SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1591 (52), Tuesday, July 13, 2010
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TITLE: Curators Sentenced But Not Imprisoned
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two Russian curators who angered the Russian Orthodox Church with an exhibition that included images of Jesus Christ portrayed as Mickey Mouse and Vladimir Lenin were convicted Monday of inciting religious hatred and fined, but not sentenced to prison.
The case of Yury Samodurov, 58, and Andrei Yerofeyev, 54, has been closely watched by human rights activists. The decision by a Moscow court could sidestep the possibility of an international outcry over imprisoning the two respected art-world figures, but is unlikely to stem concerns about the growing influence of the church and the specter of Soviet-style censorship returning.
“This conviction means our government is following a dangerous path for a so-called democracy,” Samodurov said in the courtroom right after the hearing. He said he couldn’t pay the fine and would appeal the verdict, which took Judge Svetlana Alexandrova just over two hours to deliver in a packed and sweltering courtroom.
Alexandrova said she took into account the defendants’ ages and families in deciding against incarcerating them.
The curators were convicted for their 2007 exhibit entitled “Forbidden Art” at the Sakharov Museum, a human rights center named after celebrated dissident physicist and Nobel peace prize laureate Andrei Sakharov.
The two could have been sentenced to up to three years in prison, but were ordered only to pay fines of up to 200,000 rubles ($6,500).
Artists and activists had appealed to the Kremlin to put a stop to the prosecution. Even Russia’s culture minister said the two men did nothing to break the law against inciting religious hatred. Other curators have promised to display the exhibit to support the two defendants.
But the prosecutors, backed by a resurgent Orthodox Church enjoying its best relations with the Kremlin since the Soviet break up, refused to back down.
After Monday’s verdict there were brief scuffles outside the court as the defendants’ supporters clashed with Orthodox activists angry that the defendants were set free.
“This can’t be allowed to stand,” said church activist Leonid Semyonovich, dressed in black and holding a silver cross nailed to a wooden plinth. “Society must be protected from these people. We wage spiritual war on them and will hound them out of Russia.”
The religious activists’ chants of “Disgrace! Disgrace!” were drowned out by “Bravo! Bravo!” from supporters.
In the years after the 1991 Soviet collapse, the Russian Orthodox Church has grown into a powerful institution that claims more than 100 million followers. It has vocally criticized tolerance of homosexuality, abortion and multiparty democracy, while critics have accused top clerics of involvement in shady business deals and corruption.
Samodurov, who was the museum’s director from its founding in 1996 until he stepped down in 2008, had once been convicted of inciting religious hatred and fined the equivalent of $3,600 for an exhibit in 2003 called “Caution: Religion!”
Yerofeyev is a former head of contemporary art at the State Tretyakov Gallery, one of Russia’s most renowned museums.
The 2007 exhibit was closed a few days after it opened after a group of altar boys defaced many of the contemporary paintings, which used religious allusions to express attitudes toward religion, culture and the state.
Religious ultranationalist groups won the support of the Russian Orthodox Church in pushing prosecutors to bring charges in 2008 and then kept up their pressure on the two curators throughout the trial.
Another court case also could be looming in Russia involving nationalists and an artist.
Moscow contemporary artist Lena Hades said she has been interrogated by district prosecutors for allegedly inciting hatred against Russia with two paintings that show the country in a negative light.
Hades said the investigator had a “huge” file with printouts of her comments in livejournal, an online diary web site, and previous exhibits. She said she is being threatened with up to two years in prison, and that the case started after nationalists filed more than 300 complaints against her.
She is awaiting word of any charges.
TITLE: Moscow Relieved That U.S. Spy Case Over
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A sense of relief seemed to pervade the halls of government over the weekend that a potentially embarrassing spy scandal with the United States was over and the two sides could get back to work on bolstering ties.
But few Russian officials showed any enthusiasm about discussing the two-week affair.
In a brief, three-sentence statement, the Foreign Ministry said the exchange of 10 Russian sleeper agents from the United States for four convicted spies from Russia “was carried out in the general context of improving Russian-U.S. relations.”
The most hawkish commentators and policymakers largely backed away from their usual saber rattling. Nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky warned of a renewed Cold War but softened his remarks to explain that this would happen “not tomorrow, but maybe in five or 10 years.”
Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow’s NATO representative and one of the country’s most hawkish commentators, was unusually silent about the issue on his prolific Twitter account. He did not return a request for comment Friday.
Sergei Markov, a senior State Duma deputy for United Russia, the party headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, toed the official line by linking Russia’s approach to improved relations with the United States. “The atmosphere has changed profoundly,” he told The St. Petersburg Times, adding that ties had moved far from Soviet-era hostility and stood closer to U.S.-French relations.
Markov, however, acknowledged that there was a good deal of embarrassment on Moscow’s side. “There certainly is a feeling of shame because these so-called spies look so childish,” he said.
U.S. Justice Department documents have depicted some of the uncovered agents as ineffective and lazy. The fact that none of them were charged with espionage has been taken as a clear indication that their mission, which in some cases lasted for more than a decade, was a failure.
Markov also insisted that Russia had been vindicated in the case of Igor Sutyagin, one of the traded prisoners whose incarceration in Russia had been characterized by human rights campaigners as a miscarriage of justice.
“The fact that the U.S. requested this man to be handed over proves that he had worked as an agent for them,” Markov said.
Sutyagin, an arms analyst, was sentenced in 2004 to 15 years in prison on charges of passing classified information to a British company alleged to be a front for the CIA.
He maintained his innocence and reportedly only signed a confession last week out of fear of spoiling the other three prisoners’ chances of freedom.
The U.S. State Department denied Thursday that Sutyagin was a spy.
The quick resolution to the spy scandal speaks volumes about U.S. President Barack Obama’s determination to keep relations in track, analysts said.
Obama was briefed about the FBI’s case against the Russian suspects on June 11 — exactly 15 days before he met with Medvedev in the White House for the “cheeseburger summit” and 18 days before their arrests, U.S. media reported, citing unidentified U.S. officials. The arrests were prompted by plans by several suspects to return to Russia over the summer, and Obama personally raised the idea of a prisoner exchange well before the FBI acted, the officials said.
The CIA contacted the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, around June 28, the day after the arrests, to float the idea of an exchange, setting the stage for three phone calls between CIA Director Leon Panetta and SVR chief Mikhail Fradkov, the officials said. The two sides agreed to a swap just days later, on the July 3-4 weekend.
Russia’s main interest was that the 10 suspects be returned to Russia without convictions, said Tatyana Stanovaya, an analyst with the Center of Political Technologies, a think tank.
“The most important thing is to return them quickly, so that they spend as little time as possible in the U.S.,” she said.
But before the swap could take place, a flurry of negotiations were held on the details. The CIA identified the four prisoners that the United States wanted freed and asked Russia not to take retaliatory steps against American citizens, U.S. officials said. The SVR, in turn, required signed confessions from the four prisoners to make way for Medvedev to pardon them.
Medvedev and Obama have not discussed the spy affair, and they plan to keep it that way, The Associated Press reported, citing White House officials.
Ordinary Russians, meanwhile, worried last week that the spy affair would damage relations, according to a new poll by the independent Levada Center.
The poll found that 53 percent of Russians thought that U.S. intelligence agencies fabricated the spy case as a “provocation” to undermine relations, while only 10 percent said the FBI had uncovered real spies. A total of 37 percent had no opinion, according to the July 2-5 poll, which had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.
“There is an understanding that this is less an attack against Russia and more of one against Obama,” said Markov, the Duma deputy.
Vice President Joe Biden, who kicked off Obama’s “reset” in relations with a speech in 2008, defended the swap of the 10 suspects for four prisoners as a good deal.
“We got back four really good ones,” Biden said on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” comedy show on Friday. “And the 10, they’ve been here a long time, but they hadn’t done much.”
Biden offered a quick comeback when Leno showed him a photo of Anna Chapman, the redhead spy suspect who became an Internet sensation. “Let me make it clear, it wasn’t my idea to send her back,” he said.
TITLE: Stockmann Center Gets Dubious Award for Design
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Local preservationists moved the protest campaign against the controversial Stockmann Nevski Center project in St. Petersburg to Stockmann’s offices in Helsinki on Friday.
The activists also called on the public to boycott the Stockmann Nevski Center, which is scheduled to open in November, on the grounds that construction has radically altered one of the city’s most treasured historic views. The project’s management rejected all accusations of wrongdoing Monday.
Antonina Yeliseyeva and Dmitry Litvinov of the Living City local non-governmental organization for the preservation of historic and cultural heritage brought a Dishonored Citizen of St. Petersburg Award to deliver it to Jussi Kuutsa, who was development director of the Stockmann Group’s international operations until recently. Kuutsa is due to start a new job at a different company from Aug. 1, but will remain in charge of the project until its launch, scheduled for November.
The award included a diploma and a brick from a demolished historic building.
According to Yeliseyeva, three valuable historic buildings — 114 and 116 Nevsky Prospekt and 4 Ulitsa Vosstaniya — were demolished illegally, as they were in a protected zone, while nearby buildings were damaged by the work.
“In particular, there are huge cracks in numbers 112 and 110 on Nevsky, and the residents don’t know if they should move out, while the buildings continue to fall apart,” she said by phone Monday.
Despite Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s promises, the demolished buildings have not been recreated in their original form. The facades have been restored to an approximation of their original appearance, but a 35-meter tall glass extension has been erected on top of the facades, though the law does not allow any buildings taller than 28 meters in the area, Yeliseyeva said.
“This is a new dominant of Nevsky Prospekt, which even overshadows the Admiralty,” she said.
“It might be OK for the city’s outskirts, it’s a typical nine-story building, but even recently it was impossible to imagine that such a structure could exist on Nevsky.”
Living City established the Dishonored Citizen of St. Petersburg Award in 2007 to shame people who contribute most to the destruction of the city’s historic appearance.
Previously, the public voted for the award to be given to Alexander Vakhmistrov, former deputy governor in charge of construction; architect Tatyana Slavina, whose bureau provided positive reviews for several debatable construction projects; and Vera Dementyeva, the head of City Hall’s heritage protection committee (KGIOP), who has been criticized for taking decisions beneficial to developers instead of protecting the city’s heritage as her committee is supposed to do.
Kuutsa is the first non-Russian to be presented with St. Petersburg’s “dishonorable citizen” award.
The Stockmann project has been surrounded in controversy since 2006, when the original building on the site was stripped of protected status and demolished to make way for Stockmann’s retail and office complex. Another wave of scandal broke out earlier this year after a multi-story glass structure appeared on top of the reconstructed buildings.
Speaking by phone Monday, Kuutsa dismissed preservationists’ claims as “wrong,” insisting that Stockmann had secured all the necessary permits from the city authorities for the construction.
“Whether people like it or dislike it is one thing, but they should remember that this glass structure on the top of the roof has been approved by all the city authorities in the required order and we have all the approvals for that,” Kuutsa said.
“And now if somebody doesn’t like it, of course it’s a not a nice thing for us either. But it’s a question of somebody liking ice-cream and somebody else not liking ice-cream. What can we say about that?”
TITLE: President’s Request Over Bill Ignored
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma on Friday gave final approval to a presidential bill increasing prison terms for police officers who commit crimes, seemingly ignoring a request from President Dmitry Medvedev to expand the legislation to include all law enforcement officials.
Medvedev asked deputies to expand the legislation after a Constitutional Court expert in April declared the bill discriminatory for singling out the police.
A senior Duma deputy with United Russia, Mikhail Grishankov, told The St. Petersburg Times in April that deputies would satisfy Medvedev’s request, but the wording of the bill passed in a third reading Friday remained unchanged.
Grishankov could not be reached for comment Friday.
Despite Medvedev’s request, deputies apparently felt no pressing need to revise the bill because the Constitutional Court expert’s finding was a nonbinding recommendation, analysts said.
The bill, posted on the Duma’s web site, increases the maximum prison terms for various crimes committed by police officers and also punishes police for not obeying orders from superiors, introduces new reasons to dismiss police officers, and toughens requirements for new recruits.
Police officers who fail to fulfill orders would face up to two years in prison if they acted alone and up to five years if they acted with others.
TITLE: Russia Falls Short On Corruption Proposals
AUTHOR: By Natalya Kostenko
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia has completed fewer than half of the Council of Europe’s recommendations on fighting corruption, though the Prosecutor General’s Office contended that some of the proposals could not be fulfilled, while others are still being readied.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has sent to the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption, or GRECO, its report on how Russia is fulfilling the recommendations it received in December 2008 after two rounds of checks, a Kremlin official told Vedomosti.
GRECO’s executive secretary, Wolfgang Rau, confirmed that the report had been sent.
The group’s experts will now study the document and offer a grade for Russia’s leadership on their fight against corruption in November, at GRECO’s 49th session.
According to a draft of the report obtained by Vedomosti, just 12 of the recommendations were completed in full: a plan and strategy for fighting corruption were approved; a law on countering corruption was passed; public activists were allowed broader participation in the president’s anti-corruption council; criteria were introduced for hiring prosecutors; judges received the right to contest their dismissal; the public was given wider access to information on the work of courts and state bodies; public reports on bureaucrats and law enforcement officials were introduced; and commissions were formed within state bodies to probe conflicts of interest.
Six recommendations were not fulfilled, while eight were partially met.
Russia did not follow through on the creation of administrative courts to contest the actions of the state. The Prosecutor General’s Office said a law on the matter, first introduced to the State Duma in 2000, is languishing because of opposition from the government and the presidential administration, although it also said a special law should not be needed for citizens to defend their rights in the regular courts.
The law was proposed by the Supreme Court and even passed in a first reading during a wave of anti-corruption sentiment in 2008. But the government’s official position on the bill says it needs more work to establish the courts’ jurisdiction and a list of state bodies whose actions could be contested.
The question has been under discussion for ages and a solution would require solving a multitude of organizational, personnel and financial problems, said Vladimir Pligin, chairman of the State Duma’s Constitution and State Affairs Committee.
Russia also failed to reduce the number of people with immunity from criminal prosecution.
The Prosecutor General’s Office noted, however, that President Dmitry Medvedev’s package of anti-corruption measures in 2008 essentially removed immunity for prosecutors, investigators and regional lawmakers. The only privilege now shielding them from unjustified prosecution is a requirement that the case be opened by higher-ranking investigative officials.
Medvedev has also simplified the procedure for filing charges against deputies, senators, judges and prosecutors by eliminating the need for a decision from a panel of judges.
But Mikhail Grishankov, deputy head of the Duma’s Security Committee, said he considered the recommendation unfulfilled. Medvedev’s changes do not reduce the number of people with special legal status under Article 447 of the Criminal Procedural Code — which is not even mentioned in the amendments. They merely simplify the “special procedure” for them, he said.
The lawmaker proposed removing immunity for all prosecutors, investigators, lawyers and election commission members.
Another unfulfilled recommendation was a ban on presents for state officials. The prosecutors wrote that they developed amendments to Article 575 of the Civil Code that let officials keep gifts worth up to 3,000 rubles, or about $100. Anything more valuable would be handed over to the official’s agency.
TITLE: Consumer Rights Group Slams ‘Scientist’
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The controversial self-styled scientist Viktor Petrik, who looks set to benefit from a multi-billion-dollar nationwide water purification program, has come under fire from the Consumer Rights Society, which is suing the inventor for what it calls “useless water filters.”
Petrik, who is heavily backed by the United Russia party and its leader Boris Gryzlov but denounced by the Russian Academy of Sciences, runs the Golden Formula holding that produces water filters.
When the St. Petersburg Consumer Rights Society tested the filters earlier this summer, the results were somewhat embarrassing for its manufacturer. According to Roman Gaidashov, an expert from the watchdog, the filters are worse than useless — they are dangerous.
“Firstly, our tests have shown that the filters fail to filter out any chloride at all,” Gaidashov said. “After the test filtrations, there were organic pollutants in the water as well. We find it astounding that these filters were certified in the first place. We have not been able to test the filters for every single pollutant.”
The filtration process itself is not perfect, experts explain. Because it is warm and wet in the filter, bacteria and other microorganisms multiply there at high speed, and the water that comes out is not drinkable.
The St. Petersburg Consumer Rights Society is calling for the production of the filters to be declared illegal and for production to be banned altogether.
In an ironic twist, Petrik himself is busy with another lawsuit, which he launched against a number of media outlets that have published articles he says have damaged his reputation.
In May 2010, the controversial inventor filed a defamation lawsuit for 21.1 million rubles ($698,000) against several media outlets, including Rosbalt news agency, as well as Novaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda newspapers.
Petrik alleges that demand for his water filters has plummeted due to negative publicity.
A filter technology patented jointly by Petrik and Gryzlov is to be used nationwide in a state-financed tap water purification program titled Clean Water and promoted by the ruling party.
In the meantime, a special commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences has conducted an investigation into Petrik’s water filtration methods and concluded that the technique “has nothing to do with science.”
The commission, which was created in February amid a public backlash against Petrik, analyzed his patents and alleged inventions, which range from radioactive water treatment and the separation of platinum metals to alpha-ray radiators for nuclear medicine.
The commission included 11 academy members, who concluded that Petrik, who claims to have been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has never published a chemistry paper in a scientific journal.
Petrik’s 38 Russian patents repeat technical solutions previously registered by local and foreign inventors, the commission said in a statement published on the academy’s web site.
A filter for purifying radioactive water, patented jointly by Petrik and Gryzlov in 2007, does not work because it is based on an “erroneous perception” of the nature of hydrogen isotopes, the commission said.
Petrik, who served a prison term for fraud in Soviet days, found himself in the spotlight earlier this year after United Russia started pushing for the Clean Water program, which utilizes the Petrik-Gryzlov filter.
The filter can still be used to purify regular water, meaning the academy’s conclusion will not affect the Clean Water program. Pilot tests, financed by the government and run by Petrik’s company Golden Formula, are underway in several schools and municipal facilities throughout the country.
Petrik could not be reached for comment Monday.
TITLE: PM Scolds Aeroflot Over Foreign Planes
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reprimanded Aeroflot on Saturday for not purchasing enough Russian-made planes, telling the state-run carrier’s CEO that growing profits and dividends were not its only concern.
The airline recently announced plans to purchase a combined 44 planes from Boeing and Airbus, compared with 30 of Sukhoi’s regional SuperJet, starting in 2016.
“You want to dominate the domestic market, but you don’t want to buy Russian technology. That won’t do,” Putin told Vitaly Savelyev, according to a transcript of their conversation posted on the government web site.
Savelyev, who took over as chief executive in March 2009, has pushed forward with Aeroflot’s campaign to improve its image as an international airline, revamping its fleet and retraining staff. The CEO had been an executive at Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s Sistema holding and before that served for three years as a deputy economic development and trade minister.
Earlier this year, Aeroflot was recognized for the first time as best in passenger service on economy-class short- and medium-haul flights, as well as on business-class long-haul flights, among the SkyTeam alliance’s seven European airlines.
With airlines across the world taking a major hit during the crisis, Savelyev hurried to show off his company’s relatively strong financials, noting that it was one of the few that still turned a profit.
“According to international accounting standards, Aeroflot grew by a factor of 3.5 in terms of profit. We will be paying dividends for 2009 that are twice as high as those for 2008,” he said.
Aeroflot’s capitalization doubled year on year to reach $2.6 billion, Savelyev said. The company also paid 12 billion rubles ($400 million) to the state budget in taxes and customs duties.
The civil aviation market fell by 9.4 percent last year, he said, while Aeroflot managed to “stop at the 5.6 percent mark.”
But Putin seemed to think Savelyev still had a few things to learn about running a corporation for the state, noting the “inadequacies” of Aeroflot’s fleet modernization plans.
The company’s six Ilyushin-96 jets in a fleet of 115 planes is too few, Putin said. He asked why Aeroflot has overlooked Tupolev’s jets and Irkut’s MS-21 when it announced plans to purchase 22 Boeing 787 Dreamliners and 22 Airbus A350s starting in 2016.
Savelyev hurried to redeem himself, noting that the company’s consolidation of some struggling regional airlines would bring more Russian-made planes into its park.
“We have Vladivostok Avia, we have Sakhalin Airlines. We are planning to use all the aircraft in the fleet. Mostly it is domestic technology,” he told Putin. “It is cheaper. Domestic technology does not involve customs duties, which is why it is effective from an economic point of view. … We will no doubt be using domestic technology,” Savelyev said.
In 2009, the number of imported commercial aircraft reached 390 after Russia bought 100 foreign-built planes, according to the data released at the Aircraft Finance and Lease in Russia and the CIS conference in February.
Currently, Russia imposes a 20 percent duty on certain categories of foreign commercial planes, which it introduced to bolster demand for local airplanes. Nonetheless, some 70 percent to 80 percent of all flights by Russian airlines are carried out by foreign planes, analysts estimate.
The state has gradually begun to lift and reduce taxes on certain planes. On June 15, a government subcommittee that deals with protectionist measures approved the cancellation of import duties on aircraft with more than 250 seats.
Analysts say foreign planes remain appealing to Russian carriers because of fuel efficiency and fears that domestic models not yet flying could be late to the market.
The MS-21 — an abbreviation for Long-Haul Carrier of the 21st Century — is tentatively scheduled to fly in 2014, with deliveries two years later. The heavily promoted SuperJet has faced delays, although Sukhoi says the first deliveries will be made this year.
“The risks are too high to order a plane that does not exist yet, or that exists but only as a marketing project,” said Andrei Rozhkov, a transportation and infrastructure analyst at Metropol.
“Russian planes are cheaper to maintain, but when fuel prices go up, they become unprofitable compared with their foreign counterparts,” he said.
TITLE: State Duma Cracks Down on Street Rallies
AUTHOR: By Alexey Eremenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma took a step toward severely tightening the screws on public rallies Friday, passing a bill in a first reading that would ban people from organizing them if previously convicted of offenses as minor as speeding or riding a commuter train without a ticket.
The bill, supported by 312 deputies out of 450, was criticized by Gennady Gudkov, a senior member of the A Just Russia party, as “foolish” and “aimed at hindering the organization of rallies and making them impossible.”
The draft said no individual or legal body, including a political party, may organize a public gathering if convicted of an administrative offense.
The list of administrative offenses includes speeding, traveling without a ticket and minor fire safety violations, as well as a broad range of offenses related to elections and organizing public gatherings.
Rally organizers will also not be permitted to inform the public about their plans, including the topic of the rally, until local authorities approve the date and place of the event, the draft said.
To stage public rallies, organizers currently must file a notice with local authorities, who under the bill will have three working days to reject a planned route and propose a new one.
Rallies that are particularly unwanted by authorities, such as gay pride parades and opposition events, have often failed to secure permission from local authorities in recent years on the grounds that the desired location or route was unavailable.
Moscow City Hall has denied all requests for gay pride parades since 2006, and the St. Petersburg City Hall followed suit last month.
Opposition rallies calling for the constitutionally protected right of free assembly, held on the 31st of every month since last July, regularly end in riot police crackdowns.
The bill also proposes that rules for all public gatherings involving transportation vehicles and held on “transportation infrastructure objects” — which includes roads — are to be set by local authorities.
This change would give authorities the right to ban “blue bucket” car rallies held by motorists opposed to the use of flashing blue lights, which give officials the right to ignore some traffic rules, by putting buckets on the roofs of their own cars, Gudkov said.
The bill “completely bans all such rallies, including the ‘blue buckets,’ which make the authorities very nervous,” he said, Interfax reported.
The bill was submitted by two deputies, from the ruling United Russia party and A Just Russia. A deputy with the Liberal Democratic Party was listed as a third author, but his party has demanded that he withdraw his support.
Maxim Rokhmistrov, deputy head of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Duma faction, called the bill unconstitutional because an administrative offense cannot result in a person losing their right to free assembly.
TITLE: 800 Foreign Youngsters Flock to Camp on Lake Seliger
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: LAKE SELIGER, Tver Region — The summer camp on Lake Seliger used to be a private party for pro-Kremlin youth, but this year EU flags and a motley crew of foreign participants indicate that the times are changing.
“I really don’t care about Russian politics because I am not from Russia,” said Akhilesh Chauhan, 20, a student from India who praised the friendly atmosphere at the camp.
Among the 5,000 campers at this year’s gathering, which opened last Friday and runs through July 30, are more than 800 foreigners, including students from Britain, India, Kenya, Pakistan and Slovakia.
The pro-Kremlin pundits who warned campers in years past about shadowy menaces to Russia’s “sovereign democracy” at daily lectures have given way to educators, film producers and fashion designers.
Seliger was founded as a training camp for Nashi, a youth movement created in 2005 with the support of authorities seeking to stave off “color revolutions,” popular uprisings that led to regime change in countries like Ukraine and Georgia.
But the camp has steered away from politics to become an education forum open to all public organizations, Oleg Rozhnov, the Deputy Sport, Tourism and Youth Politics Minister who is also involved with the forum, said last year.
That does not mean that authorities have thrown the project to the wind. President Dmitry Medvedev made a splash at the Seliger camp on Thursday in his first visit as president. He previously attended in 2007 as a first deputy prime minister.
The president viewed several innovation projects by young inventors and chatted with Stanford University representatives who invited him to come and give a lecture. Medvedev gave a speech at the university in California late last month during a tour of Silicon Valley. He also visited President Barack Obama in Washington.
“I will try to settle it with Obama and come and visit you one more time,” Medvedev said Thursday, RIA-Novosti reported.
Buses carrying 400 children from another summer camp in the Tver region were stopped by traffic police for three hours to make way for Medvedev’s cortege, the opposition web site Kasparov.ru reported. But Interfax said Medvedev arrived by helicopter.
A Kremlin spokesman could not say late Thursday how Medvedev had traveled to the camp but noted that decisions to block roads are made by local police, not the Kremlin.
When Nashi ran the camp, the national anthem was used as a wake-up call, and the practice has persisted. But the Nashi members in attendance are mostly employed as guides and guardians of order, not propagandists like before.
Discipline also remains strict like in Nashi times. Campers have a 1 a.m. curfew, and those who drink alcohol are kicked out on the spot. Even skipping lectures can result in a camper’s badge being punched with a hole — and three punches mean a ticket home.
But the atmosphere around the camp was cheerful during a visit this week, with campers spending their time alternating between lectures and leisure activities like rock climbing, bicycling and boat rides.
Previous Seliger camps had political posters plastered all around the place. But this year, only two big photos — of Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — were featured on the walls of an open concert stage.
Even those traces of propaganda puzzled some guests.
“Honestly, I was very surprised [to see] Putin and Medvedev. In Japan, we do not see the pictures of political leaders in places like this,” Japanese student Yumi Tsubaki said as she sat on the grass chatting with a Russian-Korean friend, Kim Me Dua.
Tsubaki, one of 26 Japanese students at the camp, said she was an English major attracted to Seliger because of her interest in Russian culture. Some foreigners have complained about visa problems, but Tsubaki said she had no trouble.
Mikhail Mamonov, director of Seliger’s international program, said about 30 foreigners were not able to attend but insisted that no one had been denied a visa. He did not specify what prevented them from coming.
Some foreign youth who made it to Seliger were still dissatisfied, and a British student, Haidar Ali, even showed The St. Petersburg Times a list of complaints he had compiled: no English translations during some lectures, a general lack of planning, and “couples engaging in inappropriate sexual activity.”
“They have failed in what Seliger promised to deliver,” Ali said.
He said he was particularly disappointed by the lack of political lectures by Western professors, as scheduled by organizers.
Ali said Frederick Starr, a professor on Central Asia, Afghanistan and Caucasus from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, was the only Western lecturer who had spoken so far.
The complaints did not prevent Vasily Yakemenko, who headed Nashi when its members harassed Britain’s ambassador in 2006 for attending a Russian opposition event and now heads the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, which organizes the annual camp, from speaking fondly about the foreign participation this year.
“The main topic of the international session is to open Russia to students worldwide,” Yakemenko said Wednesday, Interfax reported.
None of the foreign participants interviewed by The St. Petersburg Times were aware of the Seliger camp’s politically charged history.
But many Russian participants noted that the gathering had improved without Nashi.
“There is more freedom and artistic spirit,” said Yana Belotserkovskaya, 19, an amateur poet from Lipetsk in central Russia who raved about a lecture by acclaimed poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Representatives of foreign and Russian companies that are sponsoring the camp said they would not be involved if the camp focused on political themes like in previous years. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid problems with camp organizers.
TITLE: Was Columnist a Wife Betrayed by Spy?
AUTHOR: By Jocelyn Noveck and Jim Fitzgerald
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: YONKERS, N.Y. — Vicky Pelaez met her husband, Juan Lazaro — or so he called himself — some 30 years ago in her native Peru. She was a gutsy TV reporter, he a talented photographer and a karate black belt. “To her, he was a hunk,” a friend says.
Soon, the two were married and living in a leafy New York suburb, raising a young son along with Vicky’s older one, proudly watching him develop into a talented pianist. And now, three decades later, with the family suddenly torn asunder, her lawyer says she likely never even knew Juan’s real name: Mikhail Vasenkov.
It’s one of the more tantalizing mysteries to emerge from the spy saga that has entranced the world over the past 12 days: Could a wife be in the dark even as to her husband’s very name?
And the broader question: Was Pelaez, deported Thursday in a spy swap along with her husband, an enthusiastic secret agent — who like him, was willing to put her loyalty to Moscow over that to her children? Or was she a wife betrayed?
One thing was clear on Friday, hours after Pelaez, 55, and Vasenkov, 66, arrived in Vienna, en route to Moscow: A family was in tatters.
In Yonkers, a gaggle of journalists was parked outside the family’s two-story, brick and stucco home, with a patio, dog house and wading pool in the yard, waiting to talk to the couple’s 17-year-old son, Juan Jr., and his stepbrother Waldo Mariscal, 38, an architect.
“I guess I feel sorry for the younger kid, unless he was in on it,” remarked a neighbor, Jim Carey. “We don’t really know if he knew anything.”
As for the parents: “They have to live with what they did,” he said.
Before noon, the two sons escaped, grim-faced, to a nearby park. When they returned, Mariscal spoke to the media, insisting he didn’t believe his parents were spies, and defending their character.
“I don’t know about Juan’s relationship to Russia. He probably bought some seasoning from a Russian store,” Mariscal said. As for his mother: “The only Russian thing that she likes is vodka with passion fruit.” He said he didn’t know where they would end up living, though he said the teenager wanted to stay in the United States.
He acknowledged the family would lose their home, since it was paid for by the Russians, but added: “My parents paid for this house with their sacrifices since 1995.”
A lawyer for the father noted that the sons had no income. “It’s very upsetting. They don’t know what to do next,” said Genesis Peduto.
As for their parents, they had only 24 hours to decide whether to accept the “all-or-nothing” deal to go to Moscow or face years behind bars, said Pelaez’s lawyer, John Rodriguez.
He said Pelaez plans to go back to Peru, where her family has a ranch, and where she hoped to continue writing for El Diario La Prensa, a well-known Spanish-language newspaper.
It was in Lima, the Peruvian capital, that the couple met in the early 1980s. The country was in turmoil, with leftist rebels ascendant. Vicky was working for Channel 2, Frecuencia Latina. The man she knew as Juan Lazaro was not only a talented freelance photographer but a karate black belt who taught the discipline to colleagues.
Delfina Prieto, who worked alongside Lazaro at the Peruvian magazine Punto, called him “a magnificent person, a great companion.” She said he always looked out for her and, because she is short, once pulled her up on his shoulders at the presidential palace so she could get a good shot.
But she questioned his origins, as did others. “I would always think, ‘This guy has a European accent,’” she said.
Cesar Medrano, another photographer who knew the couple, agreed. “He said he was Uruguayan, but he had a European accent. He looked German.” Yet another colleague, Carlos Saavedra, said Lazaro never spoke about his past — “but we never asked.”
Does that include Pelaez? It’s not known what she knew of his origins. The federal complaint says agents intercepted a conversation inside the Yonkers home in 2002, where Lazaro was heard describing his childhood to Pelaez, saying: “We moved to Siberia ... as soon as the war started(.)”
A key sign of how little she may have known: Her lawyer said Thursday his client “seemed shocked” to learn that Juan Lazaro was not her husband’s real name. “I don’t believe she knew he had another name,” Rodriguez said.
In any case, the two were deeply in love, according to a colleague of Pelaez in Peru, TV reporter Monica Chang. “She was a very passionate woman,” Chang said in a TV interview. “To her, he was a hunk.”
In Peru, Pelaez established a reputation as a gritty street reporter. Then, in December of 1984, she was kidnapped for a day by members of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, one of the country’s main communist armed insurgencies, along with her cameraman.
It was partly because of that ordeal that Pelaez and Lazaro, recently married, left the country for New York, says her sister, Elvira Pelaez.
There, she made a name for herself at El Diario La Prensa as a columnist who praised Fidel Castro and was highly critical of U.S. government policy.
While Pelaez continued to pursue her career as a journalist, Lazaro studied at the New School for Social Research, now called The New School, a university in Manhattan. He taught a class on Latin American and Caribbean politics at Baruch College, also in Manhattan, in 2008.
The two were “a normal couple,” very affectionate with one another, said Medrano. He said he met with Lazaro during a visit to New York by a Peruvian president — he didn’t remember which — and Lazaro was juggling his studies with a night job cleaning a restaurant.
Elvira Pelaez told reporters Lazaro was an honest and hardworking man who had always been an “incredible support” to his wife. Pelaez dedicated her 2004 collection of columns to her children and to Lazaro, whom she called her “comrade and guide of all dreams.”
TITLE: Cyprus Bail Jumper Cloaked in Mystery
AUTHOR: By Christopher Torchia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LARNACA, Cyprus — The United States and Russia swapped 14 spies with precision, but one piece of the puzzle remains: the suspected spy who disappeared after posting bail in Cyprus.
Did he flee on his own? Get away with help from the Russians? Trick local residents into unwittingly aiding an escape? Meet some other fate?
The public doesn’t even know his true name.
The suspected paymaster of the Russian spy ring was arrested June 29 in Cyprus on an Interpol warrant while trying to board a flight to Budapest, Hungary, two days after his 10 alleged co-conspirators were arrested in the United States. His companion, a beautiful younger woman, was allowed to fly out.
But the case dissolved into rumor-fueled confusion hours later when the suspect, who called himself Christopher Metsos, vanished after handing over a Canadian passport that claimed he was 54 and getting released on bail. Police escorted him to a bank, where he took out 27,000 euros ($33,000) to pay the bail. Late that afternoon, he returned to a hotel and was never seen again.
No one apparently blanched that a man who had been acting like a budget tourist during his 13-day stay in Larnaca had such easy access to thousands in cash.
Metsos was “Defendant No. 1” in the criminal complaint that also named 10 Russian agents in the United States, all of whom were deported to Russia in exchange for four prisoners accused of spying for the West.
“If this man is what they say he was, he will have had some safe passage or probably turn up in Russia at some point,” said Huw Dylan, a lecturer in intelligence at the department of war studies at King’s College in London.
The brisk exchange of spies Friday at Vienna’s airport was the culmination of an idea hatched more than a month ago at the White House, weeks before the Russian sleeper agents were even arrested June 27.
No evidence has emerged that events surrounding the Metsos mystery were linked to plans for a spy swap. American officials had said they were disappointed with his apparent escape. The Greek Cypriot government, in turn, said U.S. officials were slow to provide documents that would have made clear the importance of the suspect in their grasp.
The Interpol warrant, based on information from the United States, did not list espionage in the charges against him.
Cypriot authorities confiscated Metsos’ laptop and several USB memory sticks at the airport and say they will turn them over to the United States if they contain data pertinent to the U.S. charges, which include money laundering and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.
“We are in the process of finding out what is in the laptop,” said police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos, who predicted an announcement about the computer this week. As for the spy swap, he said it had no impact on the Cypriot investigation.
“We are not interested in the political side,” Katsounotos said.
If Metsos fled Cyprus, as is believed by local authorities after days of searching, the key question is to what extent, if any, he received assistance.
Canada said Metsos was using the identity of a dead Canadian boy, a fact that suggests he could have had access to other false documents enabling him to leave the country with ease.
Metsos is believed to have several aliases, and spoke English, Russian and Spanish, a security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to the media.
The suspected spy was last seen in a hotel in downtown Larnaca, where he placed a “Do not disturb” sign on the doorknob. Hotel staff said he took a shower but did not sleep in the bed, and had two suitcases that disappeared with him, but that no one saw him leave.
Cyprus, an island in the eastern Mediterranean, is loaded with possible international exit routes.
Those include the airport on the edge of Larnaca; another airport in Paphos, a coastal town 90 minutes’ drive to the west; Larnaca’s marina or several other ports along the Greek Cypriot southern coast, home to thousands of private boats and ferries to Greece and other countries. One way to disappear would be to cross into the diplomatically isolated Turkish Cypriot north, whose airport only has direct air links with Turkey.
Unlike his purported co-conspirators, Metsos did not live in the United States, according to the FBI. Instead, he supposedly delivered cash to agents there, meeting one many times in New York and, on one occasion, burying a package believed to contain money north of the city that was retrieved by another agent two years later.
The criminal complaint against Metsos and the 10 Russian agents suggests that he had a wry sense of humor. On March 31, 2002, at a meeting recorded and videotaped by the FBI, Russian agent Vladimir Guryev, using the alias of Richard Murphy, told Metsos that he was frustrated with his job.
“Well, I’m so happy I’m not your handler,” Metsos purportedly said. The FBI believes he gave $40,000 to Murphy at that meeting.
Metsos flew into Cyprus from Vienna on June 17. Larnaca residents who met him described him as quiet and unremarkable, walking around the city in shorts with the woman with whom he planned to fly to Hungary. Hungarian police said they have no information on her.
In the 1990s, Metsos once said he was Colombian, which backs up other reports that he speaks Spanish. He studied for a semester in 1994 at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, apparently giving them a false address and false phone number from Bogota.
It is not known where he has been living recently — but experts widely believe Russia is his final destination.
“He’s got nowhere else to go,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst in Moscow. “Perhaps he’s here already.”
TITLE: Two Deported Russians Staying in Hotel in Britain
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Two of the four Russians expelled from the country in a historic spy swap are in a hotel somewhere outside London with no British visas, said the brother of one of them.
Igor Sutyagin, an arms researcher, was still in prison clothes, without money or plans, pondering whether to remain in the country or return to his homeland, his brother Dmitry Sutyagin said.
“He said he’s in a small town on the outskirts of London, but where exactly he doesn’t know because when he was taken there he wasn’t told anything,” Dmitry Sutyagin said.
Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in the Russian military intelligence who was found guilty of passing state secrets to Britain, is in the same hotel, he said.
Sutyagin, Skripal and two other Russians convicted of spying for the West were exchanged Friday for 10 Russian agents deported from the United States, in an elaborately choreographed diplomatic dance at Vienna’s airport in the largest spy swap since the Cold War.
The four expelled by Russia were then flown to Britain, and the plane later went to the United States. What happened to the other two who were expelled from Russia, Gennady Vasilenko and Alexander Zaporozhsky, and the 10 Russian sleeper agents was unclear Sunday.
Anna Chapman, the glamorous redhead who achieved Internet fame following her arrest in New York, called her sister after the exchange.
“Everything is OK, we have landed,” Chapman told her sister by phone from Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport on Friday, a friend of the family told the Tvoi Den tabloid.
The British government said it was considering stripping her of her British citizenship. Chapman spent several years in London, married a British man and later divorced.
The lawyer for another of the 10 agents, Vicky Pelaez, said the Russian government had offered her $2,000 a month for life, housing and help with her children — rather than the years behind bars she could have faced in the United States if she had not agreed to the deal.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder defended the swap Sunday, saying the 10 Russian agents posed a potential threat to the United States and received “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from Russia, even though they had not passed along any U.S. secrets.
“Russia considered these people as very important to their intelligence-gathering activities,” he told CBS television’s “Face the Nation.”
He called the swap “an opportunity to get back … four people in whom we have a great deal of interest.”
To start the whirlwind exchange, two planes — one from New York’s La Guardia airport and another from Moscow — arrived Friday in Vienna within minutes of each other. They parked nose-to-tail at a remote section on the tarmac, exchanged spies using a small bus, then departed just as quickly. In all, it took less than 90 minutes.
The Emergency Situations Ministry Yak-42 then left for Moscow carrying the 10 people deported from the United States, and a maroon-and-white Boeing 767-200 that brought those agents in from New York whisked away four Russians who had confessed to spying for the West.
The U.S. charter landed briefly at RAF Brize Norton air base in southern England, where Sutyagin and Skripal were dropped off.
Sutyagin briefly called his wife, Irina Manannikova, on Saturday in the first contact with his family since his deportation, Dmitry Sutyagin said.
Sutyagin was given a telephone card to make the call, and there was no way to call him back, the brother said. Telephone cards often mask the number being called from so that it does not register on caller identification systems.
Sutyagin does not yet have a British entry visa, which limits his freedom to move, but expects to have one soon, his brother said.
“He hopes that after the weekend, all these formalities will be settled,” Dmitry Sutyagin said.
Then come tougher decisions. Sutyagin and the other three Russians were pardoned by President Dmitry Medvedev before being expelled, raising the possibility that they could be allowed to return to Russia. Sutyagin did not want to leave the country but is unsure whether to try to return, his brother said.
“He thinks he needs to take stock and consider what’s going on in Russia, in England,” Dmitry Sutyagin said.
Sutyagin was arrested in 1999 and convicted in 2004 of spying. Authorities said he provided information about nuclear submarines to a British company alleged to be a CIA front. Sutyagin maintained his innocence, saying all the information he provided was available from open sources.
Skripal was found guilty of passing state secrets to Britain and sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2006. He was accused of revealing the names of several dozen Russian agents working in Europe.
Zaporozhsky, a former colonel in the Foreign Intelligence Service, was sentenced in 2003 to 18 years in prison for espionage on behalf of the United States, passing secret information about undercover Russian agents working in the United States and about Americans working for Russian intelligence.
Vasilenko, a former KGB officer employed as a security officer by NTV television, was sentenced in 2006 to three years in prison on illegal weapons possession and resistance to authorities. It was not exactly clear why he was involved in the spy swap.
The United States deported agents using the names Anna Chapman, Tracey Lee Ann Foley, Donald Howard Heathfield, Juan Lazaro, Patricia Mills, Richard and Cynthia Murphy, Vicky Pelaez, Mikhail Semenko and Michael Zottoli. All pleaded guilty on Thursday to conspiring to act as unregistered foreign agents.
Many of them had children, and Holder, U.S. attorney general, sought to erase concern over their fate, saying they all were allowed to return to Russia “consistent with their parents wishes” or, in the case of those who were adults or nearly adults, were allowed to make their own choices of where to live.
“The children have all been handled, I think, in an appropriate way,” he said.
The seven offspring embroiled in the spy saga ranged in age from a 1-year-old to a 38-year-old architect. In most cases they were born and grew up in the United States, making them U.S. citizens.
(AP, SPT)
TITLE: Former Spy Tretyakov Dead at 53
AUTHOR: By Brett Zongker
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — A former top Russian spy who defected to the United States after running espionage operations from the United Nations, Sergei Tretyakov, has died in Florida, his wife and a friend said Friday. He was 53.
News of his death last month came on the same day that the United States and Russia completed their largest swap of spies since the Cold War.
Tretyakov, who defected in 2000 and later claimed that his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the UN’s oil-for-food program in Iraq, died June 13. He was 53, according to a Social Security death record.
WTOP Radio in Washington first reported his death Friday. His widow, Helen Tretyakov, told the station that he died of natural causes.
She asked friends not to make the death public until the cause was determined, according to author Pete Earley, who wrote a 2008 book about Tretyakov. Earley wrote Friday on his blog that Tretyakov died of a heart attack at home, and an autopsy showed no sign of foul play.
The medical examiner’s office in Sarasota County, Florida, said the autopsy report was pending. A woman who answered the phone at the office said it would be completed after July 26.
“Sergei was called ‘the most important spy for the U.S. since the collapse of the Soviet Union’ by an FBI official in my book,” Earley wrote. “Unfortunately, because much of what he said is still being used by U.S. counterintelligence officers, it will be years before the true extent of his contribution can be made public — if ever.”
A private funeral was held three days after Tretyakov’s death, in keeping with Russian Orthodox tradition, and more than 200 people attended a service in the days after, Earley wrote.
Tretyakov was born Oct. 5, 1956, in Moscow. He joined the KGB and rose quickly to become the second-in-command of its UN office in New York between 1995 and 2000.
His defection in 2000 was very significant, said Peter Earnest, director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, who spent more than 30 years in the CIA.
Russia’s spies in the United States would have come under Tretyakov’s purview, Earnest said.
For up to a decade following his defection, the FBI kept watch over 10 Russian agents as they tried to blend into American suburbia. They were arrested last week and swapped Friday in Vienna for four people convicted in Russia of spying for the United States and Britain.
“That does bring into mind the question: Is that the sort of information he might have shared with the U.S. authorities?” Earnest said.
Tretyakov defected to the United States with his wife and daughter.
In a 2008 interview promoting Earley’s book, Tretyakov said his agents helped the Russian government skim hundreds of millions of dollars from the oil-for-food program before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. He told The Associated Press that he oversaw an operation that helped Hussein’s regime manipulate the price of oil sold under the program, and Russia skimmed profits.
Tretyakov called his defection “the major failure of Russian intelligence in the United States” and warned that Russia, despite the end of the Cold War, harbored bad intentions toward the United States.
Tretyakov said he found it immoral to continue helping the Russian government.
“I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. I’m not very emotional. I’m not a Boy Scout,” Tretyakov said. “And finally in my life, when I defected, I did something good in my life. Because I want to help United States.”
TITLE: Attorney General Maintains Russian Spies Posed Threat
AUTHOR: By H. Josef Hebert
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — While they passed along no U.S. secrets, the 10 Russian sleeper agents involved in the spy swap posed a potential threat to the U.S. and received “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from Russia, Attorney General Eric Holder said.
“Russia considered these people as very important to their intelligence-gathering activities,” he told CBS’ “Face the Nation” in an interview broadcast Sunday.
He defended the decision to allow the 10 to return to Russia in exchange for the release of four Russian prisoners accused of spying for the West because the swap presented “an opportunity to get back ... four people in whom we have a great deal of interest.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, sidestepping the question of whether Russia’s espionage poses a threat to the U.S., said the swap came amid improved relations between the two countries.
“The economic discussions that President (Dmitry) Medvedev and President Obama had just recently and the progress that we’ve made in reducing nuclear weapons — and hopefully we’ll get a treaty through Senate this summer that will further reduce nuclear weapons — means our security is stronger and safer and our relationship is stronger,” Gibbs said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Asked about the timing of the arrests in the U.S., Holder said one of the Russian agents was preparing to leave the country and there was concern that “we would not be able to get him back.” Holder also mentioned “other operational considerations” that he declined to reveal.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that on the day before the arrests, one of the agents, Anna Chapman, called her father in Moscow and told him she suspected her cover had been blown. The Post article cited anonymous U.S. law enforcement and intelligence sources.
On pending terrorism cases, Holder acknowledged “there’s a real question” as to whether a terrorist suspect such as self-professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed can face the death penalty if he were to plead guilty before a military commission.
TITLE: Drought Drives Up Grain Prices
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian grain exports are becoming less competitive as a drought drives prices higher, according to a group consisting of the nation’s largest producers and traders.
Prices are rising by about 100 rubles ($3.24) a week, Arkady Zlochevsky, president of the Grain Union, told reporters in Moscow on Monday. Third-grade milling wheat now sells for about 4,000 rubles a metric ton at elevators in central Russia, he said. Gains by the ruble also are making Russian grain less attractive, according to Zlochevsky.
“Conditions for Russian exports are only worsening,” he said. “Domestic prices are rising, and the strengthening of the ruble also hurts our competitiveness.”
The drought has killed plants covering 9 million hectares (22.2 million acres), or 19 percent of Russian grain plantings, according to Zlochevsky. That’s the worst since record-keeping started 130 years ago, he said.
Third-grade milling wheat sells for 4,250 rubles a ton in southern Russia and 3,650 rubles a ton along the Volga River, Zlochevsky said. Prices are lowest in western Siberia at 2,700 rubles a ton.
While the national grain crop may fall below the 85 million tons forecast by the Agriculture Ministry, “under any scenario” it will exceed domestic consumption of 77 million tons, according to Zlochevsky. The wheat harvest will come to between 55 million and 58 million tons, he said.
TITLE: Soil Drought Affects 11 Russian Regions
AUTHOR: By Maria Kolesnikova
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s worst drought in a decade has damaged more than half of grain planted in eleven regions and hot, dry weather may continue for the rest of this month, a meteorologist said.
“We don’t see much room for improvement in July,” said Anna Strashnaya, head of agro-meteorological forecasts at the Federal Hydrometeorological Service. Rains came too late in some areas, while conditions remained unfavorable in the worst-hit regions along the Volga River and in the Ural Mountains, she said in a telephone interview Friday.
Soil drought has affected more than half of grain plantings in 11 regions along the Volga, in the Urals and central Russia, and yields in these areas will be at least 30 percent less than last year, the service said on its web site late Friday.
The Agriculture Ministry reduced its forecast for the total grain crop by 5.6 percent to 85 million metric tons on July 5. Last year’s harvest came to 97 million tons. Fourteen regions along the Volga, in the Urals and central Russia have declared emergencies because of heat and drought. Emergencies may be extended to four more regions soon, the ministry said last week. Drought damaged 9.3 million hectares (22.9 million acres) of crops across the country, it said.
“Drought affected most of the areas in the Volga region, where 50 percent to 70 percent of grain plantings, and sometimes more, were damaged,” Strashnaya said. “Productivity will be low, and yields won’t be much higher than in Saratov.”
The Saratov region, which accounted for 3.2 percent of Russia’s wheat crop last year, last week reported grain yields at 750 kilograms (1,653 pounds) a hectare, compared with last year’s yields at 1.4 tons a hectare. The grain crop in Tatarstan will come to about 1 million tons this year, down from an average 4.5 million to 5 million tons, the regional Ministry of Agriculture and Food said July 5.
Hot and dry weather worsened the crop outlook in parts of central Russia, with half of grain plantings damaged in the Voronezh region, which accounts for 3.2 percent of Russian wheat, and some damage in the Tambov region, Strashnaya said. Yields “may be only marginally better” in Voronezh and parts of Tambov than in Saratov, Strashnaya said. Yields in Voronezh averaged 2.65 tons a hectare last year.
Heat will persist in central Russia through Tuesday, with temperatures exceeding the norm by 7 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit) and reaching as high as 36 degrees Celsius, the hydrometeorological service said on its web site.
The Volgograd region in the south, which accounts for 4.6 percent of the wheat harvest, continues to suffer from dry and hot weather, with temperatures as high as 35 degrees Celsius, Strashnaya said. Yields there will be “very bad, and only marginally better than in Saratov,” she said.
“Unfavorable conditions” persist across the Urals despite some decline in temperatures, she said. More than half of the grain crop is damaged in the Chelyabinsk region and as much as 30 percent in the Kurgan region.
Rains have delayed harvesting in southern regions including Krasnodar and Stavropol, and may cause some crop losses, Strashnaya said.
Siberia is the only region where the weather is “normal,” and the crop there could help to compensate for losses in other areas, she said.
TITLE: Megafon Seeks More Acquisitions This Year
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — MegaFon, the country’s third-largest mobile phone operator, may carry out one or two more acquisitions this year, possibly expanding again in the wireless business after it bought a fixed-line provider, CEO Sergei Soldatenkov said in an interview.
“We have many projects in the pipeline we would like to buy,” including fixed-line and wireless operators, Soldatenkov said. “I would like to have one or two more acquisitions, perhaps not as big as Synterra.”
MegaFon, part-owned by TeliaSonera, agreed last month to pay $745 million for Synterra, a Russian telecoms operator. Its larger wireless rivals, Mobile TeleSystems and VimpelCom, made acquisitions in 2008 and 2009 to branch out beyond mobile phone calls to benefit from growing Internet demand.
Broadband Internet subscribers in Russia reached 11.6 million last year, double 2007’s total, Advanced Communications & Media estimates. That may rise to 15.5 million this year and 26 million in 2012, said Alexander Shatikov, a partner at the research company.
The country aims to introduce broadband Internet nationwide in the next five years, Communications and Press Minister Igor Shchyogolev said in May.
“Traffic is growing at a wild pace,” with an eightfold increase in data transmission in the first five months of this year from a year earlier, Soldatenkov said. “We, of course, are trying to invest as much as we can in the network to meet demands of our subscribers.”
MegaFon has invested more than 200 billion rubles ($6.5 billion) in the past five years, the CEO said. The company said July 2 that it would increase investment 13 percent to 60.5 billion rubles this year to build up its 3G network in Russia.
Soldatenkov said talks were under way with Akado, a Moscow-based provider of Internet and cable television owned by billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. Soldatenkov declined to comment on reports that Vekselberg was seeking $1 billion for Akado.
MegaFon aims to use the purchase of Synterra, which owns regional telecoms operators, to break into the market of state contracts, Soldatenkov said. MegaFon will also take control of Synterra’s networks and may sell or swap some excess capacity.
“I hope by the end of the first quarter next year we will have a network comparable to that of Transtelecom or Rostelecom by capacity,” the CEO said. Rostelecom is the country’s dominant long-distance call operator, while Transtelecom is the telecoms provider controlled by Russian Railways.
MegaFon announced last year plans to raise as much as $1.5 billion in so-called Euro medium-term notes. Its board has not voted on the program, Soldatenkov said, adding that the company would issue the notes as needed rather than selling the entire amount in one go.
This year “it may happen, if we have further acquisitions,” he said. “So far we bought Synterra without using this instrument.”
MegaFon predicts revenue will grow 10 percent to 11 percent this year from last year’s 181.9 billion rubles, Soldatenkov reiterated. The company wants to top MTS and VimpelCom on revenue from operations in Russia this year, he said.
Apart from acquisitions, MegaFon also seeks to increase its national retail network of directly owned outlets to as many as 1,500 in the next two years. The company now has 620 of their own outlets and sells through other dealer networks.
MegaFon, which has more than 53 million subscribers in Russia, Tajikistan and the disputed Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, isn’t looking to expand internationally, Soldatenkov said. Markets in other former Soviet republics have been snapped up by competitors, he added.
Soldatenkov also said he “does not see synergy” for MegaFon if shareholders TeliaSonera and Alfa Group merge their holdings in the Russian company with those in Turkcell. TeliaSonera and billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group last year agreed to combine their stakes in MegaFon and Turkey’s biggest mobile-phone service to create a new company.
“What will it change for us?” he said. “The Turkish market is totally different; there could not be any synergies when the operators are developing on different territories.”
TeliaSonera, Sweden’s largest phone company, controls 43.8 percent in MegaFon, Alfa Group holds 25.1 percent and AF Telecom Holding, controlled by billionaire Alisher Usmanov, has a 31.1 percent stake.
TITLE: Kuzbassrazrezugol Raises Q1 Profit, Price Change Possible
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Kuzbassrazrezugol, the country’s second-largest coal producer, increased first-quarter profit fourfold from a year earlier, according to a company report obtained by Bloomberg.
Net income at the company — which has attracted investors including BlackRock Investment Management, East Capital Asset Management and Fidelity Investment Asset Management — jumped to 1.81 billion rubles ($58 million), from 437 million rubles a year earlier, the report showed.
Kuzbassrazrezugol has previously used so-called transfer pricing, or selling overseas shipments through a foreign trading company owned by the producer’s parent, to strip out exports from its earnings, Alfa Bank said in a research note in January. The methodology shifts profits from the listed company to the trading subsidiary owned by the main shareholders, it said.
“It seems the company, which used to consolidate most of its profits at its trading companies in Europe, has now shifted to posting more cash flows domestically,” said Ilya Brodsky, vice president of Specialized Research & Investment Group.
Kuzbassrazrezugol’s biggest domestic competitor is Siberian Coal and Energy Company, or SUEK.
Stepan Dubkov, a spokesman for Kuzbassrazrezugol in Kemerovo, declined to comment.
More than 80 percent of the coal exported from Russia is sold via offshore units that allow producers to pay less tax, the Audit Chamber said in July 2009.
Offshore trading companies accumulate “significant” coal revenue as producers sell to them at a discount of 30 percent to 54 percent of global prices, the state financial watchdog said on its web site. “The Russian budget is losing significant tax revenue,” it said.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: GDP Could Rise 3%
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s gross domestic product may increase 3 percent this quarter from the same period last year as government spending bolsters industrial output, Renaissance Capital said.
GDP may advance 0.9 percent from the second quarter, RenCap said in a report Monday, raising its previous forecast from 0.7 percent.
“The main positive growth drivers appear to be related to a direct impact of the government’s efforts to reinvigorate the economy,” economists led by Alexei Moisseyev said in the report.
Lukoil Signs Memo
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — ERG Renew and Lukoil said they signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in the market of renewable energy sources, focusing on the wind energy segment. The companies said in a statement distributed by the Italian Exchange that they would evaluate opportunities in Eastern Europe and Russia.
Polyus Welcomes Probe
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Polyus Gold General Director Yevgeny Ivanov welcomed an investigation by Kazakhstan into the activities of five members of the Assaubayev family who were former directors of KazakhGold Group, Gold Lion Holdings and Hawkinson Capital.
“Prompt resolution of these matters in accordance with applicable laws will enhance Kazakhstan’s status as an attractive country for foreign investment,” Ivanov said Monday in an e-mailed statement.
Following the announcement of the investigation, the Kazakh government Monday annulled a previous decision to allow KazakhGold to sell shares to Polyus, the Industry Ministry said in a separate statement.
Retailer’s Stocks Leap
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Seventh Continent advanced by the most in almost two weeks after Kommersant reported the Moscow-based food retailer will get a $650 million credit line from Alfa Bank.
Majority owner Alexander Zanadvorov restructured a $560 million personal debt to a group of banks, according to Kommersant, citing people familiar with the matter it didn’t identify.
Seventh Continent traded 6.6 percent higher at 270 rubles at 10:41 a.m. in Moscow, the biggest intraday gain since June 30. The stock earlier jumped by as much as 8.5 percent.
Crude Duty May Rise
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia may boost its duty on crude exports 6.1 percent next month to $264 a ton ($36.02 a barrel) after prices for its Urals blend rose.
Russia sets the duty based on the average Urals price from the 15th day of each month to the 14th day of the next. Urals, Russia’s benchmark export blend, may average from $74.20 to $74.50 a barrel during this monitoring period, Alexander Sakovich, head of the Finance Ministry’s analysis department, said by phone Monday. The tax was set at $248.80 a ton in July.
The export tax on light oil products may rise to between $189.30 and $190.10 a ton. The duty on heavy products may increase to between $102 and $102.4 a ton. The tax on East Siberian crude may rise to between $79.50 a ton and $80 a ton.
TITLE: Investment in Special Zones Hits $4.7 Billion
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s 16 special economic zones have attracted 207 residents and 144.9 billion rubles ($4.7 billion) investment in the more than four years since they were created, the company tasked with developing them said Friday.
The zones, created in 2005 to encourage investment and innovation, have fallen far short of the government’s expectations. President Dmitry Medvedev eliminated the dedicated state agency overseeing them in October, handing its functions to the Economic Development Ministry.
Critics have cited the zones’ lackluster performance as evidence that the state will face an uphill battle in creating an innovation hub in the Moscow region town of Skolkovo. The State Duma has given preliminary approval to two laws creating a special legal status for the project.
But the state-run company Special Economic Zones, known in Russian as OAO OEZ, said it was reorganizing to work more effectively since the reshuffle, assuming new duties like working with investors in addition to overseeing construction.
“The current model is much more conducive to development of the zones,” said Dmitry Sulima, a spokesman for the company.
The zones are divided into four types, specializing in technical innovation, industrial production, port logistics and tourism. A total of 8.84 billion rubles ($286 million) was invested in the zones’ infrastructure last year, the company said Friday in its 2009 annual report.
The zones had 207 residents at the end of 2009, employing 3,900 people, the report said. A counter on the company’s web site listed 223 residents as of Sunday.
Yury Zhdanov, the first director of the zones agency, said in 2005 that one zone in the Lipetsk region would need 1.8 billion rubles of infrastructure investment to create 5,800 jobs by 2010.
According to Friday’s report, the project is already nearly three times more expensive — costing the regional and federal budgets 5.15 billion rubles. Lipetsk Governor Oleg Korolyov told reporters in January that the zone had created 1,500 jobs, or roughly one-quarter of the target.
Slow growth has led economists to push for changes in the law to facilitate the creation of new zones and increase the amount of funding from regional and municipal governments.
The technical innovation zones, such as those in Dubna and Tomsk, have been called by government officials Silicon Valleys in the making, but experts have said they don’t encourage innovation.
Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, has cited their poor performance to argue for the creation of Skolkovo.
“The general economic climate is so unfavorable to innovation that creating closed zones would not be able to change the conditions for innovative activities,” the Institute for the Economy in Transition said in a report last year.
“Residents of the zones don’t have substantial economic incentives to engage in technical innovation,” the report said.
The Economic Development Ministry’s latest project is a special economic zone to develop resorts and tourism in the North Caucasus.
Alexander Khloponin, the presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, told Medvedev in March that the law on special economic zones should be changed because they are “ineffective” and do not generate tax revenue.
TITLE: RusVietPetro to Boost Reserves
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Zarubezhneft is looking to increase its cooperation with Vietnam, including boosting the crude reserves of their RusVietPetro joint venture, an executive for the Russian state oil producer said Sunday.
“I hope that RusVietPetro’s recoverable reserves will far exceed 100 million [metric] tons,” Zarubezhneft first deputy chief executive Viktor Gorshenev said, Interfax reported.
The company, registered in 2008, is 51 percent owned by Zarubezhneft with the rest belonging to Vietnam’s state-run PetroVietnam. It now has recoverable reserves of 95 million tons in the Nenets autonomous district.
RusVietPetro plans to produce its first ton of oil there in the third quarter, with production reaching 1 million to 1.2 million tons per year, Gorshenev said.
Nikolai Brunich and Phung Dinh Thuc, the chief executives of Zarubezhneft and PetroVietnam, signed a number of cooperation agreements in Moscow on Sunday following meetings Friday between President Dmitry Medvedev and Nong Duc Manh, the general secretary of Vietnam’s Communist Party.
Zarubezhneft and PetroVietnam will sign a contract to develop part of Vietnam’s southern shelf when Medvedev visits in late October, Gorshenev said.
On Friday, Medvedev awarded Manh the Pushkin Medal for his contributions to building ties between their countries. The two discussed closer cooperation in energy and culture, the Kremlin said in a statement.
“We understand the importance of the oil produced by VietSovPetro in the 1980s and 1990s,” Manh said Sunday, Interfax reported. The company’s production accounts for 18 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and 40 percent of all the oil it extracts, he said.
VietSovPetro was created as a 50-50 joint venture between Zarubezhneft and PetroVietnam in 1981.
The venture exceeded its planned production volume for the first half of the year and could top the full-year output target of 6 million tons, Gorshenev said. Production will edge up to 6.14 million tons in 2011 before peaking in the next few years and falling to 5.9 million tons in 2015.
TITLE: Interros Says It Will Vote To Keep Norilsk, Slams RusAl
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Vladimir Potanin’s Interros holding said Thursday that it would vote against dismissing Norilsk Nickel’s board of directors, calling fellow shareholder United Company RusAl a “destructive” force within Russia’s largest mining company.
Interros is satisfied with the results of a June 28 shareholders meeting and sees “no basis” for reconsidering its outcome, the holding said in a statement.
The announcement came a day after RusAl said it would seek an extraordinary Norilsk shareholders meeting in October to re-elect the board, including ousted chairman Alexander Voloshin, and regain its former parity with Interros.
“The destructive action by RusAl contradicts the interests of other shareholders and the level of RusAl’s participation in the management of the company should be commensurate with and limited to the size of its minority shareholding,” Interros said.
Interros and RusAl, which both hold at least blocking stakes in Norilsk Nickel, had been at odds over management of the mining giant for eight months until a government-brokered truce in October 2008.
Their conflict over the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium spilled back into the open after last month’s shareholders meeting, which saw Interros re-elect four directors to the 13-member board, compared with RusAl’s three.
Management also won three seats, which RusAl said was the result of voting manipulations using Norilsk shares controlled by subsidiaries of the company.
Analysts said the vote gave Interros and Norilsk management de facto control over the company. Interros and RusAl are now expected to buy up Norilsk shares on the market to gain additional votes ahead of the next shareholders meeting.
The two dominant shareholders also appeared to be making their case to smaller shareholders, with each arguing that their opponent is using Norilsk to further its own interests.
Interros on Thursday accused RusAl of attempting to use Norilsk as a cash cow to pay down some $12 billion in debt.
RusAl CEO Oleg Deripaska argued late last year that Norilsk should pay 115 percent of its 2009 net income in dividends, a proposal Interros and Norilsk management opposed. The company eventually approved a 50 percent dividend for the year.
Separately, Norilsk said in a statement Thursday evening that the dividend payment could be delayed because Voloshin refused to sign off on the results of the shareholders meeting.
Voloshin — whom the Kremlin tapped this week to promote Russia as an international financial center — also took issue with the shareholders’ vote.
Deripaska said earlier this week that Voloshin, an independent nominated by RusAl to represent its major creditor, Vneshekonombank, would be re-elected to the post at the next meeting.
TITLE: Nabiullina Says Luxury Tax Planned
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government is looking to introduce a tax on several luxury items to help raise funds for the budget, Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina said Thursday.
“We are making calculations, and within one week to ten days we will have specific suggestions regarding the list of items,” Nabiullina said, Interfax reported. “I don’t think the list will be very long,” she said.
Russia currently has excise taxes on gasoline, alcohol and tobacco. The government is also discussing a possible increase of the gasoline excise tax to replace the transportation tax imposed on drivers.
Faced with a budget deficit that reached 5.9 percent of gross domestic product last year, the government has been trying to cut spending and raise revenue to rein in this year’s shortfall.
A law on excise taxes that existed in the 1990s included jewelry, caviar, porcelain, fur, chocolate and even automobile tires in an early draft of the document. The law was eventually folded into the Tax Code, but levies on most of the items were never introduced.
Taxation of luxury items is periodically discussed in the State Duma and was last rejected by deputies in a first reading in May. The law, introduced by the Just Russia party, proposed taxing expensive dachas, yachts and cars, as well as luxury goods worth more than 300,000 rubles ($9,700).
TITLE: Imported Car Duties to Remain
AUTHOR: By Alyona Chechel and Alexei Nepomnyashchy
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Higher duties on imported cars that were set to expire Monday will now be in place until at least 2012 as part of Russia’s customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, leaving drivers to pay a major premium for foreign autos.
The increased duties on foreign-made cars are now considered permanent because the customs union’s single import tariff has taken effect, a source in the Economic Development Ministry and an official in the government sub-commission on protectionist measures told Vedomosti.
The government temporarily raised import duties on foreign cars effective Jan. 1, 2009, to help the domestic auto industry survive the economic crisis. For new cars, the rates rose to 30 percent of their value, from 25 percent, but not less than 1.2 euros to 2.8 euros per cubic centimeter of engine capacity.
For cars three to five years old, the rate rose to 35 percent, from 25 percent, but not less than 1.2 to 2.8 euros per cubic centimeter of engine capacity. For cars older than five years, the duty is 2.5 euros to 5.8 euros per cubic centimeter.
Under a government order that took effect Oct. 12, the rates were prolonged for another nine months, meaning that they were to expire Monday. But no work to extend or cancel the tariffs is under way, the Economic Development Ministry official said.
Under the customs union’s common tariff — which took effect in Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus on Jan. 1 — the time period for duties on cars imported by legal entities is not specified, so they are automatically considered permanent, the member of the protectionist measures sub-commission said.
Keeping the duties at a prohibitive level for as long as possible was the Industry and Trade Ministry’s idea, and the measure was included in its strategy for developing the Russian auto industry, the source said.
“We’re operating under the assumption that the current tariff levels, including on new foreign cars, will be in place until 2015,” Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Andrei Dementyev told Vedomosti.
Removing the barriers earlier could harm efforts to develop domestic production, he said, adding: “We can’t let that happen anytime soon.”
First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said in late May that duties on new cars imported into the customs union could be reduced in 2012, though they will remain unchanged for used cars.
The import barriers have been effective so far, so it is no surprise that they were left in place, said Ivan Bonchev, the Russian director of auto policy for Ernst & Young. Before the crisis, the numbers of domestic and foreign cars being sold were roughly even, whereas now up to 70 percent of sales are of Russian-made cars.
According to data from the Economic Development Ministry, which monitors the effects of protectionist measures, the number of imported cars that were up to five years old fell by 96 percent since the duties were introduced, bringing their market share in the first quarter of 2010 to just 2.4 percent.
Until July 1, 2011, individuals who import cars into Kazakhstan and Belarus will pay a duty that is 83 to 88 percent lower than the one for Russia. For example, importing a 2003 Audi A6 with a three-liter engine into Belarus would cost 1,800 euros ($2,300), compared to 12,000 euros in Russia.
But under the customs union agreement, a driver crossing the border into Russia in the imported car would have to pay the difference.
Keeping the high tariffs will force carmakers to think more about the possibility of producing and assembling cars in Russia, Yelena Solopova, the deputy head of Audi Russia, said through the company’s press service. “As a brand importing cars, we’re not enthusiastic about this topic,” she said.
For Renault, however, it is a positive signal since the majority of the cars that it sells in Russia are produced locally, spokeswoman Oksana Nazarova said. Additionally, the company is a co-owner of AvtoVAZ, and the protective measures justify the cash investments now being made into Russia’s largest carmaker, she said.
“The majority of our cars are produced in Kaluga, so the increase in import duties didn’t result in higher costs for us,” said Yulia Raulina, a spokeswoman for Volkswagen in Russia. The company believes that the barriers will hurt the economy and business in the long run, she said, but investors who brought production to Russia should have advantages.
AvtoVAZ spokesman Igor Burenkov said he thought keeping the high duties was related to the state’s program to restructure the auto industry, which will require at least five years. The market needs to be protected for a while, but the duties could be reconsidered earlier than the government is forecasting, said Yelena Matveyeva, deputy chief of GAZ.
TITLE: Central Bank to Form Model For Stress Testing Lenders
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s central bank said it’s creating a model for stress testing lenders that assesses the “interplay” between economic indicators and the performance of the banking sector.
The regulator’s approach will include “various macro-scenarios in the baseline parameters of a stress test,” Bank Rossii said Monday in a statement published on its web site, adding that it’s using the recommendations of international institutions including the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
The new “econometric” model will factor in the influence on banks of such “macro-parameters” as the price of oil, the ruble’s exchange rate and changes in gross domestic product and industrial output, the statement said.
Bank Rossii previously didn’t take into account possible changes in the macroeconomic outlook, Alexei Simanovsky, who heads the central bank’s financial regulation division, has said.
TITLE: In the Spotlight: Women Over 30
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, Domashny channel started a new drama series about a group of three close women friends, called “Such an Ordinary Life.”
The three women, Larisa, Stasya and Irina, met at school. Now aged 35 to 40, they all have children, although only one husband is still around. Larisa is a well-turned-out blonde who owns a beauty salon, while Stasya has picked up Parisian chic — but no visible means of support — from an unfortunate marriage to a Frenchman. By contrast, Irina is a pony-tailed biologist who spends her nights poring over white mice.
The show is as glossy as Larisa’s nails, with a schmaltzy title song and artily blurred credits. So far, the women have spent most of their time sitting in their kitchens and crying on each other’s shoulders. That’s pretty typical of Russian shows about women over 30, the age when it’s assumed that married women will be tired of their dull, inattentive husbands and single women will have given up hope of ever finding Mr. Right.
Larisa is played by the biggest star in the show, Yekaterina Volkova. The juiciest scenes go to Irina, who confesses on posters for the show: “I’m in love with the son of my friend.” At the age of 35, she is consumed by passion for Yegor, 22, the sharp-cheekboned son of Larisa. He is into late-night races on frozen rivers in his customized Lada. They share a passionate kiss in the front seat of the car before Irina, disgusted at herself, runs off into the night.
Irina doesn’t have much of a life otherwise. She spends her days looking after an aged aunt. At night, she works in a laboratory, doing experiments with mice, until she has to leave because her boss insists on her working day shifts. “Send that aunt of yours to the poorhouse,” the boss says unsympathetically.
The father is no longer on the scene, but Irina has a teenage daughter named Liza, who also likes Lada driver Yegor and who is not afraid of showing it. She lures him into her bedroom and strips to her matching underwear set. He gives her the brush-off, telling her she has “everything ahead of her.” Unfortunately, Irina walks in at the most compromising moment.
Meanwhile Stasya, 36, has returned from France, her young son in tow, after her French husband turned out to be a pedophile — or at least that is how she explains her sudden arrival.
She wants to reconnect with her old friends, but they are frosty, since she left for France unexpectedly in 1998, taking Irina’s life savings with her. The show flashes back to that fateful day, when Stasya’s mother gathered her friends and ordered, “Make sure you never forgive her.”
More than a decade later, she is still implacable and lets Stasya stay only one night before telling her to book a taxi.
Luckily Stasya manages to beg a bed from the most successful of the three, the beauty salon owner, Larisa, who is 40. She earns far more than her husband, an impoverished physicist, and has a nice apartment. She is still pursued by an admirer, Dmitry, who has loved her ever since their poor student days, but who has since made a fortune selling Italian doors.
Her long-lost friend Stasya perkily asks her, “Have you ever regretted that you chose the wrong man?” before going on to muse about Dmitry. “Why didn’t he ever fall in love with me?”
TITLE: U.S. Acted Too Hastily in Spy Swap
AUTHOR: By David J. Kramer
TEXT: Most analysts in the United States are praising U.S. President Barack Obama and the way his administration handled the spy swap. Many in Russia, by comparison, are blasting the Foreign Intelligence Service for an inept, clumsy spy operation that embarrassed their country. Both governments seem eager to put the controversy behind them as quickly as possible, but many questions remain unanswered before this episode gets relegated to the history books.
For the Obama administration, the arrests of 10 Russians accused of failure to register as foreign agents — which, to be clear, is far short of espionage — and money laundering less than 72 hours after the “cheeseburger summit” between President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama were incredibly awkward. Because the Obama administration touts the reset policy as its major foreign policy success, it felt it could not afford to let the spy story play out any longer and risk damage to the bilateral relationship. Obama, according to reports, was unhappy with the timing of the arrests, and he and his policy advisers wanted the problem to go away as quickly as possible. Hence, the spy swap of the 10 Russian agents in the United States for four Russians serving harsh prison terms for espionage.
The Kremlin also wanted to play down the incident for two main reasons: embarrassment and fear that it would weaken Obama and strengthen his critics in Congress and elsewhere, who are not ecstatic about his reset policy. Russian leaders like dealing with Obama but worry, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wrote in February in a cover letter accompanying the “leaked” foreign policy document, about attempts by U.S. “right-wing conservative forces, including the military, intelligence, and foreign policy establishment … [to] revert to the confrontational policy of the previous administration.” Indeed, some Russian officials and analysts — as well as 53 percent of Russians surveyed last week — questioned the timing of the U.S. law enforcement actions and suspected an anti-Russian, right-wing conspiracy from within the FBI and other security organizations.
The notion that people inside the FBI or Justice Department wanted to throw a monkey wrench into Obama’s reset policy strikes this observer as absurd. They briefed Obama on the situation June 11, more than two weeks before the arrests, which were made after concern that one or more of the accused Russian agents may have discovered that their cover had been blown.
According to media accounts, the U.S. side moved quickly in proposing the swap idea to Moscow. CIA Director Leon Panetta reportedly presented his Russian counterpart with a list of four names, and the Russian side quickly agreed. To be clear, it is very good that four Russians being held in Russian prisons were released as part of the deal. But the haste with which this whole deal was consummated has an unsettling quality to it in several respects.
First, one of the four Russians released from Russian prisons, Igor Sutyagin, was unfairly persecuted and imprisoned in 2004 for allegedly passing on information to a British firm suspected of being a front for the CIA. From day one, Sutyagin has professed his innocence, as have the State Department and human rights organizations. As part of the swap, Sutyagin had to sign a confession admitting guilt or else the whole deal would have been voided and he would have been blamed for scuttling it. Sutyagin and his family have complained about the pressure applied to him by Russian officials and apparently in the presence of U.S. Embassy officials to sign such a confession. According to an interview his father gave to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Sutyagin had no choice. Instead of rushing to get this done so quickly at the expense of Sutyagin’s reputation and integrity, could the U.S. side not have held out a little longer and insisted that Sutyagin not be coerced into admitting guilt as a firm condition for the swap?
Second and related, if the United States had held out for a better deal, could it have secured the release of more Russians whom it deems are being detained in Russia improperly? The four who were released are good, but could Washington have gotten more by being in less of a rush?
Third, if the 10 Russians were charged with failing to register as foreign agents and money laundering but not espionage, why was the Russian government so eager to secure their return to Moscow? Was the Kremlin afraid the arrested Russians might spill the beans about some larger plot or implicate officials at the Russian Embassy in Washington or its mission to the United Nations? Were the 10 Russians or others not apprehended up to more than U.S. authorities accused them of? By returning them so quickly to Moscow, the Obama administration forfeited the opportunity to get more information out of them, use them as leverage to demand more information from Russian officials about what they were really up to. U.S. law enforcement authorities contend they knew everything they needed to know about the activities of the 10 “illegals.” I wish I had more confidence that were true.
Fourth, to credit a phrase coined by Columbia University professor Stephen Sestanovich, the U.S. government’s “catch-and-release policy” amounts to a mere slap on the wrist and a ticket back home. Is that supposed to deter illegal activity, including spying, by other or future Russian agents (or those from other countries)? That Russians are still spying on the United States is not a surprise, of course. In fact, Russian activity is on the rise, and these days it isn’t just state secrets that they’re after but corporate, industrial and innovation secrets, too.
The bumbling efforts of the 10 Russians have provided plenty of fodder for comedians, but their actions posed a clear threat to U.S. interests and were in violation of U.S. law. Their presence in the United States was no laughing matter. In weighing its options, the Obama administration decided to dispatch of the Russian spies immediately so as to keep its reset policy on track, and it did secure the release of Sutyagin and three other Russians. But could the U.S. side have gotten more? Was Sutyagin’s forced confession really unavoidable? Was there more to the Russian operation than 10 incompetent dilettantes? Were these the agents Moscow wanted Washington to find? We may never know the answers to these questions.
David J. Kramer is senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington. During the administration of George W. Bush, he served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. He writes here in a personal capacity.
TITLE: Spying Is a Laughing Matter
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: It is tempting to regard the Russian spy scandal and the subsequent Cold War-style exchange involving more than a dozen prisoners from both sides on a tarmac in Vienna as an illustration of Karl Marx’s famous saying: “History repeats itself — first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Indeed, the Russian “illegals” seem to have spied like characters in a third-rate spy novel, complete with invisible ink and hollowed-out nickels. They also treated their assignments as an extended, all-expenses-paid vacation and appear to have done little work for their spymasters. The charges were grave, but the actual spying seemed trivial, even frivolous.
It showed how much Russian intelligence services have been degraded. Since the country’s “vertical power” structure was built by former KGB officer Vladimir Putin and staffed with his former colleagues in the security apparatus, this story goes to the heart of post-Soviet Russia.
The Soviet Union was notorious for its spy mania. The country produced books and movies about Western spies, and Soviet citizens dreaded speaking to foreigners. But it was in the West where Soviet spy rings were pervasive — and remarkably successful. Soviet intelligence officers co-opted the left-wing idealism and greed of many locals, in addition to employing their own agents. The list of infamous Soviet spies is a mile long, including the Cambridge Five in Britain, and the Rosenbergs, Rudolf Abel and Aldrich Ames.
Meanwhile, the only highly placed Western spies in the Soviet hierarchy were Colonel Oleg Penkovsky and Major Pyotr Popov — both of whom were executed in the early 1960s.
Nevertheless, in the end, the spy game came to naught. For all of its overwhelming edge, the Soviet Union was defeated in the Cold War, lost its global empire and ignominiously collapsed.
Before contrasting the highly professional FBI with the bumbling incompetence of the Russian “illegals,” it may be useful to look at recent history. Let’s recall, for instance, Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for the Russians for a mind-boggling 22 years. And what about the notorious Bank of New York case? Russian authorities claimed that the bank assisted Russian individuals and companies in laundering more than $20 billion. Based on leaks from law enforcement agencies, both The New York Times and The Washington Post published alarmist articles about the Russian mafia laundering blood-soaked billions through the U.S. banking system.
The result, however, was not a mountain but a molehill, with just two people pleading guilty and getting five-year probations for their monstrous crimes.
More important, when the FBI was busy chasing illusory Russian money launderers in 1999, Osama bin Laden was busy planning for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The current Russian spy ring is also a case in point. Although clearly an open-and-shut case, the FBI spent a decade investigating those clowns — getting juicy budgets in the process. If you want a great example of a government-funded boondoggle, you need not look any further.
The most interesting information on this case was provided by New York tabloids and by Graham Greene’s 1958 novel “Our Man in Havana,” which early in the Cold War poked fun at the hare-brained intelligence establishment, ours as well as theirs.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
TITLE: Walking a Tightrope: Faith and Identity in Tatarstan
AUTHOR: By Kristian Krohg-Soerensen
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: KAZAN — The chalk-white limestone walls of the Kazan Kremlin create a striking impression of the city as they rise dramatically from the bank of the Kazanka River, just before it converges with the mighty Volga. The Kremlin, dating from long before Ivan the Terrible ravaged and rebuilt the city in 1552, is not only the main tourist attraction in the city. It is also by far the most essential concentration of political power and cultural symbolism in the Republic of Tatarstan.
The Russian-Orthodox Annunciation Cathedral, completed in the 16th century, is overshadowed by the nearby mastodon minarets of the Kul Sharif mosque, recently rebuilt as a memorial to the original mosque that was burnt to ashes under Ivan the Terrible. Both buildings have great symbolic value for the two populations dominating the Russian federal republic — Orthodox Russians and Muslim Tatars.
Tatarstan, one of the richest and also one of the most independent federal entities of Russia, seems always to have treated its conquerors with defiant acceptance. Today, still trying to find a way through the rubble of the Soviet legacy of ethnofederalism, Tatars are holding on to their federal rights and work to define their Tatar identity through language, history and religion.
Building Tatar identity
One of the less remarkable buildings within the Kazan Kremlin houses the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences. At the academy’s institute of history, from an office crammed with historic Tatar regalia, Dr. Rafael Khakimov (or Khakim, as his de-Russified name reads on several of his books) works with Tatar identity building and the definition of the Tatar way of practicing Islam. The republic, in which 52.9 percent of the 3.8 million population is predominantly Tatar and Muslim, seeks a form of Islam compatible with post-Soviet and modern-day Russian life. Claiming to pick up the thread where the pre-Revolutionary Jadidist movement left it under Soviet rule, Khakimov has written several essays about Tatar identity building, cultural and religious practices and federalism.
“It’s all about tolerance,” said Khakimov. “In this area, Christianity and Islam, Russians and Tatars, have been co-existing for more than 500 years. That means we can both practice our religions, and still respect each other.”
In the first years after the fall of the U.S.S.R., Tatar politicians were the ones who took most seriously the promising words of Russian president Boris Yeltsin to the republics about “taking as much sovereignty as they can handle.” Mintimer Shaimiev, a former Communist apparatchik who became the first president of the republic in 1991, played a long political game securing federalism and Tatar autonomy, while holding nationalist groups and secessionists at arm’s length. After Vladimir Putin’s power centralization project, however, the game became tougher. Shaimiev has succeeded in establishing a strong Tatar state, but the conflicting interests of the white Kremlin in Kazan and its red counterpart in Moscow are visible in practically every political question. Stepping down in January this year, Shaimiev chose Rustam Minnikhanov as his successor to continue treading the fine line between building a Tatar national identity and keeping Moscow happy enough to yield federal rights.
Disagreeing on Islam
Before being ousted from his position two years ago, Rafael Khakimov was Shaimiev’s political advisor and Tatarstan’s main official ideologue. Through his works, he built the grounds for a strong national identity for the Tatar republic, defining its culture and history as differing from that of Russia’s. His works on the Tatar way of Islam, or so-called Euro-Islam, have been used politically to define the type of religious practice endorsed by the state. The question is one of modernization, in which the Muslim world is warned about its likeliness to lose terrain in the fields of economy and science if it does not recognize modern facts and get rid of old-fashioned dogma.
According to Khakimov’s works, a conservative and dogmatic attitude to religious practice is an obstruction to a modern and progressive way of life. Pointing to statistics showing a young Tatar population mainly identifying with Islam but seeming less interested in active practice, Khakimov describes Tatar Islam as being part of a cultural identity rather than a way of setting rules and boundaries for living. This, in turn, enables Tatar Muslims to cope with the demands of modern-day society.
He admits, however, that this magical formula cannot be applied to every multiethnic society in the world.
“These ideas have not been picked up with much interest in other Muslim communities,” Khakimov said. “Most Arab Muslims seem afraid of seceding too much of their religion if they are to compromise with secular, Westernized communities,” he said.
Not all Tatar Muslims agree with Khakimov’s ideas. Professor Ilhus Zahadullin, rector of the Kazan-based Russian Islamic University, says that Khakimov neglects the basics of Islam.
“Religion is religion, politics is politics. You can’t change the principles of a religion in order to make them fit into a political framework,” said Zahadullin, whose university is unique in Russia and currently the largest of very few universities of its kind.
Indeed, the perception of Islam has been one of the hottest questions in the Tatar nation-building process. Shaimiev put in some hard work in the ’90s to keep nationalist movements from playing the religious card too strongly on the table of negotiations with the Russian president.
Radicalism Rising?
Still, there exist Islamic movements in Tatarstan that tend to perceive religion as more than one of many markers of national identity. Recently, says Valiulla Yakubov, deputy Mulla of the Tatarstan spiritual board, the board has begun to fear a growth of extremist political Islam in the region from Wahabite and Salafite groups.
“There are many supporters of such groups among the young, and they are subject to massive propaganda,” Yakubov said in a recent interview with Interfax. “Many Tatars returning from education in Saudi Arabia are very passionate in their preaching, and this seems to bear fruit.”
Scholars studying radical Islam have observed that although radical Islamism is less likely to occur in secularized and economically well-off Tatarstan than in impoverished areas such as Dagestan and Chechnya, there is a possibility of radicalism rising. Diffusion of radical ideas from the Middle East is believed to be one of the reasons. Inner competition between clerics, and the politics conducted by Tatar politicians during the long and winding road of post-Soviet transformation, reportedly also plays a significant role.
So far, however, the strongest resistance to Khakimov’s ideas of moderate Islam have come not from Tatarstan, but from Moscow. His stepping-down as a politician, it is said, had a lot to do with Shaimiev making a compromise with the Red Kremlin — allegedly, Khakimov’s number was up after making “scandalous” remarks endorsing the recognition of Kosovo. Moscow leaders, seemingly, want to mark clear boundaries for how far Tatarstan may travel on the road of independence. Keeping his position at the Institute of History, however, it seems likely that Khakimov will retain a position in advising the new president in identity matters.
With many intricate questions still unsolved, the newly-appointed Minnikhanov and his advisors in the White Kremlin will have to keep walking the tightrope in their relationship with the Red Kremlin, while maintaining a firm grip on growing religious extremism and secession-hungry nationalists.
In that sense, little has changed since the times of Ivan the Terrible.
TITLE: Somali Militants Praise Attacks in Uganda
AUTHOR: By Max Delany and Jason Straziuso
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KAMPALA, Uganda — An al-Qaida-linked Somali militant group suspected in twin bombings in Uganda’s capital that killed 64 people watching the World Cup final endorsed the attacks on Monday but stopped short of claiming responsibility, as Uganda’s president vowed to hunt down those responsible.
The blasts came two days after a commander with the Somali group, al-Shabab, called for militants to attack sites in Uganda and Burundi, two nations that contribute troops to the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia.
The attacks also raise concerns about the capabilities of al-Shabab, which the U.S. State Department has declared a terrorist organization. If confirmed that the group carried out the attacks, it would be the first time al-Shabab has struck outside Somalia.
In Mogadishu, Somalia, Sheik Yusuf Sheik Issa, an al-Shabab commander, told The Associated Press early Monday that he was happy with the attacks in Uganda but refused to confirm or deny that al-Shabab was responsible.
“Uganda is one of our enemies. Whatever makes them cry, makes us happy. May Allah’s anger be upon those who are against us,” Sheik said.
Kampala’s police chief, Kale Kaihura, said he believed al-Shabab could be responsible.
A California-based aid group, meanwhile, said one of its American workers was among the dead. Police said Ethiopian, Indian and Congolese nationals were also among those killed and wounded, police said.
Ugandan government spokesman Fred Opolot said Monday there were indications that two suicide bombers took part in the late Sunday attacks, which left nearly 60 others wounded.
Blood and pieces of flesh littered the floor among overturned chairs at the scenes of the blasts, which went off as people watched the game between Spain and the Netherlands. The attack on the rugby club, where crowds sat outside watching a large-screen TV, left 49 dead, police said. Fifteen others were killed in the restaurant explosion.
“We were enjoying ourselves when a very noisy blast took place,” said Andrew Oketa, one of the hospitalized survivors. “I fell down and became unconscious. When I regained, I realized that I was in a hospital bed with a deep wound on my head.”
Several Americans from a Pennsylvania church group were wounded in the restaurant attack including Kris Sledge, 18, of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. He said from a hospital bed afterward that he was “just glad to be alive.”
Florence Naiga, 32, a mother of three children, said her husband had gone to watch the World Cup final at the rugby club.
“He did not come back. I learnt about the bomb blasts in the morning. When I went to police they told me he was among the dead,” she said.
Invisible Children, a San Diego, California-based aid group that helps child soldiers, identified the dead American as one of its workers, Nate Henn, who was killed on the rugby field. Henn, 25, was a native of Wilmington, Delaware.
“From traveling the United States without pay advocating for the freedom of abducted child soldiers in Joseph Kony’s war, to raising thousands of dollars to put war-affected Ugandan students in school, Nate lived a life that demanded explanation. He sacrificed his comfort to live in the humble service of God and of a better world, and his is a life to be emulated,” the group said in a statement on its web site.
Kony heads the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has waged one of Africa’s longest and most brutal rebellions, in northern Uganda.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni toured the blast sites Monday and said that the terrorists behind the bombings should fight soldiers, not “people who are just enjoying themselves.”
“We shall go for them wherever they are coming from,” Museveni said. “We will look for them and get them as we always do.”
Ugandan army spokesman Felix Kulayigye said it was too early to speculate about any military response to the attacks.
TITLE: Polanski Freed By Swiss Govt Ruling
AUTHOR: By Bradley Klapper and Frank Jordans
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERN, Switzerland — The Swiss government declared renowned film director Roman Polanski a free man on Monday after rejecting a U.S. request to extradite him on a charge of having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.
The Swiss mostly blamed U.S. authorities for failing to provide confidential testimony about Polanski’s sentencing procedure in 1977-1978.
The Justice Ministry also said that national interests were taken into consideration in the stunning decision.
“The 76-year-old French-Polish film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the USA,” the ministry said in a statement. “The freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked.”
Polanski’s lawyer Herve Temime said the director was still at his Swiss chalet in the resort of Gstaad, where he has been held under house arrest since December.
Switzerland’s top justice official said he could now leave.
“Mr. Polanski can now move freely. Since 12:30 today he’s a free man,” Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf declared.
TITLE: ‘Barefoot Bandit’ Nabbed on Eleuthera
AUTHOR: By Juan McCartney and Mike Melia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NASSAU, Bahamas — For two years he stayed a step ahead of the law — stealing cars, powerboats and even airplanes, police say, while building a reputation as a 21st-century folk hero. But Colton Harris-Moore’s celebrity became his downfall.
Witnesses on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera recognized the 19-year-old dubbed the “Barefoot Bandit” and called police, who captured him Sunday after a high-speed boat chase, Bahamas Police Commissioner Ellison Greenslade said at a celebratory news conference in Nassau, the capital.
Greenslade said shots were fired during the water chase but he did not say who fired them. He also said Harris-Moore was carrying a handgun that he tried to throw away.
Another senior police official, however, said police fired to disable the motor on the suspect’s stolen boat, and that Harris-Moore threw his gun in the water. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case, also said that police recovered a laptop and a GPS locator from the suspect.
Police flew Harris-Moore in shackles to Nassau. True to his nickname, the teen with close-shorn hair was shoeless as he walked off the plane wearing short camouflage cargo pants, a short-sleeved shirt and a bulletproof vest.
Harris-Moore is blamed for several thefts in the Bahamas in the week since allegedly crash-landing a stolen plane there, and Bahamian authorities said he will be prosecuted for those crimes before the start of any U.S. extradition proceedings.
Harris-Moore had been on the run since escaping from a Washington state halfway house in 2008. He is accused of breaking into dozens of homes and committing burglaries across Washington, as well as in British Columbia and Idaho.
He is also suspected of stealing at least five planes — including the aircraft he allegedly lifted in Indiana and flew more than 1,600 kilometers to the Bahamas, despite a lack of formal flight training.
Some of his alleged actions appeared intended to taunt police: In February, someone who broke into a grocery store in Washington’s San Juan Islands drew cartoonish, chalk-outline feet all over the floor.
Through it all, his ranks of supporters grew. Some of his more than 60,000 Facebook fans posted disappointed messages Sunday, while others promoted T-shirts and tote bags with the words “Free Colton!” and “Let Colton Fly!”
Even someone in the Bahamas had mixed feelings about his arrest.
“I feel like it would have been good if he got away because he never hurt anybody, but then he was running from the law,” said Ruthie Key, who owns a market on Great Abaco Island and let Harris-Moore use her wireless Internet connection July 5.
“He seemed very innocent when I spoke with him at the store. I don’t think he’d hurt anybody,” Key said.
Island police had been searching for the teen since he allegedly crash-landed the plane on Abaco, where he was blamed for at least seven burglaries. The search expanded to Eleuthera after police there recovered a 44-foot (13-meter) powerboat reported stolen from Abaco.
Police said several people reported seeing the teenager Wednesday night in the waters between Eleuthera and Harbour Island, a nearby tourist destination known for its art galleries, but did not know about the Barefoot Bandit until after discovering a series of break-ins the next day. Harris-Moore’s mistake was to return to the same area.
James Major, who rents cars on Eleuthera opposite Harbour Island, said a witness on his side of the channel reported a sighting of Harris-Moore to police early Sunday. He said locals had been on the lookout since the fugitive was blamed for trying to steal four boats and breaking into two buildings at the ferry landing.
“He might have been dangerous to the public,” Major said. “Everybody is glad he was caught.”
Greenslade said the high-speed chase began around 2 a.m. Sunday after police received tips from members of the public that the suspect was on Harbour Island.
TITLE: Stoning of Woman Over Adultery Conviction in Iran Halted ‘For Now’
AUTHOR: By Nasser Karimi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran — The controversial death sentence by stoning for an Iranian woman convicted of adultery will not be implemented for now, said a judicial official on Sunday.
The world outcry over the death sentence has become the latest issue in Iran’s fraught relationship with the international community.
Malek Ajdar Sharifi, the top judicial official in the province where the mother of two was convicted, told the Iranian state news agency that her crimes were “various and very serious” and not limited to adultery, but that the sentence “will not be implemented for the time being.”
He added Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s stoning would still take place if the judiciary wanted, despite the “propaganda” by the West.
The United States, Britain and international human rights groups have all urged Tehran not to carry out the sentence.
The first indication that the government had changed its mind came with a statement by the Iranian embassy in London that the stoning would not occur.
Under Islamic rulings, a man is usually buried up to his waist, while a woman is buried up to her chest with her hands also buried. Those carrying out the verdict then throw stones until the condemned dies.
TITLE: Fidel Castro to Appear on Cuban Television Program
AUTHOR: By Paul Haven
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: HAVANA — Fidel Castro is back.
The aging revolutionary leader was due to appear Monday on Cuba’s key public affairs TV program, according to a front-page headline in the Communist-party newsletter Granma. It may be the most prominent appearance by the former president since he fell ill in 2006.
Castro, 83, was set to discuss his concerns about the Middle East on the Mesa Redonda — or Round Table — a daily talk show about current events that is usually transmitted live on state media and seen across the island.
“This afternoon, special Mesa Redonda with Fidel,” blared the headline.
The announcement did not specify if Monday’s program would be broadcast live. Castro also appeared in a brief videotaped interview on the program in 2007 to discuss Vietnam.
But appearances have been extremely rare since a serious illness in 2006 forced him to step down — first temporarily, then permanently — and hand power over to his brother Raul.