent in corporate, industrial, and military sales. As a young salesman, my view of HR was that it was a needless cost center. To my younger mind, the people working there were largely unemployable elsewhere. This needless cost center seemed to be something that existed simply to grow larger and larger, consuming ever-greater volumes of valuable company resources. On top of that, it would try to fill the employees’ heads with corporate propaganda. Having done so, the HR personnel could check a box, collect a paycheck, feel happy about themselves and slink back to their offices.
After all, these HR personnel were not flying to the far corners of the globe to put a deal together and get some business for the company. In my younger, sales-driven mind, our work in sales was all about solving problems, and I did not see the contribution that HR was or was not making. In retrospect, perhaps I did not want to see their contribution.
As my career progressed and I became a commercial director for a major telecom company here in St. Petersburg, I began to see the HR department as a possible ally in my attempts to drive the business forward. If I could just drink enough tea with the head of HR maybe, just maybe, I could get my new compensation plan for my hard working sales and customer service people through to the general manager and have him sign off on it. I also began to see that the HR people for the most part were trying to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. My view was softening — it turned out that there were some competent HR people, and if you could identify them the situation could be improved.
Later, I became general manager of a company in St. Petersburg, and now the HR department worked for me. Being responsible for the entire company, the change in my view on HR began to accelerate. How was I going to ensure that my company orders complied with Russian legislation? How would I ensure that my hiring (and firing) practices were also in accordance with Russian legislation? There are standard functions that any HR department should be familiar with — hiring, firing, vacation, sick leave, recruiting and training, to name a few. And in Russia, if any of these functions are not dealt with in accordance with legislation, your company is potentially at risk of penalties should a state labor inspector drop by. In my experience, these inspectors only come by if an employee — your human resource — files a formal complaint.
And should the inspectors come, you will want to make sure your documentation is all in order (hopefully you have already done this as you are running a well managed business and your head of HR is a star.) Documentation that you should be worried about includes employee contracts, subcontractor contracts, payroll sheets, personal income tax cards (NDFLs) and unified social tax cards (OPFs.) HR needs to work closely with the accounting department to ensure that these documents meet the appropriate legislation. The fines may not be huge, but the inspectors have the power to freeze your bank accounts and that is a real cause for concern. On top of that, once an employee has made a complaint against your company, however successfully you resolve the case in question, the blot on your copybook at the local inspectorate remains. The St. Petersburg Labor inspectorate offers a web site with a mine of helpful information at www.speterburg.rostrud.info/.
In Russia, like in most countries, you often encounter systems where pay rises depend on the ability to charm the general manager, while a properly run HR department should provide a systematic approach to the issue. In my view, during my time running a company in St. Petersburg, the HR department did an outstanding job in creating an annual performance review system, specifically writing detailed instructions and company orders describing how the system would work, organizing all the meetings to educate the employees on how it would work and implementing the project. The benefit of this approach was that this matter could be dealt with in a more predictable manner, leaving management more time to efficiently run the business. Hats off to HR!
My view has become more moderate with time and, perhaps of equal importance, with experience.
Now back to Ivan. I don’t agree with him that HR is the first department you should hire for when setting up a company, but I do agree that HR has an important role to play in any company and, effectively managed, HR can positively contribute to your bottom line.
Rick Macy, vice president of Russia CzuraThornton Private Investment, is a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in St. Petersburg, former general manager of the St. Petersburg Yellow Pages, and offers sales and management training courses in English and Russian — www.rickmacy.ru
TITLE: Gorbachev’s Abandoned Europe
AUTHOR: By Fyodor Lukyanov
TEXT: Twenty-five years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Twenty years ago, at the Congress of People’s Deputies, he was elected as the first and — as it turned out — last president of the Soviet Union. A few days ago, state-run pollster VTsIOM published the results of a survey showing that Russians are gradually taking a more positive view of the perestroika period. Today, 41 percent of those surveyed hold a negative attitude toward perestroika, compared to 56 percent five years ago. Even with this positive trend, it will be many years before Russia and the West give a common appraisal of the events which occurred between 1985 and 1991.
The difference in perception is easily explained. Many Russians acknowledge that the Soviet Union’s fatal problems began long before Gorbachev became general secretary on March 11, 1985. But there is no getting around the fact that Gorbachev himself came to symbolize that collapse. For the West, Gorbachev symbolizes the start of a new epoch, even if 20 years later the outlook is not quite as rosy as when the Berlin Wall came down. In general, the expectations of both sides did not pan out, but for different reasons.
One of the more important points of Gorbachev’s legacy is his idea of a common European home. Almost nobody mentions it today, although there was a time when it seemed that nothing could stand in the way of its realization. After all, Moscow had rejected its totalitarian ideology and was looking for common ground with the West. However, in the midst of that euphoria, sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf authored the 1990 book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” in which he wrote: “If there is a common European house or home to aim for, it is … not Gorbachev’s but one to the West of his and his successors’ crumbling empire. … Europe ends at the Soviet border, wherever that may be.” Dahrendorf defined Europe as a political community where “small and medium-sized countries try to determine their destiny together. A superpower has no place in their midst, even if it is not an economic and perhaps no longer a political giant.” Nobody has yet described the situation more accurately.
The original wave of European Union expansion, first anticipated in the early 1990s, focused on technical and legal criteria for membership without discussion of how far that expansion might extend — that is, without defining Europe’s borders. It was considered politically incorrect to do so. But at some point, most people understood by default that Europe and the European Union were synonymous. At the least it was assumed that the gradual increase in the number of states adopting European rules and practices — the system by which the European Union expanded — would eventually transform the geographic territory of Europe into a common space.
As a country that played the decisive role in the collapse of the Soviet Union, could Russia have become a part of Europe? During a brief stage of democratic euphoria, Moscow was ready to merge with the European-Atlantic community on practically any terms. During these friendly times, the door was formally open for Russia, but at the same time nobody thought seriously that Russia would ultimately be accepted into that community. While Russia remained weak and strove toward integration, Europe savored its “trophies” and assumed that Russia had no other options but to adopt Western values and institutions. But when the EU had just about finished swallowing up Central and Eastern Europe, it became clear that Russia, recovering from its geopolitical knockout, reacquired its superpower ambitions. Despite Russia’s weak position internally and globally in the early and mid-1990s, it was unable to part with its self-image as a superpower.
Now Moscow does not strive for integration but wants to see itself as an independent power center and as an alternative to Brussels. Ambitions were split along opposing paths. Russia could either become a competitor to Europe in the global arena — as the Soviet Union essentially was along with its Warsaw Pact allies — or else become a full-fledged member of Europe on an equal basis with Brussels — a second power center within a common European house. Gorbachev contemplated the second version, but the collapse of the Soviet Union buried those hopes. Now, Russia lacks the will, resources and ability to compete with the EU but still sincerely believes that it can achieve this status in the near future.
Meanwhile, the European community is in a deep state of confusion. Europe’s ability to function will always be limited as long as Russia is not included as an equal partner, and the campaign among Eastern European members of the EU to isolate Russia only undermines efforts to increase European unity. It is no coincidence that the idea to bring Russia into NATO has been raised from time to time in Europe and the United States. The most recent example is a letter from a group of influential German politicians headed by former Defense Minister Volker Ruehe.
During the past 20 years we haven’t witnessed the unification of Europe, but the continual shift of its borders to the east. Though that phenomenon was the focus of world politics in the past, now both a weakened Russia and a stronger Europe are under the threat of becoming marginalized because the main events of global politics are taking place elsewhere on the planet. Thus, the attempt “to determine destiny together” is of vital importance not for “small and medium-sized countries” as Dahrendorf wrote, but for Russia and the rest of Europe, both of which are gradually becoming “small and medium-sized” compared to the rest of the world.
Against the backdrop of a rapidly rising Asia, which is shifting the most important global power centers far from Europe, Gorbachev’s notion of a common European and Russian home might be sidelined. Even if this house is one day built, it may be located in the boondocks of global politics.
Fyodor Lukyanov is editor of Russia in Global Affairs.
TITLE: The Kremlin Temptation
AUTHOR: By Dominique Moisi
TEXT: It is sometimes said that Germany has become a “second France” in its “selfish” approach to the European Union, but is France really on its way to becoming a “second Germany”? If Germany is Russia’s main economic partner, perhaps France should be its principal strategic partner.
France does not share Germany’s natural closeness to Russia — a relationship based on both geography and history. But France does have a long tradition of a special bilateral relationship with Russia — marked by a deep cultural dimension — that somehow transcended the Cold War.
General Charles de Gaulle once described himself as a “foul-weather friend” of the United States, which implied that in “better weather” he could go his own way, leave NATO’s integrated military command and behave as some kind of bridge between East and West. De Gaulle’s policy of detente towards the Soviet Union, which he started years before former U.S. President Richard Nixon and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tried it, personified France’s desire to exist diplomatically on its own and to maximize its room for maneuver with the United States.
Times have changed. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is not de Gaulle, and Russia is not the Soviet Union. Yet there is an undeniable whiff of nostalgia in the current rapprochement between two powers that are both conscious of their relative decline in the world. Both intend to reinforce their respective status — diplomatic in the case of France, strategic in the case of Russia. Yet the reality is more prosaic for both.
The high point of President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Paris several weeks ago, during which the Mistral-class helicopter carrier deal was discussed, was the two countries’ agreement not so much on long-term strategic visions, but on pragmatic considerations. For France, above all, “it’s the economy, stupid.”
France is keen to maintain its independent arms industry and to keep open its naval arsenal, based in Saint-Nazaire on the country’s west coast. This legitimate mercantile concern has supposedly been reciprocated by small steps made by Russia towards a policy of sanctions against Iran. It will be interesting to see in a few weeks or months whether the Kremlin will actually deliver.
In reality, as was the case in August 2008, when Sarkozy successfully negotiated a cease-fire and then a peace deal between Georgia and Russia (largely on Russian terms), the French president’s actions are music to Russian ears. And “Sarkozy the American,” as he was once known in France, no longer thinks that he has to prove anything to the United States. France symbolically returned to NATO’s military command in April 2009. Even if some U.S. officials are irritated by French sales of sophisticated military equipment to Russia, no one has dared to complain openly.
With China looming on the horizon as a much more confident and defiant force than Russia, including as a key player in the Group of 20, Russia is being courted by all the world’s powers. And everybody seems to be making the same calculus, hoping to alter the balance of power within Russia to reinforce Medvedev’s position vis-a-vis Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
But does such a calculus make sense, or is it simply wishful thinking — a reassuring and comfortable illusion designed to make French leaders feel good, when in fact they are dealing with Russia on purely commercial grounds?
As a Russian friend recently told me, “Putin wants to live like Roman Abramovich and to rule like Stalin.” He is the man in charge. The idea that you can play a Medvedev card to balance Putin is a dangerous illusion. There is no division of power between the two men. The former is paving the way for the latter to return to the Kremlin in 2012. In Russia, power is money and money is power. The stakes are simply too high.
France should not delude itself. There is nothing inherently wrong in selling weapons to Russia, but in doing so, one merely plays into the hands of Putin’s effort to reinforce his policy of domination over Russia’s “near abroad.” The sale of such warships will not positively affect the balance of power within Russia, but it will affect the regional balance of power — in favor of Russia.
What is clear is that any ambition to define a common European energy and security policy toward Russia is slowly disappearing. From Berlin to Paris and from Paris to Rome, European leaders may ultimately be doing the same thing, but they are all doing it separately as competitors vying for Russian favor rather than as partners within a supposedly tight-knit union.
Dominique Moisi is a visiting professor at Harvard University and the author of “The Geopolitics of Emotion.” © Project Syndicate
TITLE: Sovok on the Upper East Side
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: I was recently denied a Russian entry visa. This gave me the opportunity to visit the Russian Consulate in New York, a rare occasion since I usually get my visa through an agency that spares me such visits for a small fee.
The consulate is located on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side on 91st Street, which would have been an elegant block except for the grim crowd shoving and clustering nervously at its doors. At the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, U.S. citizens get preferential treatment from their own consular officials. In New York, however, besides foreigners waiting for their visas, there are also many Russians obtaining new passports, trying to get documents for their children born abroad, applying to get their dachas “amnestied,” or futzing with other nerve-wracking bureaucratic procedures. Thousands of Russian citizens live in the United States, but there is also the undeniable fact that these people are treated by Russian authorities even worse than foreigners, especially Westerners.
The wait was long, the line didn’t move for hours, and little information was given. The person manning the door emerged every now and again to give a curt answer to all questions — “Wait!” The consulate closed for lunch, and there was no telling whether you would be admitted through the massive doors before the break or, for that matter, before the end of the day. If you were not lucky enough to be served that day, you had to come back the next morning.
Occasionally, somebody jumped to the front of the line, resulting in heavy grunts and groans from the other mortals who didn’t have connections. Some animals are indeed more equal than others.
When my turn at last came, I went through a metal detector — a reasonable precaution in the age of terrorism — which began buzzing loudly. The guard completely ignored me.
Americans in the visa line kept complaining about poor organization, cigarette smoke, empty coffee cups on the sidewalk and a lack of information. Their complaints would have probably been more valid had the U.S. Embassy in Moscow been providing a more pleasant experience for its Russian visitors.
Instead, the U.S. Embassy has been called the last Soviet agency in Russia. Lines outside are long, documentation requirements are onerous, intrusive and arbitrary, and U.S. consular officials are sometimes ignorant and crude.
To be fair, things have improved in recent years after the U.S. Embassy made a concerted effort to improve its customer service in the visa section. But it will take many more years of a new and improved, friendlier embassy in Russia to reverse the damage that has been done to its image.
The stakes are high. When the U.S. State Department treats potential visitors rudely, other governments have the carte blanche to do even worse.
Systematic violations of international law and the U.S. Constitution by the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush not only set a bad example to dictators and tyrants worldwide, but they deprived their critics of a leg to stand on. For this reason, U.S. President Barack Obama’s refusal to prosecute such violations is not a private matter for the United States, it is a slap in the face to every person on Earth concerned with freedom and democracy.
I would have liked to say I was denied the Russian visa unfairly. But at least it was done politely and in a professional manner, which is more than many Russian applicants to the U.S. Embassy can say.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
TITLE: House Passes Landmark Health Care Bill in U.S.
AUTHOR: By Erica Werner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — A transformative health care bill is headed to President Barack Obama for his signature as Congress takes the final steps in the Democrats’ improbable and history-making push for near-universal medical coverage.
On the cusp of succeeding where numerous past congresses and administrations have failed, jubilant House Democrats voted 219-212 late Sunday to send legislation to Obama that would extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans, reduce deficits and ban insurance company practices such as denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.
“This is what change looks like,” Obama said later in televised remarks that stirred memories of his 2008 campaign promise of “change we can believe in.”
“We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people.”
Obama will travel outside Washington on Thursday as he now turns to seeing a companion bill through the Senate and selling the health care overhaul’s benefits on behalf of House lawmakers who cast risky votes. It is most likely that he will sign the bill on Tuesday, but the plans are not yet final, said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss as-yet unannounced strategy.
Obama’s young presidency received a much needed boost from passage of the legislation, which would touch the lives of nearly every American. The battle for the future of the health insurance system — affecting one-sixth of the economy — galvanized Republicans and conservative activists looking ahead to November’s midterm elections.
A companion package making a series of changes sought by House Democrats to the larger bill, which has already been passed by the Senate, was approved 220-211. The fix-it bill will now go to the Senate, where debate is expected to begin as early as Tuesday. Senate Democrats hope to approve it unchanged and send it directly to Obama, though Republicans intend to attempt parliamentary objections that could change the bill and require it to go back to the House.
Sen. John McCain said Monday morning that Democrats have not heard the last of the health care debate, and said he was repulsed by “all this euphoria going on.”
Appearing on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” McCain, who was Obama’s GOP rival in the 2008 presidential campaign, said that “outside the Beltway, the American people are very angry. They don’t like it, and we’re going to repeal this.”
McCain, who is in a tough Republican primary fight in his home state, said the GOP “will challenge it every place we can,” and said there will be reprisals at the polls, in Congress and in the courts.
The complicated two-step approval process was made necessary because Senate Democrats lost their filibuster-proof supermajority in a special election in January, a setback that caused even some Democratic lawmakers to pronounce the yearlong health care effort dead. Under the relentless prodding of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in particular, it was gradually revived, and the fix-it bill will be considered under fast-track Senate rules that don’t allow minority party filibusters.
“We will be joining those who established Social Security, Medicare and now, tonight, health care for all Americans,” said Pelosi, D-Calif., partner to Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the grueling campaign to pass the legislation.
“This is the civil rights act of the 21st century,” added Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the top-ranking black member of the House.
GOP lawmakers attacked the legislation as being everything from a government takeover to the beginning of totalitarianism, and none voted in favor. “Hell no!” Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, shouted in a fiery speech opposing the legislation. “We have failed to listen to America and we have failed to reflect the will of our constituents.”
Thirty-four Democrats also voted “no” on the Senate-passed bill.
Sunday night’s votes capped an unpredictable and raucous weekend at the Capitol, with Democratic leaders negotiating around the clock for the final votes as hundreds of protesters paraded outside, their shouts of “Kill the Bill! Kill the Bill!” audible within the Capitol.
A last-minute deal with a critical group of anti-abortion lawmakers Sunday afternoon sealed the Democrats’ victory. The leader of the anti-abortion bloc, Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., didn’t get to add stricter anti-abortion language to the underlying bill, but was satisfied by an executive order signed by Obama affirming current law and provisions in the legislation that ban federal funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother.
Republican opponents of abortion said Obama’s proposed order was insufficient, and when Stupak sought to counter them, a shout of “baby killer” was heard coming from the Republican side of the chamber.
Far beyond the political ramifications — a concern to which the president repeatedly insisted he paid no mind — were the sweeping changes the bill held in store for Americans, insured or not, as well as the insurance industry and health care providers.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the legislation awaiting the president’s approval would cut deficits by an estimated $138 billion over a decade. For the first time, most Americans would be required to purchase insurance, and face penalties if they refused. Much of the money in the bill would be devoted to subsidies to help families with incomes of less than $88,000 a year pay their premiums.
TITLE: Sandstorms Bring Haze To China
AUTHOR: By Anita Chang
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — Sandstorms whipping across China shrouded cities in an unhealthy cloud of sand and grit Monday, with winds carrying the pollution outside the mainland as far as Hong Kong and Taiwan.
It was the latest sign of the effects of desertification: Overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and drought have expanded deserts in the country’s north and west. The shifting sands have gradually encroached onto populated areas and worsened sandstorms that strike cities, particularly in the spring.
Winds blowing from the northwest have been sweeping sand across the country since Saturday, affecting Xinjiang in the far west all the way to Beijing in the country’s east. The sand and dust were carried to parts of southern China and even to cities in Taiwan, 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) away from Inner Mongolia where much of the pollution originated.
The sandstorm in Taiwan, an island 100 miles (160 kilometers) away from the mainland, forced people to cover their faces to avoid breathing in the grit, which can cause chest discomfort and respiratory problems even in healthy people. Drivers complained their cars were covered in a layer of black soot in just 10 minutes.
The airport on the Taiwanese-controlled islet of Matsu, just off the mainland coast, suspended services Sunday due to poor visibility caused by the sandstorm.
In Hong Kong, environmental protection officials said pollution levels were climbing as the sandstorm moved south. Twenty elderly people sought medical assistance for shortness of breath, Hong Kong’s radio RTHK reported.
The Hong Kong government urged people to stay indoors and encouraged schools to cancel sports events.
The latest sandstorm was expected to hit South Korea on Tuesday, said Kim Seung Bum of the Korea Meteorological Administration. The sandstorm that raked across China during the weekend caused the worst “yellow dust” haze in South Korea since 2005, and authorities issued a rare nationwide dust advisory.
Grit from Chinese sandstorms has been found to travel as far as the western United States.
China’s Central Meteorological Station urged people to close doors and windows, and cover their faces with masks or scarves when going outside. Sensitive electronic and mechanical equipment should be sealed off, the station said in a warning posted Monday on its web site.
China Central Television told viewers to clean out their noses with salt water and remove grit from ears with cotton swabs dipped in alcohol.
State television’s noon newscast showed the tourist city of Hangzhou on the eastern coast, where graceful bridges and waterside pagodas were hidden by a mix of sand and other pollutants. In Beijing, residents and tourists with faces covered scurried along sidewalks to minimize exposure to the pollution.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing warned that particulate matter in the air made conditions “hazardous,” though high winds dispersed some of the pollution and the air quality was later upgraded to “very unhealthy.”
TITLE: CERN Breaks Record for Beam Energy
AUTHOR: By Alexander G. Higgins
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GENEVA — Operators of the world’s largest atom collider on Friday ramped up their massive machine to three times the energy ever previously achieved, in the run-up to experiments probing the secrets of the universe.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said beams of protons circulated at 3.5 trillion electron volts in both directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border at Geneva.
The next major development is expected in a few days when CERN starts colliding the beams in a new round of research to examine the tiniest particles and forces within the atom in hopes of finding out more about how matter is made up.
The collider in December had already eclipsed the record of the next most powerful machine, the Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago, which has been running just shy of a trillion electron volts, or TeV.
The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of dark energy and matter. Scientists also hope to approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.
CERN has reported a series of successes since the collider was restarted last year after 14 months of repairs and improvements following a spectacular failure when scientists initially tried to get the machine going.
CERN improved the machine during a 2 1/2-month winter shutdown to enable it to operate at the higher level of energy.
“Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC’s overall design, and the improvements we’ve made since the breakdown in September 2008,” said Steve Myers, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology.
TITLE: American
Put On Trial In N. Korea
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday that it will put a detained American on trial for illegally entering the country from China.
A North Korean agency decided to indict Aijalon Mahli Gomes as “his crime has been confirmed,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a brief dispatch.
The dispatch said the man was born in 1979 and is a resident of Boston. It provided no further details.
Monday’s announcement came as regional powers are pushing for North Korea to rejoin international disarmament talks on its nuclear weapons program. The North pulled out of the arms talks last year in protest of international criticism of a rocket launch.