SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1619 (80), Tuesday, October 19, 2010
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TITLE: Chavez Clinches Power Deal
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Rosatom committed to build Venezuela’s first nuclear power plant, while the South American country agreed to allow Rosneft and TNK-BP to purchase oil assets in Europe and Venezuela as part of a package of 10 agreements signed during a visit by President Hugo Chavez.
“A deal in the atomic sphere has just been signed. … I am not sure who will be shaken up by this, but President [Chavez] said that this will elicit different emotional responses from various countries,” President Dmitry Medvedev said Friday, alluding primarily to the United States.
He emphasized that the deal was done strictly for business reasons.
The United States has been at odds with Chavez over his foreign policy and frequent outbursts against “the Yankee state.” The Venezuelan leader has said in the past that the United States was “on the way down” and used “earthquake weapons” in Haiti.
On Thursday, Chavez said “nothing will stop us” from advancing nuclear power in the country.
Rosneft on Friday signed an agreement with Petroleos de Venezuela to buy its 50 percent stake in German refinery Ruhr Oel, which is a joint venture between the Venezuelan company and British Petroleum, for $1.6 billion.
Russia and Venezuela also signed an accord supporting TNK-BP in its bid to purchase assets from BP in the South American country.
“We will buy 16.7 percent of Petromangas, 40 percent of Petroperija and 26.6 percent of Bouqeron,“ German Khan, one of TNK-BP’s major shareholders, said Friday, Bloomberg reported.
The Russian visit, which was Chavez’s ninth in 11 years, demonstrated the strength of the bilateral ties and included the signing of a cooperation plan for 2010 through 2014.
Rosatom agreed to build the nuclear power station after it finishes construction of a research reactor, company head Sergei Kiriyenko said Friday.
While the cost of the deal was not announced, the power plant will have two 1,200-megawatt nuclear reactors, according to a statement published on Rosatom’s web site.
In mid-August, Rosatom launched Iran’s first nuclear power plant after almost 40 years of on-and-off construction. Currently, the state corporation is in talks with India and has reached agreements with China and Turkey to build new reactors.
“I would like to emphasize that our intentions are clean and open: We want our partner, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, to have a full range of energy choices, to have energy independence,” Medvedev said.
Venezuela relies mostly on hydroelectric power and wants to reduce its dependency on oil and gas, which, Chavez says, is a model imposed by America.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced Friday that Russia would deliver 35 tanks to Venezuela as part of an earlier agreement.
Chavez has bought more than $4 billion worth of Russian weaponry over the past five years, but no additional deals were announced on this trip, despite talk of potential purchases.
In the refinery deal, the crude inventory and receivables were not included because they were yet to be formally evaluated, but they are expected to bring the purchase price to as much as $2 billion.
Ruhr Oel’s assets account for about 20 percent of total German refining capacity, Rosneft said in a statement.
The joint venture has stakes in four German refining and petrochemical plants, including 100 percent of Gelsenkirchen, 24 percent of MiRO, 25 percent of Bayernoil and 37.5 percent of PCK Schwedt.
“As a result of this acquisition, 18 percent of Rosneft’s refining capacity will be located in the heart of industrialized Europe,” said Rosneft president Eduard Khudainatov. “Furthermore, our resource base will strengthen Ruhr Oel’s competitive position, while our growing refining and petrochemical businesses will benefit from joint ownership via Ruhr Oel of leading technologies and management practices.”
“Russian companies will now enter the European Union — I mean Germany. Russians will supply crude by sea, which perfectly suits the Russian and Venezuelan economies,” Putin said at a meeting with Chavez on Friday.
The deal should be completed by the end of the year, he said.
After completing his two-day visit to Russia, Chavez flew to Belarus, where he promised to supply 30 million tons of oil for three years starting in 2011.
TITLE: Mayor Sobyanin To Court Investors
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev told Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Sobyanin that his priorities as Moscow’s next mayor would be to battle traffic jams and corruption in order to attract more investment.
Medvedev announced his decision to name Sobyanin as mayor late Friday, fulfilling expectations raised early that morning when the web site of Rossia One state television prematurely broke the news about Sobyanin’s nomination.
Russian newswires quickly picked up the report, which cited a Kremlin statement, but Medvedev’s spokeswoman Natalya Timakova denied releasing the statement an hour later and the web site apologized.
But Friday evening, Medvedev invited Sobyanin to his Gorki residence and told him about his nomination.
“This is very difficult work with a lot of responsibility,” Medvedev said during the televised meeting.
Medvedev highlighted corruption, traffic and social problems as the main issues that Sobyanin should tackle after being confirmed as mayor by the Moscow City Duma.
“There are many opportunities for doing business in Moscow, but not all of them can be easily accomplished,” Medvedev said. “There are many reasons for this, one of which we are openly talking about: corruption.”
As for Moscow’s notoriously bad traffic, Medvedev said, “if the situation with the traffic cannot be solved, at least it can be significantly improved.”
“This is a big responsibility and confidence, and I’ll do everything possible to justify it,” Sobyanin told Medvedev, according to a transcript of the meeting posted on the Kremlin’s web site.
“I’ve been living in Moscow for a few years, and I know the troubles and problems of this city,” he said. “A lot has been done in the last few years, but at the same time, there are serious issues that need to be resolved immediately.”
Sobyanin, 52, made no public comments after the meeting, but Kommersant, citing unidentified sources, said he had been highly reluctant to take the post.
In tackling Moscow’s traffic, Sobyanin might be able to turn to his own wife for advice. Media reports in 2006 said his wife, Irina, owned a road-construction company called Ira Bordyur. Sobyanin has not commented on the reports.
Sobyanin, who has served as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, was seen as the front-runner for mayor after making it to United Russia’s shortlist for Medvedev on Oct. 9. The other candidates were Transportation Minister Igor Levitin, Nizhny Novgorod Governor Valery Shantsev and Lyudmila Shvetsova, Moscow’s deputy mayor in charge of social policies.
“Sergei Sobyanin is an experienced manager, who has all qualities needed to be the mayor of Moscow,” Medvedev wrote on his Twitter blog.
Medvedev fired Mayor Yury Luzhkov on Sept. 28 after 18 years in office over “a loss of confidence.” He has not elaborated on the reasons.
Boris Gryzlov, the State Duma speaker and leader of United Russia’s faction in the Duma, predicted that Sobyanin “will be respected by Muscovites.”
Moscow region Governor Boris Gromov, who had been embroiled in various feuds with Luzhkov in recent years, praised Sobyanin’s nomination Saturday as a new “dynamic stage of cooperation between Moscow and the Moscow region in all ways,” Interfax reported.
Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party, cautioned that the new job “won’t be easy” for Sobyanin.
Sobyanin will start by “reorganizing the financial flows” in the city dominated by Luzhkov’s allies, including taking away businesses from Luzhkov’s wife, Yelena Baturina, the billionaire owner of the Inteko construction company, said Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank.
Baturina’s relationship with Luzhkov and her wealth raised questions about corruption in City Hall. Investigators have said they do not plan to investigate Luzhkov’s family for corruption, and the former mayor and his wife have denied wrongdoing.
Luzhkov, who has been on vacation in Austria for the past week, will only comment on Sonyanin’s appointment after he returns to Moscow this week, Interfax reported.
Sobyanin, a lawyer by training, has lived in Moscow for the past five years after shorter stints in the capital in the 1990s. Born in 1958 in an ethnic Mansi village in West Siberia’s Khanty-Mansiisk district, Sobyanin quickly rose through the ranks of the Communist Party and Soviet institutions. In 1994, he was elected speaker of the district’s parliament and became a Federation Council senator two years later.
“Sobyanin is not a Muscovite, but he made a lot of political connections in the city as the [Khanty-Mansiisk district] speaker,” Pribylovsky said.
Sobyanin was elected governor of the Tyumen region in early 2001 and later that year was elected chairman of the TNK oil company.
After replacing Medvedev as Putin’s Kremlin chief of staff in 2005, Sobyanin went on to head Medvedev’s election campaign in 2007 and become a deputy prime minister in 2008. He also has served as a co-chairman of Channel One state television since February 2009.
As a new man in City Hall, Sobyanin might want to reshuffle the team formed by Luzhkov, Pribylovsky said. Shvetsova is likely to remain in her post because she was shortlisted by United Russia for the mayor’s job, but Sobyanin might also bring in another woman, Anastasia Rakova, he said. Rakova, who is known as Sobyanin’s right hand, heads the government’s law department and is the only subordinate he brought from Khanty-Mansiisk to Moscow, he said.
Sobyanin, a member of United Russia’s supreme council, will have to resign as deputy prime minister and Putin’s chief of staff when his nomination is approved by the Moscow City Duma, where United Russia occupies 32 of the 35 seats. A date for the conformation had not been set by Sunday.
Analysts say Sobyanin’s appointment as mayor represents a significant loss for Putin, for whom he established communication with the regions. Putin has not said who will replace Sobyanin.
Sobyanin and his wife have two daughters. According to his income declaration, Sobyanin earned 3.2 million rubles ($105,609) last year and owns a Jeep Cherokee, while his wife earned 18,500 rubles ($610). The two share an apartment of 118 square meters.
TITLE: City Conference Backed With Free IVF Treatments
AUTHOR: By Sophie Gaitzsch
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Infertility problems were at the center of scientific and public attention Thursday when more than 90 members of the medical community and representatives of City Hall gathered at Smolny for the first St. Petersburg international conference devoted to the issue.
The conference, entitled “Problems in overcoming infertility and reproductive technologies,” was organized by City Hall with the support of the U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD).
“Infertility is not only a problem for couples,” said Deputy City Governor Lyudmila Kostkina, who attended the event. “It also has a considerable impact on the demographic situation. This is why the implementation of fertility treatment has become an urgent necessity. And I am convinced that the situation cannot be improved without the participation of the authorities,” she said.
The issue is a pressing one in Russia. World Health Organization figures show that Russia’s fertility rate plunged dramatically during the ’90s before only very slightly increasing to 1.29 children per woman in 2005. For comparison, the European Union’s rate for that year was 1.5.
According to statistics provided by MSD at a press briefing held after the conference, 15 percent of Russian families are unable to have the child they desire and one in five Russian women has difficulties becoming pregnant. And, far from improving, the situation seems to be getting worse. In the last five years, the number of Russian women who cannot have children increased by 14 percent.
Various explanations for the problem have been identified: The average age at which people become sexually active is lower, increasing the chances of contracting an STD, while the average age at which women give birth to their first child is higher. Complications after abortions are also a factor. In Russia, 64 percent of pregnancies are terminated, and according to figures provided by MSD, 200,000 to 250,000 Russian women become sterile every year after having an abortion. Finally, experts recognize that smoking — another widely spread habit in Russia, especially among men — also plays a role, along with ecological problems.
One of the responses of the federal authorities to the problem of infertility was to launch a free in vitro fertilization (IVF) program in 2006. With only 120 babies per million born in Russia as a result of IVF, the technique, which costs 55,000 to 75,000 rubles ($1,815 to $2,475), is not very widespread in Russia.
“But today, it is one of the most effective solutions to the problem of infertility,” Andrei Ivanov, head of the city’s Mariinsky Hospital’s fertility treatment department, said at the press briefing.
This year, the total number of free IVF procedures performed under the federal program is about 2,500, with a quota of 475 for the northwest region. In addition to that, in St. Petersburg, 409 free procedures have been made available by city authorities and an extra 400 by MSD, a gesture announced by the company on Thursday.
Efforts in the field can also be seen in the facilities available. The fertility treatment department of the Mariinsky Hospital — one of the two state hospitals in St. Petersburg that offers IVF treatment — opened two years ago in brand new premises with spacious bright rooms and cutting-edge equipment.
The demand for participating in the program is very high — there are currently about 400 couples on the waiting list — despite the extensive list of requirements to become eligible for it.
“At our hospital, we request, among other things, that the couple be married, registered as residing in St. Petersburg and that the age of the woman does not exceed 38 years old,” said Ivanov.
With so many people unable to afford the expensive treatment or wait their turn for the free IVF program, the 400 procedures offered by MSD are a welcome gift, stressed a hospital representative. On the company’s side, the management hopes to profit from the city’s will to develop IVF as a response to infertility.
“We are happy to provide that medication,” said Robert Karl, managing director for MSD in Russia.
“For MSD, it is a way of showing that we expect to become trusted partners with the St. Petersburg authorities. MSD identified IVF as a field where we can effectively work together and we hope that today’s conference is the first step of a long-term cooperation between our company and St. Petersburg.”
TITLE: 2 Sentenced Over Yamadayev Killing
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Chechen convicted of slaying Ruslan Yamadayev, a former State Duma deputy and powerful rival of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, on a Moscow street in 2008 was jailed for 20 years Monday, while the Chechen who drove the getaway car got 15 years.
The Moscow City Court handed down the lengthy sentences to the gunman, Aslanbek Dadayev, 33, and the driver, Elimpasha Khatsuyev, 39, after a 15-week trial, a lawyer for a third defendant on trial, Musa Khadisov, told The St. Petersburg Times.
The court did not establish who organized the attack, which Yamadayev’s brother Isa long blamed on Kadyrov. Isa, however, unexpectedly made peace with Kadyrov in August.
TITLE: First Couples Pose for Census Photos
AUTHOR: By Alexey Eremenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The first nationwide census in eight years picked up steam over the weekend, with both the president and the prime minister attempting to lead the populace by example, meeting with census takers before cameras Saturday.
President Dmitry Medvedev, who met a census taker in his residence in the Moscow region’s Gorki village, offered the young woman tea and cookies before answering her questions and even telling how he worked as a census taker in 1989. He said it took him a week to poll every household in the building he was assigned, but he succeeded.
“In the end, I reached those who did not respond immediately anyway — I was a persistent man and had more time, being a postgraduate student,” Medvedev said, RIA-Novosti reported. “Eventually, they opened doors and gave all the data.”
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met a census taker at his own Moscow region residence, in Novo-Ogaryovo.
The Prime Minister’s wife, Lyudmila Putina, was also present for the cameras in a rare public appearance.
Both leaders and their spouses informed the census takers about their age, education, marital status, housing conditions, employment, involvement in migration processes, sources of income, usage of Internet and other telecommunication devices and even the way their households process waste — a question added at the insistence of environmental activists, RIA-Novosti reported.
Other public figures who have already participated in the two-week census include St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, the official web site for the census said Friday.
TITLE: Protesters Defend
Historic Building
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Dozens of St. Petersburg residents attended a rally Saturday to protest plans to demolish the three-story Jurgens House, a historic building in the city center, as the developer Luksor that owns the building waits for final approval from the state construction watchdog.
Russian architect Emmanuil Jurgens (1827-1880) built the house at 19 Ulitsa Zhukovskogo for his family in 1865. Many buildings built by Jurgens in St. Petersburg are protected by the state.
Igor Yurgens, an advisor to President Dmitry Medvedev, whom the preservationists applied to on the grounds that he shares a surname with the architect, wrote a letter to Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev asking him to look into the situation.
Jurgens’ great-great-grandson Andrei Sergeyev spoke at the rally in defense of the building. St. Petersburg was built as a flat city because Russia is a big country, and it doesn’t need tall buildings like Japan or South Korea, he reasoned.
The rally’s organizers, the preservationist group Living City, said 167 people signed a petition to save the building during the rally, which lasted slightly more than one hour. The petition will be presented to St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko.
By St. Petersburg law, all buildings built before 1917 are classified as “historic,” and can only be demolished if they are in critical condition.
Alexander Rotshtein, Luksor’s publicity officer, said Monday that two expert analyses had showed that the building was in a critical state, and said that demolition would start as soon as the company receives approval from Gosstroiekspertiza, the state construction watchdog. By law, the watchdog should make a decision within two months, he said.
Living City’s Andrei Vorontsov said he doubted the experts’ conclusions. The building is three stories high, which means that the pressure on the foundations is minimal; it has sturdy brickwork and no cracks, he said by phone Monday.
The Jurgens House comprises a three-story building facing out onto the street and a four-story annex facing the courtyard. Luksor intends to demolish both the building and the annex, leaving only the fa?ade, Rotshtein said, and to erect an office building on the site.
Rotshtein avoided saying how many floors the planned office building will be.
“We’re acting exclusively within the law, otherwise why doesn’t Living City sue us?” he said.
Speaking at the rally Saturday, Living City’s Yulia Minutina said that such situations occur in St. Petersburg every day.
“A building is in need of repair work, because no building can stand for a hundred years without restoration,” she said.
“But sadly, investors take advantage of this need for repair work to demolish the building and build a commercially profitable object.”
Minutina said that one of many examples of such an approach was the demolition of historic buildings on Nevsky Prospekt to make way for the Stockmann retail and office center.
TITLE: Rejected Peruvian Transsexual Robs Man in Moscow Cafe
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow police have detained a Peruvian transsexual for attacking and robbing a Muscovite who refused his advances, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported Monday.
The 27-year-old male victim, whose name was withheld, was approached by the transsexual in the restroom of an Internet cafe in southwestern Moscow, police officer Valentina Tolcheva told the newspaper.
The Muscovite insulted the Peruvian after realizing by his face and hands that he was male, not female. But the Peruvian retaliated, beating up the Muscovite and making off with his bag, which contained a cell phone and 4,000 rubles ($130), Tolcheva said, without providing a date for the incident.
Police detained the Peruvian shortly afterward.
Tolcheva said the 29-year-old transsexual is an indigenous Peruvian who came to Russia as a student and underwent a sex-change operation earlier this year that included breast and buttocks implants. He now works as a dancer in a local nightclub, she added.
Police were puzzled as to whether to place the detainee in a male or female cell and eventually resorted to solitary confinement, the report said.
It was unclear whether any criminal charges have been filed.
This is not the first time that a Peruvian transsexual has landed in trouble in Moscow. In 2007, 30-year-old Ronald Victor Garcia Barbosa was kidnapped while returning from a transvestite party.
The attackers, who included a former police officer, turned out to be part of a group that kidnapped pimps and prostitutes for ransom. Barbosa, a pre-operative transsexual, managed to flee, and the kidnappers were arrested by the police.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Kindergarten Boss Hit
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The head of one of St. Petersburg’s kindergartens was found dead in an apartment in the city’s southwest at the weekend, a law enforcement source told Interfax on Monday.
The source said the body of a 49-year-old woman with multiple stab wounds to the face and neck was found on Saturday in her apartment at 75 Prospekt Kosmomavtov.
“It has been established that the victim was the head of one of the kindergartens in the Moskovsky district of the city,” the source said.
A criminal investigation into the killing has been opened, Interfax reported.
Auto Theft at Lenfilm
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Two rare cars were stolen from the hangar of the Lenfilm Studio, a law enforcement source told Interfax on Monday.
“Two criminals broke open the lock on the door of the hangar owned by Lenfilm on Tambasova Ulitsa on Saturday, from which they stole two cars,” said the source.
The stolen cars were a BMW 321 (a car manufactured in the 1930s) and a 1928 Ford, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Magnitsky Backers Hit for Defamation
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Taranova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — U.S. lawyer Jamison Firestone, Hermitage Capital head William Browder and Russian opposition activists face possible charges after police opened a defamation investigation at the request of the senior Interior Minister investigator implicated in the prison death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Moscow police opened the inquiry on Aug. 8, days after the investigator, Lieutenant-Colonel Artyom Kuznetsov, filed a complaint with the Fili-Davydkovo police precinct, Gazeta.ru reported Friday, citing precinct officials.
No individuals are identified in the police investigation, but Kuznetsov singled out several parties in his complaint, including Russian-untouchables.com, a web site set up by Magnitsky’s supporters that features documents and video footage accusing Kuznetsov’s family of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on new apartments and expensive cars after 2007 — money that the web site said Kuznetsov and his family could not afford on their official incomes.
Kuznetsov also complained in an interview published Friday that opposition activists with The Other Russia group glued posters with Magnitsky’s portrait and the words, “Kuznetsov Is a Killer,” in the apartment building where he lives with his wife and young child.
Kuznetsov said he believed that Browder, a U.S.-British businessman who has been barred from Russia for murky national security reasons since 2005, was behind the allegations against him.
“For me, it is clear that Hermitage head William Browder is standing behind the smear campaign,” Kuznetsov told Kommersant. “His goal is clear: He fears to answer for his actions, even in Britain.”
Browder and other Magnitsky supporters accuse Kuznetsov of arresting Magnitsky and neglecting his subsequent health problems as revenge for his allegations that Kuznetsov and other officials had defrauded the government of $230 million. Magnitsky made the accusations after the officials opened a tax evasion case against Hermitage Capital, which has denied wrongdoing.
Magnitsky, 37, died from heart failure in a Moscow detention center in November 2009.
Hermitage Capital on Friday accused Kuznetsov and his colleagues of initiating the defamation investigation to make sure that they would not be punished for their own misdeeds, Vedomosti reported.
Firestone, who was Magnitsky’s boss, wrote on his blog Friday that Kuznetsov’s complaint was a brazen attempt to portray himself as a victim of his own crime.
President Dmitry Medvedev fired about 20 law enforcement officials in the wake of Magnitsky’s death and ordered a thorough investigation. But nearly a year later, no arrests have been made in connection with the death.
A bill was introduced into U.S. Congress late last month that would bar 60 Russians implicated in Magnitsky’s death from the United States and its financial markets.
The Foreign Ministry has warned U.S. lawmakers against approving the bill, saying it would harm relations.
TITLE: Duma Cameras Aim To Boost Attendance
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In the latest bid to fight poor attendance by lawmakers, State Duma deputies are considering installing an expensive video surveillance system able to identify their own members in their dimly lit assembly hall, Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported Thursday.
Lawmakers planning the initiative expect the powerful cameras and complex face-recognition software will cost 3 million rubles ($100,000), although the cost will likely reach 10 million to 15 million rubles, the report said, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.
Deputies rejected the idea of installing an electronic pass system like those implemented in most offices worldwide, the newspaper added.
The lower chamber of the parliament came under fire after a May television report showed lawmakers successfully pass a bill, despite having only 88 of 450 deputies in attendance. Lawmakers were shown hurrying around the chamber to vote for absent colleagues.
TITLE: New ‘Party of Action’ Looks to 2011 Election
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky and Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A wealthy businessman unveiled plans Thursday to create a new party, sparking debate about whether it was another Kremlin-backed project for the 2011 parliamentary elections or the independent initiative of an ambitious entrepreneur.
Partia Dela — or Party of Action — offered a populist platform that was light on specific policies, with one notable exception. The party will seek to reinstate direct elections for regional leaders, a policy that recently ousted Mayor Yury Luzhkov has said he plans to campaign for.
“We think that a political discussion is needed to create a better environment in the country, and the wrong economic course should be corrected. Those are the things we need to fight for,” Konstantin Babkin, 39, told The St. Petersburg Times after holding his party’s founding congress.
Babkin is chairman of the Novoye Sodruzhestvo holding, a major producer of agricultural machinery that controls several plants in Russia and Canada. The company, which includes Rostov-based combine producer Rostselmash, was listed 47th on Forbes Russia’s 2010 list of largest privately held companies, with annual turnover of 43 billion rubles ($1.4 billion).
More than 160 delegates from 51 Russian regions voted unanimously to make Babkin chairman of the new political party. The congress was held on the outskirts of Moscow in the Soviet-era Izmailovo hotel, which has agreed to host opposition parties in the past.
The program distributed at the congress focused on populist demands, such as universal higher education, measures to raise birth rates, support for the poor and the introduction of a luxury tax.
Delegates selected an image of a bee as their emblem, in what Babkin said should demonstrate the industriousness of the party’s members.
A source close to the party denied that the bee was a reference to Luzhkov, a noted beekeeper. The party held “consultations” with Luzhkov, the source said, but the informal talks have ended and are not expected to continue.
Luzhkov has said he plans to stay in politics and fight for the return of gubernatorial elections, although he will not contest the 2012 presidential elections. He said he would revive the long-dormant Russian Movement of Democratic Reform, once chaired by his predecessor and friend, Gavriil Popov.
Babkin said he planned to get the party registered with the Justice Ministry before the year’s end so that it could run in next year’s elections to the State Duma. Party leaders privately expressed confidence that they would be allowed to register, a process that has been used in the past to exclude opposition groups.
Only seven parties are now registered, and just four have been able to pass the 7 percent threshold to win seats in the Duma.
Babkin denied any Kremlin involvement behind his party. But several political analysts said Party of Action looked like an effort to engage supporters of the now-defunct Agrarian Party, which was swallowed up into Putin’s United Russia last year.
“No signals have come yet from the Kremlin — neither positive, nor negative,” said the soft-spoken Babkin, who added that he and his supporters “do not always agree” with United Russia.
Babkin said his party would not just be a pro-business party and would seek support from students and pensioners.
The demand to return popular elections of governors, eliminated under then-President Vladimir Putin in 2004, could put the party on course for a rocky relationship with the Kremlin.
President Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly said he is against returning to direct elections, and analysts have said Luzhkov’s outspoken support for the issue may have contributed to his dismissal.
But analysts noted that businessmen have been careful not to cross the Kremlin with their political ambitions, particularly since 2003 when Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, was jailed in a politically tinged tax case.
Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said it was “absolutely impossible” for a major businessman such as Babkin to go into politics now without first getting a blessing from the Kremlin.
“Or at least from a certain faction in the Kremlin that believes that a certain part of the political spectrum is not well-covered by a loyal party,” he said.
Babkin may be trying to realize his political ambitions and might feel encouraged by not being cut short by the Kremlin at the very beginning, said Georgy Bovt, a political analyst and a co-chairman of the liberal Right Cause party, which was registered last year.
“The Kremlin can block them at any step, but they prefer to watch to see whether this effort might yield a new political resource,” he said.
Some delegates at the party’s forum Thursday were also ambivalent of the perspectives of its leadership.
“Maybe they don’t have the charisma needed for political leaders and have not mastered their speeches, but they have a desire to change something,” Viktor Moskalyov, a delegate from the city of Smolensk, told The St. Petersburg Times.
Babkin has not criticized Putin or Medvedev in the past.
He has been a vocal advocate for years for import duties on agricultural machinery and called on Putin in July 2009 to make permanent a 15 percent duty introduced during the economic crisis.
Ivan Starikov, a former deputy economy minister who worked on agricultural issues who knows Babkin well, said Thursday that the party was not connected to the Kremlin and would be an “opposition force.”
“This party will be democratic-oriented and will act as a lobbyist for business interests,” he said.
Starikov said Babkin had decided to go into politics and “is very determined” because he has lost faith in the state’s support of the agricultural industry.
He also noted that Babkin is not a political novice. The businessman was a senior member and sponsor of the liberal but Kremlin-loyal Civic Force party, which ceased to exist in 2008.
TITLE: Director Mikhalkov Looms Over Copyright Dispute
AUTHOR: By Derek Andersen
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Famed film director Nikita Mikhalkov looms large over a dispute about the collection of fees on imported electronic devices and blank recordable media, a business that could be worth $100 million per year.
Mikhalkov is president of the Russian Union of Rights Holders, which is competing for the government license to collect fees and distribute them among copyright holders, as well as rights to develop the entertainment industry for the next five years.
The group — which he co-founded last year with the Russian Cinematographers’ Union, another organization he heads — has been in a tense competition with the Russian Society for Allied Rights as they await the state’s decision on who will get the license.
The accreditation commission of the Federal Service for the Protection of Cultural Heritage met Sept. 20 to consider the groups’ applications, but it said it would not make its conclusion public until after the government released bylaws governing the collection of the fees.
“The commission’s decision is the darkest secret,” said RSAR executive director Anzhelika Korotayeva.
The federal service did not respond to a written request for information on when the announcement would be made.
The RSAR was founded in 1997 to pursue copyright benefits from recordings made for private use. Despite the RSAR’s seniority, the RURH was heavily favored to receive approval because of Mikhalkov’s high profile and reports that First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov supported his bid.
The RSAR is preparing for the worst. It threatened to go to court in the event of the RURH’s selection, objecting, Korotayeva said, that there is no list of items subject to the new fee and that administrative procedures have not been followed correctly.
Alexander Kibovsky, director of the cultural heritage service, said last week that no decision would be announced until a government decree was issued specifying the equipment subject to the fee and the size of the fee, RIA-Novosti reported.
RSAR supporters sent a letter to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last week. It had 14 signatories, the majority of whom were associated with the Bolshoi Theater.
Denis Voyevodin, a partner in the Salans law firm, characterized the competition between the organizations as a “popularity contest.” He did not see a lot to praise in either side.
“Everyone is against this royalty because it seems unfair charging for a blank media holder or a TV,” Voyevodin said. But the collection of funds from the sale of such items is common practice in Europe and North America, he said.
Mikhalkov’s RURH proposes collecting 1 percent of the value of equipment and 3 percent of the value of media. It would pay copyright holders 15 percent of the money, with 25 percent going to support the RURH. The remaining 60 percent would go to a common fund, for yet undetermined uses.
The RSAR wants to collect 3 percent of the value of equipment and 5 percent of the value of media. It would operate on 15 percent of the money. RSAR legal department head Azamat Shapiyev said market research by an independent agency would be used to determine the distribution of the funds collected.
Mikhalkov’s personality, and particularly his imperious nature, comes into consideration with his organization’s application, observers said.
“The only advantage I see to the RURH is that Mikhalkov is standing behind it, so it is expected to be more transparent,” Voyevodin said. “Everyone thinks Mikhalkov may use this [fund money] to support cinematography, apart from paying copyright holders. It’s a good purpose, but he won’t give any away.”
The RSAR argued that its longer history entitles it to win in the game.
“It is a completely new association with no activity at all,” Shapiyev said of the RURH. “Our goal is for everything to be examined objectively.”
Neither organization has an extensive work history, however. A variety of laws on copyright protection have been passed since 1993, but no mechanism was ever designated for enforcing them. Consequently, according to the RSAR’s Korotayeva, that organization spent 13 years lobbying for the institution of a mechanism.
The RSAR and RURH are each associated with a constellation of related organizations with overlapping functions. Korotayeva, for instance, is deputy director of the Russian Society for the Management of Performers’ Rights. The RURH was co-founded by the Russian Copyright Society and the All-Russia Organization for Intellectual Property, in addition to the Russian Union of Cinematographers.
RURH press secretary Yulia Ivanina said the organization “unites tens of thousands who have entrusted their rights to the RURH through direct contracts.”
Singer Dmitry Koldun, who represented Belarus in the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, is among those represented by the RURH. He said the choice of an organization “made itself,” since he already had an agreement with the All-Russia Organization for Intellectual Property.
RSAR’s Shapiyev said his organization represented more than 5,000 rights holders.
The system being put in place now is the result of the passage of the fourth part of the Civil Code, written with an eye to meeting World Trade Organization requirements, in 2008.
“Russia is positioning itself as a law-abiding state,” said Robert Smirnov, of Yakovlev & Partners Law Offices. “But there has been a big gap in the field of copyright protection in recent years.”
Smirnov said a government resolution has established three criteria for the selection of an organization to collect the import fee.
Those criteria are the ability to collect and distribute money nationwide and to represent the interests of Russian copyright holders domestically and abroad, optimal cost effectiveness and “the ability to provide information on rights holders, rights entrusted to the organization’s management and the objects of copyright and allied rights,” that is, transparency.
Pavel Ariyevich, senior associate at DLA Piper Rus, is cautious about prospects for success.
“It is unclear how practically transparency could be achieved,” he said. “Moreover, there are fears that the selection will be made by state authorities without the involvement of copyright owners’ views.”
This uncertainty is related to the unclear status and competence of the collecting societies in Russia, he added.
Meanwhile, efforts are continuing to improve copyright protection in Russia. A group of United Russia deputies introduced a bill in the State Duma on Monday to require telecoms operators to create reserve funds for the compensation of rights holders for the downloading of their music and films.
TITLE: Swedish Judge Orders Seizure of State Assets
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A German businessman has claimed success in a multiyear effort to confiscate Kremlin property, saying a court in Stockholm has ordered an arrest on Russian state assets in Sweden.
Judge Sakari Alandar of the Stockholm district court, or Tingsr?tt, confirmed Thursday that a decision was made Oct. 11 to seize $4.7 million in property owned by Russia, following a complaint by Franz Sedelmayer.
The multimillion-dollar sum is based on an arbitration award that Sedelmayer won in Stockholm in 1998, Alandar told RIA-Novosti.
He added that the seizure has not taken place because a fitting real estate object has yet to be identified.
Sedelmayer, however, told Kommersant in an interview published Thursday that Swedish court marshals had already seized buildings belonging to Russia. “According to conservative estimates, Russian state-owned property in Sweden is worth between $2 million and $3 million,” he was quoted as saying.
The Munich-based businessman has waged a legal battle for years to confiscate Kremlin property as compensation for a company he lost in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. He has said previously that the Russian state owes him up to $10 million.
But the Office for Presidential Affairs, which oversees state property outside the country, dismissed the claim Thursday, saying it was a lowest-tier decision that will hardly be upheld.
“Our lawyers received the decision, and we will definitely challenge it in Swedish courts,” spokesman Viktor Khrekov told The St. Petersburg Times.
Khrekov argued that the decision was made by a district judge who failed to take into account an earlier refusal by a Swedish appeals court to hear Sedelmayer’s complaint.
“The judge was unfamiliar with the case as a whole, especially with the Sept. 30 decision [that declined the complaint],” he said in faxed comments.
Khrekov added that the Oct. 11 decision formally identified the defendant as a natural person who might flee the country. “This means that the Russian Federation can hardly be the defendant in this case,” he said.
Repeated calls to Sedelmayer went unanswered Thursday. The Stockholm court’s press service referred all enquiries to Judge Alandar, who did not return requests for comments.
Sedelmayer ran a security firm in St. Petersburg in the 1990s and was evicted from its headquarters in a luxury mansion in 1994 by a Kremlin decree.
He has claimed in past interviews that he set up the firm with the help of Vladimir Putin, who was then a St. Petersburg city official responsible for foreign investors, and that it was Putin who advised him to sue the Kremlin after the eviction.
Sedelmayer made headlines in 2008 when he forced the auction of a Kremlin-owned housing estate in Cologne, Germany. But the auction was won later that year by a Kremlin-controlled firm that avoided paying any money because the Kremlin had earlier transferred all profits and benefits from the property to the firm.
In a case reminiscent of the Swedish case, Sedelmayer claimed last fall to have won a court seizure of the Russian House, a piece of prime real estate in central Berlin. But the decision by a court registrar was overturned by a judge within days.
The businessman has claimed that he has been receiving rental payments from the Cologne estate via court orders. He told Kommersant that he has collected one million euros ($1.4 million).
But Khrekov said Thursday that the Russian state has not paid Sedelmayer “a single kopek.”
TITLE: British to Leverage Reputation
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Trade relations between Britain and Russia are slowly improving because of inherent commonalities and high level exchanges, said Chris Gilbert, director of the Russian-British Chamber of Commerce. But he emphasized that there are still bureaucratic hurdles to overcome.
Speaking ahead of a meeting of the Foreign Investment Advisory Council, chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and scheduled to take place Monday, Gilbert called on the Russian government to slash red tape for both Russian and British firms trying to do business here.
“You can’t make people innovate — you have to allow them to innovate,” he said Friday in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times, referring to the government’s push to modernize the economy and diversify away from oil and gas dependency. “And if you talk to businesspeople working here, the main complaint is not even about corruption — it’s the bureaucratic burden.”
Asked whether British businesses were expecting things to get easier after Foreign Minister William Hague’s visit last week, Gilbert answered cautiously: “No, I don’t think they are. I don’t think one visit is enough. But it’s a positive first step.”
Joint commercial activities should get another boost at the end of November, said Gilbert, with the visit of British Business Secretary Vince Cable, who will co-chair, with Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, a meeting of the intergovernmental steering committee on trade and investment.
“The U.K. wants to create a knowledge-based economy; Russia wants more innovation. There’s a lot of interchange there,” Gilbert said.
London has signaled its readiness to help Moscow with its ambition to become a global financial center. The two ministers are also expected to compare notes on Olympic preparations.
In Russia, Gilbert said, being British is a distinct advantage, both in business and in personal situations. “Russian consumers like British stuff, and at a personal level, being British is an instant advantage … over the Americans for sure.”
“There’s more respect for British engineering in the Russian consumer base than in the British consumer base,” he said.
It’s a perception that Gilbert believes not enough British companies have taken advantage of. He highlighted Jaguar Land Rover; Barclays Bank, which entered the Russian market with the acquisition of Expo Bank in 2008; and Sly Filters, a producer of ventilation equipment from England’s East Midlands; as “doing it right” by playing on Russian respect for British workmanship.
But for Russian companies trying to penetrate British markets the question of how they position their national identity is a delicate matter.
“The last thing most British consumers remember coming out of Russia was Lada cars,” which Gilbert says have long been associated with shoddy production.
That is slowly changing, however. The software company Kaspersky Labs recently became a sponsor of the U.K.’s national weather service, which is a move that should help improve the Russian brand.
Bilateral relations took a dive after the poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, which was blamed on a former Russian spy. Moscow refused to extradite the suspect.
TITLE: Gruzdev Family to Exit Sedmoi Kontinent
AUTHOR: By Natalya Kostenko, Yelena Vinogradova, Anastasia Kreknina and Anton Filatov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — State Duma Deputy Vladimir Gruzdev’s family foundation will sell its share of food retailer Sedmoi Kontinent to entrepreneur Alexander Zanadvorov, booking a profit on the investment and freeing up funds to build affordable housing in the Moscow region.
Vedomosti learned about the plans from a source close to the foundation and an acquaintance of Zanadvorov. Foundation manager Natalya Chernyak confirmed that in the beginning of October they signed a contract to sell their 21.3 percent stake in Sedmoi Kontinent to Zanadvorov’s company Bashnya 2000.
A source close to the foundation confirmed that once the deal, which is valued at $400 million, is complete, Zanadvorov will control about 96 percent of Sedmoi Kontinent.
That means he could even become the sole owner of the chain. By raising his holding above 95 percent, Zanadvorov would be obligated to make a buyout proposal to the minority shareholders, said Andrei Lebedev, head of law firm Krikunov & Partners.
Zanadvorov plans to get credit from VTB to complete the deal with the Gruzdev foundation, a source said.
Oleg Lebedinets, a spokesman for VTB Capital, could only confirm that the bank works with the retailer “in a broad range of areas.” A spokesman for Sedmoi Kontinent said they do not comment on the business of their shareholders.
The market value of the 21.3 percent package is $156 million, based on the share price of $9.79 on Oct. 11. Since early October, Sedmoi Kontinent shares have increased in value by almost 24 percent, said Marat Ibragimov, a senior analyst at Otkritie. But the company’s market capitalization is still $720 million, meaning that a $400 million valuation for the stake is too high.
Renaissance Capital analyst Natalya Zagvozdina said $10.30 per share is a fair price, which would value the entire company at $772.5 million. “This is the price at which a minority shareholder could sell their securities on the open market,” she said.
The remaining assets of the foundation include retailer Fashion Continent and 1,000 hectares of land along Kaluzhskoye Shosse, a source close to the foundation said. The plots, 7 to 10 kilometers from the Moscow Ring Road, were purchased from Senator Vadim Moshkovich’s company Masshtab.
A source told Vedomosti that the foundation plans to take the proceeds from the sale and invest in a new project called Garden City — construction of 3 million square meters of housing.
Gruzdev declined to comment on the deal with Zanadvorov but confirmed to Vedomosti his intention to invest in the development project. “I believe in the country and believe that we need to build housing that is not only cheap, but also beautiful. Therefore, the working title of our project is Garden City.”
Samvel Karapetyan’s Tashir Group will be a partner on individual parts of the project, a source close to the foundation said. A Tashir spokeswoman confirmed the group’s participation, saying the foundation would supply the land and Tashir would provide investment and construction capacity.
TITLE: IPP Grows On 2009
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s industrial production index (IPP) for the first nine months of this year was 108.6 percent compared to the same period last year (108.9 percent for Russia as a whole). During the first three quarters of 2009, however, the IPP had fallen by 23.6 percent.
For the first time in a year, the food production index, which in recent months had fallen by 2 to 4 percent compared to the 2009 level, exceeded 100 percent (+ 0.9 percent). The growth was prompted by the hot summer, said an employee at one of the breweries. The production of beer before the start of the autumn was comparable to 2009 volumes, while during the first half of the year the figure was about 10 percent less than the year before due to higher excise duties and the cold winter, he said.
The production of non-alcoholic drinks during the summer months grew significantly compared to last year, said Yelena Lavina, a representative of Coca-Cola HBC Eurasia.
The transport production index went up 160 percent. According to data from ASM holding, in the first eight months of 2010, the output of vehicles at three St. Petersburg auto plants increased by 4.2 percent up to 34,627 cars.
Statistics show impressive growth in industrial sectors because of the low standard set during the first three quarters of last year, and industrial growth began to return at the end of last year, so year on year, there is unlikely to be any growth, said Denis Demin, deputy managing director of Lenmontazhstroi investment company.
TITLE: Severstal Firm Gets Hyundai Scrap Tender
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: St. Petersburg company Vtorchermet, a Severstal filial specialized in the purchasing and processing of industrial scrap, has won a tender to process the waste of the Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Rus factory, Severstal announced last week.
The company expects to receive 200 tons of metal each month from Hyundai. But the quantity will increase to 400 tons a month next year, according to Vtorchermet’s general director Denis Nikiforov.
Vtorchermet has been working for two years with car equipment manufacturer Gestamp, located in the Leningrad Oblast, said Nikiforov. During the first nine months of this year, the company received 2,800 tons of metallic waste from Gestamp. Waste from the automobile industry sees great demand because of the high quality of its raw materials, he added.
Representatives of Hyundai declined to comment on the announcement. In September, when the plant opened, the company’s management said it would produce 105,000 cars by 2011 and have a production capacity of 150,000 units by 2012.
Three other companies, Avantek, Balmet and Petromax, took part in the tender, which was held last week, said the manager of Petromax. Petromax manager and Sergei Ganichev, the assistant director of Avantek, know who the winner of the tender is. Ganichev, whose company transforms 20,000 tons of waste each month, said Avantek didn’t win anything.
Hyundai generates relatively little waste, but the contract is good because of its stability, said Albert Ishchenko, chairman of the northwest waste transformer association.
TITLE: Sochi To Host F1 Grand Prix Event
AUTHOR: By Ilya Arkhipov
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: SOCHI — Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone signed an agreement Thursday for Russia to host a Grand Prix from 2014 to 2020 after talks with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Russian business leaders.
“I’m very happy not only to have Formula One in Russia, but now in Sochi I’m delighted to see all the facilities you’ve built for the Olympics,” Ecclestone told Putin in the Black Sea resort Thursday. “I sincerely hope that Formula One is going to play a big part in what I can see happening in Sochi.”
Putin said the agreement is “very important, because we need to make use of everything that we’re creating” for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. “Construction of the racetrack will give our athletes a training facility and attract the attention of young people,” he said.
Sponsors of the Sochi Grand Prix will include Lukoil, Russia’s largest non-state oil producer, billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element, MegaFon, Russia’s third-largest cellular company, and Russian Technologies Corp., a state holding with assets from weapons to cars.
Ecclestone said in April that he aimed to bring the motor-racing series to Russia by 2012. Formula One currently has 19 races, with more countries vying for a spot on the series. Staging a Grand Prix puts race hosts “on the map,” Ecclestone said in a Bloomberg TV interview in March.
Putin is trying to polish Russia’s image and boost its prestige abroad by attracting major sporting events such as the Olympics and Formula One. He has also spearheaded a bid to host the 2018 soccer World Cup.
Putin agreed to sponsor Formula One’s first Russian driver, Vitaly Petrov, who drives for the Renault team. In a March 1 meeting with Renault Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn, Putin said the French carmaker’s “symbolic step” in hiring a Russian driver would stimulate its cooperation with Russian companies.
Renault owns a 25 percent stake in AvtoVAZ, Russia’s largest carmaker. Christian Esteve, then head of Renault’s Avtoframos factory in Moscow, said on Aug. 25 that Russia is a priority market for the carmaker. Renault, Nissan and AvtoVAZ plan to control 40 percent of the Russian market by 2015, he said.
Ecclestone told Kommersant earlier this month that Russia will pay a yearly fee of about $40 million for the right to hold a Grand Prix race. Building a racetrack may cost Russia as much as $200 million, the Moscow-based newspaper said.
Construction of facilities for the 2014 Olympics should cost $6.1 billion, according to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak’s office.
TITLE: Arctic Shelf Research Missions Continue
AUTHOR: By Lyudmila Tsubiks
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As the flagship of the Russian polar fleet, the Akademik Fyodorov, returns from a research expedition in the Arctic Ocean aimed at finding evidence that areas of the continental Arctic shelf belong to Russia, governments continue to dispute the issue, mediated by the UN.
The debate over the Arctic continental shelf gained momentum this year, with Russia, Canada, the U.S., Denmark and Norway all vying for a piece of the oil in the Arctic. Just ten years ago, little interest had been expressed in the “dead land” of the Arctic, until it suddenly became a strategic political target due to the high oil resource potential of the Arctic Ocean. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that 90 billion barrels of oil, 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids may be located in the Arctic. That is about 25 percent of current global oil reserves. The reserves appear even more attractive when taking into consideration that scientists predict that some Arctic ice will melt by 2020, freeing up access to the oil deposits.
Like the other Arctic countries, Russia has accepted the UN convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which is now an obstacle standing in the way of the realization of its Arctic ambitions.
“In the Arctic, it is quite possible to do without the UN, because it is part of our common wealth, which, strictly speaking, has no relation to military objectives,” President Dmitry Medvedev said after a meeting with Norway’s prime minister in Murmansk last month.
According to the convention, countries have the right to exploit oil and minerals up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from the edge of their continental shelf. They may also make a claim to the UN commission that the shelf goes beyond the end of its overland territory.
Russia claims that the Lomonosov Ridge and Mendeleyev Ridge are extensions of the Eurasian continent, and is conducting research to support its claim.
It was the first country to submit an application to expand its territory from the mainland to the North Pole. Denmark and Norway also later claimed the area.
To add weight to its arguments, Moscow organized an expedition in 2007 to the North Pole, led by explorer and State Duma deputy Artur Chilingarov. As well as collecting samples of soil, flora and fauna for research, the expedition famously planted a national flag on the seabed of the North Pole.
In other Arctic countries, the mission was considered an illegitimate claim to the territory. “This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory,’” Canada’s Defense Minister Peter McKay told CTV channel.
The Russian expedition prompted the other Arctic powers to start scrambling to put together their own claims, and it became clear that no one was willing to give up the territory without a fight.
In 2008 and 2009, joint Canada – U.S. expeditions were organized. Another joint expedition was held this summer that included a survey of the Mendeleyev Ridge and extended eastward toward the Canadian Arctic archipelago. According to the Vancouver Sun newspaper, the Canadian government is successfully holding talks with the U.S. over the contested areas in the Beaufort Sea. Negotiations with Denmark over ownership of Hans Island are also poised to go ahead.
The Northeast Passage remains a contested territory between Canada and the U.S. in the Arctic. Canada, which has the longest coastline, feels it is the rightful owner, while the U.S insists that the Northeast Passage is in international waters. According to law professor Eric Posner, Canada’s system of registering ships is more a safety measure than an attempt to control as much of the area as possible. “The U.S. does not want Canada to reap all the benefits of control of the passage, but this is a side show. The real threat is the Russian bear, not the Canadian beaver,” the professor argued on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
In the struggle for the Arctic territories, the Russian government seems confident — compared by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper to “an octopus stretching its tentacles toward North America.”
According to statistics, the U.S. currently has three icebreakers, Denmark has four, and Norway has one. Canada operates 21 icebreakers, and Russia has seven nuclear-powered icebreakers — though only five are in operation — and another 20 diesel-powered icebreakers. In coming years, Moscow plans to build three to four new generation nuclear-powered icebreakers and about eight floating nuclear power stations, one of which is currently under construction at the Baltic shipyard in St. Petersburg.
“Moscow is pouring huge sums of money into assembling the scientific and geographical evidence that will allow it to push its territory as far into the Arctic as possible,” wrote Matthew Lynn in a story for Bloomberg news agency.
In bringing nuclear power to the Arctic, Russia has paid scant attention to the potentially catastrophic consequences. Ecological forums seem senseless while vessels are searching for places to drill under the melting polar ice cap.
The Arctic countries’ submissions to the UN agency on continental shelves are due in 2013.
TITLE: E-Government Needs $2.6B
AUTHOR: By Justin Lifflander
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Communications and Press Ministry is seeking 80 billion rubles ($2.6 billion) next year to help government agencies deploy systems that will allow citizens to get services through the Internet, a ministry official told reporters Thursday.
“The battle against corruption is one of the main goals of this effort,” said Andrei Lipov, director of the ministry’s department for information technology and informatization policy.
“If we can provide even a part of the services people need via an e-government system, we expect corruption associated with government services to citizens to go down,” he said.
Some government agencies have been slow to react. Initial reviews by the ministry of nearly 60 federal agencies’ IT plans have been “disappointing,” Lipov said, and 23 have not even submitted a plan.
Some government bodies and regions are making good progress, however.
Lipov highlighted the Agriculture Ministry and the Office of Presidential Affairs as moving ahead well, and said that among the regions, the republic of Tatarstan and in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan, were very advanced in their IT planning.
At the heart of the project is a “system of interagency electronic interaction,” or SMEV by its Russian acronym.
The federal SMEV is to be operated by the Communications and Press Ministry, while each region is to name a body to operate its SMEV.
The SMEV will facilitate the implementation of a new law coming into effect next year that will prohibit a government agency from demanding documents from a citizen if that — or any other agency — already has such documents in its possession.
The Health and Social Development Ministry’s project to make digitized individual health records for every citizen is in a pilot phase this year and should be rolled out next year, Lipov said.
Foreign passports have been issued to 60,000 citizens so far this year using the Federal Migration Service’s electronic portal, he added.
TITLE: Petersburg: Russia’s Congress Capital
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The conference business, which has been going through a rough patch as a result of the economic crisis, along with almost every other sector, is showing some signs of a renaissance. Although conference organizers have been struggling, 2010 has brought some obvious positive tendencies, experts say.
The tasks facing conference organizers have become more complex as a result of the crisis, says Anastasia Pospelova, a project manager at Vedomosti newspaper’s conference department.
“To maintain quality levels in the product, we now have to invest double the amount of effort,” Pospelova said. “Despite these obstacles, the market is clearly reviving. In particular, we can see some players returning who had left the business in 2008 and 2009.”
For conference participants, every event is not only an opportunity to establish new contacts but also to exchange information, which is especially valuable during the post-crisis period. As conference organizers point out, for this reason, during the first half of 2010, anti-crisis policies featured prominently in conference agendas, regardless of the industry involved.
Financial, judicial, tax and HR topics remain popular, attracting large numbers of participants, and one of the most popular new topics is the theme of cross-cultural communications, according to Pospelova.
“The format of presenting master classes by prominent people, business leaders and experienced analysts from various fields is seeing increasing demand, too,” Pospelova said.
Another new form for business gatherings that is gaining popularity is the so-called business club, a more interactive and informal type of discussion than a standard conference. At the same time, construction-related and automotive topics, marketing and public relations issues no longer seem to generate the same interest as in years gone by, generally failing to lead to conferences in their own right, though they were previously some of the most popular and attractive topics.
How is the city of St. Petersburg — the host of the internationally respected Economic Forum, now Russia’s most important business conference which attracts heads of state and CEOs of companies of global importance — coping with the challenges of the post-crisis period?
“St. Petersburg is a city with a key ambition to become an internationally popular location for holding conferences and corporate events,” said Anatoly Turchak, president of the St. Petersburg Union of Manufacturers and Entrepreneurs.
“Today, it’s impossible to imagine the city of St. Petersburg without annual exhibitions, conferences and congresses. Over recent years the exhibition and conference industry has become a powerful and efficient way of promoting achievements in a variety of spheres.
“A modern conference or exhibition is far more than just an effective sales tool, it is a vital means of communication and of exchanging information. It’s linked to all the market’s instruments. And that makes participation in these events essential to the achievement of a whole set of entrepreneurial goals. It allows a company to achieve its goals in communications, pricing, sales and product ranges all at the same time,” said Turchak.
In the post-crisis period, employing a strategy of active sales is the key to survival, says Sergei Korneyev, head of the northwestern branch of the Russian Tourism Industry Union, who said he and his staff are busy all year round trying to attract events to the city.
Korneyev said that the U.S. and Western Europe remain interested in St. Petersburg as a conference destination, but the narrow target group of the Russian Tourism Industry Union is Scandinavian countries and Russia’s neighboring states.
“With air fares remaining high, and until budget airlines enjoy a much fuller presence on the Russian markets, our best bets are our closest foreign neighbors,” he said.
The city’s hoteliers are waking up to the city’s growing popularity as a congress destination: Most of the biggest hotels in the city already have conference facilities, and some of them even boast larger halls for hosting congresses. Almost all the new emerging hotels are allocating substantial proportions of their premises to conference space, as it gives them an opportunity to host a number of different events at the same time.
One of the most compelling recent examples is the five-star Corinthia St. Petersburg Hotel, which last year completed a large-scale expansion and refurbishment project at a cost of 100 million euros of foreign investment. The hotel building at Nevsky 59 is now home to a modern conference center, including a large multifunctional space covering 500 square meters with a seating capacity of up to 600 people.
According to official statistics, the city’s conference venues — which include more than 80 locations — offer more than 43,000 square meters of space, or 32,630 seats. More than one third of that space is offered by small venues of less than 50 square meters. Large halls of more than 1,000 square meters account for only 1 percent of the city’s conference space. The specialized venues segment — or congress centers — amounts to about 9 percent of the city’s conference space, or 11 percent of the total seating capacity.
TITLE: Putin’s Nobody for Mayor
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: Although the appointment of Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Sobyanin to the post of Moscow mayor was widely expected, the news set off a barrage of emotional opinions on the Russian Internet. Most were negative. Sobyanin was already being criticized for being a nobody, not a public politician and, most damningly, the closest associate of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin among all the candidates for mayor.
As blogger sergius1971 wrote, “Sobyanin is head of the board of directors of Channel One and bears part of the responsibility for the miserable state of the main source of information for the majority of Russians.”
Sobyanin’s record as governor of the Tyumen region also fell under the bloggers’ scrutiny. k_kiselev wrote that despite a per capita regional budget under Sobyanin that was 1.3 to 1.4 times greater than the budget in the neighboring Sverdlovsk region, Tyumen considerably lagged behind its neighbor in many parameters.
There were only a few voices in support of Sobyanin. Blogger jkuma found it a positive sign that Sobyanin is not a chekist, unlike so many appointed to governors’ posts and agencies under Putin’s presidency. She concluded that Sobyanin’s candidacy represents a compromise between the pro-Putin siloviki and the pro-Medvedev modernizers.
But last week, Russian bloggers weren’t focused only on events in Moscow. They were also following a court case in the Urals city of Nizhny Tagil, where 23-year-old Yegor Bychkov, head of the local branch of a foundation called A City Without Drugs, was accused of kidnapping and imprisoning drug users.
At issue were the foundation’s practices to “cure” drug users — methods that are extremely dubious from the point of view of both medicine and the law. Users were forcibly placed behind bars in wards and handcuffed by hand and foot to their beds. The patients were kept like this for four weeks, during which time they were fed only bread and onions.
Bychkov was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison. It’s one of those mysteries of the Russian soul that the public is on the side of the criminal. Bychkov doesn’t deny kidnapping and holding people as prisoners, but neither does he consider himself guilty. He says he did what he did with only the best intentions. Even a survey of the rather liberal audience of Ekho Moskvy radio showed that 93 percent of the respondents supported forcible “treatment” of drug users.
Perhaps the blogger sapojnik got it right when he wrote: “Our kind-natured average citizens don’t consider drug addicts to be people, and they are deathly afraid of them. Society treats drug addicts worse than rabid dogs. They treat them like zombies from a horror film. … People in our society aren’t the least bit sorry for addicts.”
Or perhaps it’s more complicated. Maybe the public is just fed up with the inability of the police to catch drug dealers. Blogger vyatsky writes: “Society is furious that the Russian legal system has put one more Robin Hood behind bars … and that corrupt cops are back in business — together with the drug dealers.”
Meanwhile, a campaign to free Bychkov has gone into high gear. Rock musician Sergei Shakhrin has personally asked President Dmitry Medvedev to review the case.
The good news is that in the age of the Internet, some problems can be solved without a petition to the Kremlin. The blogger and lawyer Alexei Navalny — aka LiveJournal user navalny — noted a very strange request for bids on the web site of the Health and Social Development Ministry. The ministry wanted a contractor to create a social network for medical personnel and patients.
This sounds like a good idea. But the catch was that the project, which had a budget of 55 million rubles (about $1.8 million), had to be finished 16 days after the contract was signed. Not even all the programmers in Silicon Valley led by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg could create a social network from scratch in just over two weeks.
Navalny reasonably suggested that the unusual requirement was made intentionally to limit the tender to one bidder, which would be submitted by an organization that had a deal with one of the ministry bureaucrats. We may never know what exactly was going on, but in any case, two days after the blogs began to buzz about this, the ministry announced that the person in charge of the request for bids had resigned.
A joke immediately started making the rounds on the blogosphere: All the country’s prosecutors might as well resign, too, since bloggers were doing their jobs for them.
Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist whose blog is chaadaev56.livejournal.com.
TITLE: Why the Media Ignore Russia
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: Recently, an American friend — an investment banker with a wide range of interests — complained to me about the lack of coverage of Russia in the U.S. media. Over the past few years, she explained, there has been little in-depth information. As a result, when important events such as the recent dismissal of Mayor Yury Luzhkov occur, it is impossible to understand what is going on.
Is it poor journalism, she wondered, a result of the financial crisis in the mainstream media, or Russia-fatigue after years of blanket coverage during the Cold War?
The problem, I think, is different: Nothing of note has happened in Russia for a very long time.
To be sure, there are still natural and man-made disasters, horrendous terrorist attacks and brutal murders of journalists and human rights campaigners. But these are not events that influence the rest of the world.
Although Russia, as a major player in the energy market, occasionally tries to flex its muscles by using natural gas exports as a political weapon, it can’t even get friendless Belarus to do its bidding, to say nothing of its customers in Western Europe. Worse, periodic supply disruptions have prompted Western Europeans to seek other sources of natural gas, such as North Africa and Israel or transportable liquefied natural gas. This will reduce Russia’s role as a supplier and make a mockery of the multibillion-dollar gas pipelines now being built.
Russia still makes its presence felt by occasionally proposing the sale of military or nuclear gear to a rogue state and lending support to mavericks, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But when push comes to shove, Russian elites shrink from an open confrontation that could jeopardize their offshore bank accounts or their children’s residency status in Western countries.
While China, India and Brazil — and now even Indonesia, Thailand and Turkey — are starting to play an enhanced role in the world economy and world affairs, Russia, despite occupying one-seventh of the world’s landmass and controlling an enormous nuclear arsenal, has largely become irrelevant. The global financial and economic crisis has essentially knocked Russia out of the BRIC grouping of the world’s most dynamic developing nations and economies of the future.
Russian leaders have all but admitted this — at least in deeds if not in words. To be sure, there is still talk of Russia’s recovering prestige and growing importance in world affairs after the hiatus of the 1990s. But even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem to believe the official propaganda. While still Russia’s most powerful man, he has allowed his hand-picked successor, President Dmitry Medvedev, to criticize the hallmarks of his era, such as the dominance of state-owned monopolies, overdependence on raw materials exports and technological backwardness.
Medvedev has indeed started to chart a different course. He has gone to the United States and has hosted California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as head of a delegation of venture capitalists and high-tech executives in Moscow. He is now fired up with the idea of building Russia’s version of Silicon Valley outside Moscow. But it is clear that sponsoring another white elephant project by pouring billions of rubles of state money down a black hole will do nothing to create a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy that could compete on the world stage. Until Putin’s legacy is overcome, my friend the investment banker will have to wait a lot longer for important news to come out of Russia.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
TITLE: A Recipe for Success: Planning the Perfect Conference
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As the popularity of conferences and forums grows around the world, St. Petersburg’s experts — both in the field of organizing events and in providing venues for them — share their experience and offer advice on how to make such events interesting and successful.
STAY RELEVANT
The first thing that the organizers of a conference should do in order to make it successful is to “offer a topic that is relevant and in demand,” says Yelena Tarasova, PR manager of Primexpo, which organizes international exhibitions in the northwest region of Russia.
“At the first stage of preparation work, the organizers need to define the degree of research regarding the issue up for discussion and find problematic moments that can present the highest interest for the discussion,” Tarasova said.
“They then need to devise the program and select the speakers,” she said.
When choosing the speakers, the organizers should take into account their status, authority and experience.
“The speakers should be known to the circle of experts on whom the event is oriented, practice in that field and be good orators,” she said.
Tarasova said it is also important to present all the aspects and opinions regarding the topic of the conference.
“It is important to achieve a good dialogue between all the key players of that market,” she said.
“Naturally, a conference can’t be held without a target audience,” she said. “For that purpose, the organizers need to identify an audience who will be interested in the discussion, figure out their preferences and expectations and topics that will be most interesting for them, and then inform participants about the event.”
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Representatives of the city’s Corinthia Hotel St. Petersburg, which has won the World Travel Award for best European hotel for business meetings and conferences for the last two years, and last month won the best Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events (MICE) hotel in St. Petersburg at the Russian Business Travel & MICE awards, said that from the point of view of conference venue hosts, it is important to have a complete list of the client’s requirements from the very beginning.
“From the point of view of a hotel as a conference venue, it is necessary to obtain a list of the client’s requirements and expectations regarding technical support and service,” said Irina Yeroshevich, the hotel’s MICE sales director.
“At the same time, we would not like to limit the holding of such events to the function of service providers. The task of the hotel is to build up a relationship with the client to the point where they are able to fully trust all the organizational issues to the staff of the hotel, allowing the client to concentrate fully on the professional side of the conference,” Yeroshevich said.
Sergei Sysoyev, head of the commercial department of the city’s State Congress Palace Complex, which hosts all kinds of forums, meetings and exhibitions, including political forums such as the G8 summit in 2006, said that conference success depends on three main ingredients: “Having clear aims and tasks, a good venue and high professional level of partners and contractors.”
Sergei Volkov, head of the management company of PetroCongress Congress Business Center, which also provides a venue for all kinds of events, said that for any conference, “attention to every detail” is of the utmost importance.
“Everything is important: preparation for a conference, the choice of the organizing company, devising a program and menu, the arrangement of the furniture, presentation equipment in the room, preliminary testing of all the systems, a comprehensive package for participants and quick registration for the event,” Volkov said.
The success of a conference directly depends on the relevance of a topic that will attract experts and participants, he added.
“At the same time, it is also effective to combine joint, productive work with leisure time. For instance, it’s a good idea to organize an exhibition of pictures by fashionable artists or an interesting excursion during a coffee-break or lunch-break,” he said. “Here, connections with art galleries and St. Petersburg museums can help a lot.”
RAISING RUSSIA’S PROFILE
Darya Ostrovskaya, commercial director of Restek Events, which organizes and hosts exhibitions, said the location of the conference plays a very important role in the process.
“Here we mean not only the choice of venue, but also the geographical location,” Ostrovskaya said.
“Unfortunately, Russia still doesn’t have enough international congress events. Despite having high potential, our cities still do not take strong enough positions in the ratings of the world’s leading congress centers. One of the reasons for that may be a lack of united promotion on the international market,” Ostrovskaya said.
According to research conducted by R&C market research company, the majority of professionals said they did not choose Russia for such events because they lacked knowledge about the country, she said.
Ostrovskaya said that to organize a successful conference, clients should turn to specialized professionals for help.
“Often, clients trying to keep the budget of the conference down prefer to organize events themselves. However, it is always better to have one manager who can do it professionally. Commissioning a contractor makes it possible to plan the event well and to economize on expenses thank to additional discounts and special prices that contractors usually offer to professional companies,” she said.
Svetlana Avdeyeva, head of advertising and PR at the St. Petersburg Chamber of Trade and Industry, said conference speakers should not only be good specialists, but should also be able to speak clearly and on the subject.
Avdeyeva said it was important to write a clear and interesting invitation for the event and send it to a “live” contact base.
“It is necessary to prepare materials on the conference for the media and participants, including information on the speakers’ speeches and additional information about their personality and experience,” Avdeyeva said.
Vladimir Metelitsyn, executive director of Farexpo, which organizes international exhibitions and congresses in St. Petersburg and Moscow, said that international conferences with a large number of participants attract the most interest in St. Petersburg. The clients of such conferences are usually international professional associations.
The success of such events depends on mutual understanding and coordinated work between all of the three sides participating in the process.
Those parties are the international client association that decides on the time, location and topic of the conference; a professional contractor or local host who develops the program for the conference and invites the speakers; and a professional congress organizing company who is responsible for all the logistics of the conference, such as hiring a venue, providing accommodation for participants, transfers, meals and a cultural program, Metelitsyn said.
WHAT TO AVOID
Tarasova said organizers of conferences should avoid repeating topics. If the topic is “long-running,” then any new conference should cover new aspects of the topic and have new speakers who offer new information, she said.
“It is important to avoid clashing with competing events regarding the terms and location,” Tarasova said.
Sysoyev said organizers should avoid holding conferences just for the sake of it. “Pro-forma conferences are normally dull and uninteresting,” he said.
Experts agree that a professional attitude is of fundamental importance when planning a conference.
“It is important to have a responsible project manager who knows all the details of the event and can coordinate the work of all necessary services well,” said Volkov.
“Organizers should not follow a speaker’s desire to get too deep into the topic if the speaker believes it is interesting but the organizers understand that it is a maze,” said Avdeyeva. “Nor should a conference be turned into an advertisement,” she said.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
At international conferences, the success depends to a large extent on the work of the interpreters, said Tarasova.
“At our events, we give preference to synchronized translation, which offers a lot of advantages,” she said.
Volkov also said the role of a synchronized interpreter cannot be overestimated.
“Here it is important to have an interpreter who is specialized in a certain field, be it naval transport or legal rights. At the same time, interpreters should have excellent reactions in order to provide instant interpretation for speakers who don’t always have clear diction,” he said.
Restek’s Ostrovskaya agreed.
“It is important for interpreters to know the terminology well,” she said. “We only employ professional interpreters for our events through specialized companies, and give them information about the speakers’ speeches in advance.”
TITLE: Expert Opinion
TEXT: Edgard Pauly, General Manager, Novotel Hotel
It really would be difficult to give too much praise to this city in terms of what it has to offer to those coming here to take part in or organize a conference. First there is the city’s very convenient geographic location. Then there’s the “who we are” factor, in terms of this city’s unique history as a former imperial capital and as a key national symbol. Then we get to the “what to do” and “where to go” sections — there really are no limits on what you can do in terms of leisure, entertainment and culture in this city. That has already made St. Petersburg a top destination for Russian and foreign travelers on holiday, but it’s also made the city extremely popular as a business destination and for all manner of meetings, seminars and events.
There is room for improvement, however. Event management needs to be further developed with new international facilities and utilities, with the development of air, sea and road access.
And then there’s the eternal issue of visas. If we had visa-free entry for three- to five-day trips this would really facilitate the events and conference business in the city. St. Petersburg really could compete with most other European cities in this sector if it had visa-free entry, and low-cost, discounted transportation links such as the service being operated by Air Berlin at the moment can really make a huge difference.
In addition to all that, new and modernized hotels in the city are offering great new meeting rooms and facilities with the best equipment available. All this means that we really can compete, we just need the will!
Magnus Wetterholm, General Manager, Skandinavia Country Club, Sestroretsk
What we’ve discovered in helping with the organization of events such as conferences is that efficiency is absolutely vital and that if the event is run smoothly, with our help, then the organizers will come back. If we can ensure that the conference goes off without a hitch, then, along with the other goodies that we can offer, then holding an event outside the city can be a great alternative to holding it in a hotel in the city.
St. Petersburg is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and exciting cities I have ever lived in, but as it’s also one of Europe’s largest cities, as a conference venue it does have certain disadvantages: traffic, pollution and, of course, all those incredible but extremely distracting sights and attractions!
By heading out of the city to somewhere like the Skandinavia Country Club, which is located in Sestroretsk, just an hour’s drive from the city center, conference participants can avoid all those negative aspects, relish some fresh country air, and really focus on their work.
On top of that, a first-class venue outside the city like ours offers something that the inner city competition can’t provide — a unique ambience that puts you in the perfect mood for a conference. We have an excellent restaurant overlooking the Gulf of Finland and a huge outdoor pool that’s heated all year round, along with spa treatments, horse-riding and other outdoor activities that are also available in every season.
TITLE: Team Bonding — Out in the Country
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: On one thing, all those involved in organizing conferences are agreed: The conference should run like clockwork. But before any preparations can get underway, the first task is to decide on the location of the conference — whether in the city center or out of town.
“The choice of the location depends, first of all, on the nature of the event,” said Irina Usenko, president of the Northern Palmira congress and exhibition foundation. “For example, out-of-town facilities have some advantages for corporate events such as conferences, training sessions and educational seminars.
“The absence of outsiders unites personnel, and the remoteness from the hustle and bustle of the city makes participants focus,” she said.
At countryside retreats, the cultural and entertainment part of an event program can be supplemented by sport and wellness procedures.
Central facilities, on the other hand, have their own advantage of having convenient transportation for conference participants to the venue.
“It is not ideal to hold international high-status events out of town,” said Usenko. “The long journey required to get there leaves in doubt the participation of VIPs, and representatives of the government or business.”
“Even when transport is provided, there is always the risk of getting caught in a traffic jam, and additional expenses for transport are incurred.”
If transport is not provided, then public transport should be taken into account when choosing a location, and organizers should also pay attention to parking facilities for participants.
“The city center is appropriate for business events, especially if the conference takes place on a weekday,” said Anna Nesterenko, marketing and advertising manager at Azimut Hotel in St. Petersburg. “There is no need to book transfers to conference halls in the city center, and often there is no need for accommodation either.”
Organizing events in the center of St. Petersburg makes it possible to arrange an intensive cultural program, with visits to theaters, museums, palaces and other sights of the city, especially if foreign visitors to the city are among the conference participants.
“In my view, the most demand is for events that are held in St. Petersburg, as it is one of the most beautiful cities, with unique architecture and a rich cultural heritage,” said Usenko.
Competition is not limited to urban versus rural facilities — there is even international competition within the congress industry. Cities around the world compete for the right to host international conferences and symposiums. But St. Petersburg cannot attract large congresses with thousands of participants. Most conference halls in the city center are aimed at events for 100 to 300 participants. In general, these are facilities at educational establishments, conference rooms at hotels, and the halls of local palaces.
“If there are 500 or more participants, the number of possible venues is limited,” said Usenko. “And international congresses with more than 2,000 participants are not held in St. Petersburg. There are simply no venues for them.”
The city’s largest-scale events, such as the annual International Economic Forum, are held at the Lenexpo pavilions, which can host up to 2,800 guests.
“We also have the Ice Palace and Petersburg Sport and Concert Complex,” said Usenko. “But they belong to another trend. And large congresses mean large numbers of business tourists, who could improve the city’s economy.”
The main disadvantage of holding events in St. Petersburg is the high cost of accommodation and of renting out conference facilities.
“In summer, accommodation prices in St. Petersburg are high, and there is a lack of available rooms in hotels and conference halls, so organizers looking for a place and reasonable price ‘run’ out of town,” said Usenko.
The main advantage here is a broader range of event formats.
“It can be a one-day event, starting early in the morning and ending in the evening with a corporate dinner, or an event taking place over several days, when all the participants stay at an out-of-town hotel and follow a program that may include a conference or training session, corporate lunches and dinners, and entertainment,” said Kristina Sobinova, marketing and PR manager at Skandinavia Country Club in the town of Sestroretsk near St. Petersburg.
“Out-of-town conference halls are good for team-building; in this case the participants can not only work, but also relax,” said Azimut’s Nesterenko.
An event that is held outside the city provides participants with the opportunity for more “intimate interaction.”
“This happens because they are not distracted by the regular routine they have in the city, and can concentrate fully on the theme of the conference and on their colleagues,” said Sobinova. “Many conferences that last several days include entertainment, which can be used as part of a corporate incentive program.”
Out-of-town facilities allow the development of seasonal programs. For example, in summer, outdoor events can be organized, especially when the conference is part of a team-building program.
“Specifically summer events are active team-building exercises, as they are held mostly outside and include some active sports,” said Kristina Livshits, sales director at Skandinavia Country Club.
“Conferences and business events in the countryside are more popular among foreign or foreign-owned companies, as they tend to concentrate more on internal marketing and training their staff,” she said.
While the downside of this is that once again, transport is a time-consuming and costly problem, and visitors to the city also want to see some of the city’s sights during their trip, the State Congress Palace Complex has devised its own answer to these problems. Based in the renovated Konstantinovsky Palace in the suburb of Strelna, it possesses a full infrastructure for holding conferences and other business events. The complex offers both a range of conference halls and accommodation. At the same time, it is in itself a museum and state residence.
Its 120-hectare site can also host wellness and cultural programs, in which work can be combined with relaxation outside the city center. The park-and-palace ensembles of Peterhof and Pushkin are not far and can easily be reached without encountering traffic jams. To ensure problem-free transfer to and from the city center, the complex has its own berth, allowing high-profile guests to the city to be taken into the city center by boat.
TITLE: Shteyngart Picks On Collapsing U.S., Not Russia
AUTHOR: By Joy Neumeyer
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Author Gary Shteyngart, who was in Moscow promoting his new book “A Super Sad True Love Story,” is no stranger to mocking Russia’s foibles. The son of Soviet Jews who moved to the United States with his parents at age 7, Shteyngart has skewered Russian emigres in “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” and “Absurdistan.”
In his current book, however, he turns his satirical sights to his adopted homeland. In Shteyngart’s dystopian America, the Chinese yuan pegs the U.S. dollar, the unitary Bipartisan Party has replaced political factions, and everyone communicates through digital devices that broadcast their credit score and sexual ranking the moment they enter a room. In other words, an America that could be not too far away — perhaps, as Shteyngart puts it, “next Tuesday.”
While the United States has become the primary focus of his anxieties, Shteyngart grounds the book in familiar character types. Within this world of frantic self-exposure arises a love story between Lenny, a 38-year-old son of Soviet Jewish immigrants, and Eunice, a much-younger daughter of a South Korean family. Lenny, an “immigrant from the pre-digital generation,” finds in Eunice an outlet for his fear of mortality; Eunice, despite all her techno-savvy, shares his hunger for non-digital connection.
The other love story in the novel is between Lenny and his adopted city, New York. Lenny’s mixed feelings mirror Shteyngart’s own experiences as a cultural transplant. Shteyngart grew up reading Chekhov in his grandmother’s apartment in Leningrad, where he gazed admiringly at the Lenin statue lording over Moscow Square. Once, his grandmother challenged 5-year-old Gary (then Igor) to write his own novel. Paid for in chunks of cheese, “Lenin and His Magical Goose” became his first book.
However, New York was far removed from Lenin’s familiar shadow. In the days of Reagan and the “evil empire,” “it was terrible to be a kid in a shapka [fur hat] walking down the streets of Queens,” he said. His parents mandated that only Russian be spoken at home, making his shift to English a “very gradual” process.
Despite his eventual acclimation to U.S. society, Shteyngart occasionally grows wistful about the childhood he missed. “I always wished I had an education in Russia,” he said. “You know, in a Russian school. But my parents filled in nicely because they forced me to read in Russian.” His next book will be a collection of essays that will include reflections on his childhood in Russia. According to him, at age 38, he has no time to waste. “What’s the life expectancy for Russian men, 53? So I’d better write a memoir.”
Shteyngart’s parents forbade him to return to Russia in his youth, but he eventually made his way back in the mid-1990s. “Russia was at its lowest point, and I was at my lowest point,” working miserably as a paralegal after college, he recalled. But “as traumatizing as it was, it felt right.”
Ever since, Shteyngart has returned to Russia yearly to visit friends in St. Petersburg. His parents have no interest in accompanying him on his return visits. “They always say, ‘why don’t you go to Spain or something like that?’”
While Shteyngart feels at home in the more “provincial” St. Petersburg, Moscow, which he considers “a big, Slavic New York,” remains relatively unfamiliar. “I’m like ‘Babe, Pig in the City’ here,” he said. He isn’t particularly fond of some of the city’s recent architectural creations, most notably the Moskva-City business complex. “It looks like a big development in Omaha or something.”
But even Moscow holds the allure of unpredictability. “It’s still exciting. … You never know what will happen,” he said. He recounted a bomb scare that put an abrupt end to a reading he was scheduled to do on Wednesday at the Russian State University for the Humanities. Russian life provides ample grist for Shteyngart’s satirical mill: After only two days, such experiences had already filled the pages of his notebook.
But in the novel he’s currently promoting, his sights are squarely on the absurdities of another empire: the United States. “I figure that America’s in such free fall, there’s no need to write about the old collapse [of the Soviet Union],” he said. “I can take my pessimistic skills back to the U.S.A.”
Shteyngart is skeptical that he has much of a Russian audience. He recalled a review he’d once received in a Russian publication that ended in the word “îáèäíî” (offensive). He imagined that the headline for a review of “A Super Sad True Love Story” might read: “Balding traitor betrays motherland.”
But, “this book they may like because it’s about the collapse of the United States,” he added.
“It kind of hurt to write about the demise of the Soviet Union, but this hurts even more,” he said. “I own real estate in Manhattan.”
In a question-and-answer session that followed a reading at the American Center last Wednesday, Shteyngart expanded on what he sees as the United States’ cultural atrophy. In his view, electronic media have encouraged “the collapse of literary tradition,” with only an empty “culture of endless self-expression” rising to take its place. “Everyone wants to write, but no one wants to read each other’s books,” he said.
However, Shteyngart’s forecast for literary culture in the United States and the world at large isn’t completely dire. “My great hope is that things are cyclical,” with the current decline of books eventually giving way to a new generation of readers, he said. He’s confident that his voice has a place in this process. Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, he said Americans have been more curious than ever before to explore a world “that exists beyond Alaska, beyond what Sarah Palin can see from her house.”
Shteyngart is happy to bring his perspective as a cultural middleman to help Americans expand their horizons. After all, “who are you gonna trust to do that?” he asked. “A foreigner, or a nice, assimilated immigrant?”
TITLE: Konstantin Raikin’s Dostoevsky Offers a Luxurious Master Class
AUTHOR: By John Freedman
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The first word that comes to mind when I think of “Konstantin Raikin: An Evening with Dostoevsky” at Moscow’s Satirikon Theater is “luxury.”
It is hardly the only word; hundreds more will follow. But it is surely the most unexpected, which makes me want to start with it.
Konstantin Raikin. Alone on stage. Valery Fokin at the director’s table. Alexander Bakshi composing the music. Alexander Borovsky creating the environment, which, like Bakshi’s music, is so simple that it is pregnant with endless possibilities.
Now that is a luxurious picture for anyone who knows Russian theater.
But before we get to that, allow me an aside.
Years ago I sat next to Julie Christie at the Satirikon’s now-legendary production of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Ms. Christie was transfixed as she watched Raikin’s Gregor Samsa transform into an insect, clicking and clacking his tongue and wiggling his fingers and toes.
By the end of the show she was visibly moved and, in a way that only a professional colleague can be, deeply admiring of what she had witnessed.
I even got a brief note from her months later that ended with her asking me to “say hello to my friend, Konstantin” when next I would see him. She was still thinking of that show.
My point is this: Raikin is an unforgettable actor. Call it charisma. Call it control. Call it talent, genius or gift. Call it what you want. Raikin’s presence on a stage somehow realigns the molecular structure of the air in the hall. Everything becomes clearer and acquires a deeper meaning.
This, I repeat, is a rare luxury. There are a plethora of fine actors in Moscow. A long line of great performances. There is only one Konstantin Raikin.
There is, however, more than a flash of deja vu in “An Evening with Dostoevsky,” which is based on “Notes From Underground,” Fyodor Dostoevsky’s seminal novella about a “sick, spiteful man” tossing down gauntlets before anyone and everything he encounters.
Decades ago, Fokin staged this same work with Raikin under the title of “And I’ll Go, I’ll Go.” Moreover, it was the team of Fokin, Raikin and Bakshi that created that memorable “Metamorphosis.”
At one moment in the new show, Raikin even offers a visual quote from the Kafka adaptation. He utters a few words about being an insect and, with a sly smile on his face, wiggles his fingers like a bug just as he did 15 years ago.
Dostoevsky’s novella is a shattering attack on logic, complacency, pride and the way of the world.
Fokin’s new version of it takes an interesting tack by commencing with what we might call a couple of false starts.
The elegant Raikin, dressed in a sharp suit, walks on stage and begins reading from a book. That is, he begins reading silently. At least until the audience begins to laugh. He then evokes laughter again by reading out loud, as if to a room of pupils in an elementary school.
More laughter comes when Raikin digs back into his personal heritage — his father Arkady was arguably the most famous and beloved comic actor of the second half of the 20th century in the Soviet Union — and begins pulling faces and doing dance steps that turn Dostoevsky’s text into a screwball comic sketch.
Like the Underground Man he plays, Raikin taunts the audience, teases it, insults it and occasionally appeals to it.
The tone shifts in the second half when Raikin’s antihero encounters a meek prostitute, whom he subjects to cruel philosophical and psychological tirades. Raikin plays it as if he were suffering from a split personality. Only a female’s shadows shimmering on the wall suggest that this is more than a feverish nightmare playing itself out in the character’s troubled mind.
Shadows, in fact, play a major role in Fokin’s vision of this individual as one who suffers from acute inferiority and superiority complexes all at once. Light changes dwarf Raikin beneath monstrous shadows, or, on the contrary, shrink the traces he casts on the wall down to a nub. At other times, shadows get up and walk away, leaving the actor behind.
Through it all, Raikin is in complete command, whether he is playing the slapstick inherited from his father, or whether he is digging down to the tragic depths that Dostoevsky plumbed.
“An Evening with Dostoevsky” is full of riches — great acting meeting great literature. That is my idea of a luxurious evening.
“Konstantin Raikin: An Evening with Dostoevsky” (Konstantin Raikin: Vecher s Dostoevskim) plays Thursday, Friday, Tuesday, Oct. 22, 28 and 29 at 7 p.m. at Moscow’s Satirikon Theater, 8 Sheremetyevskaya Ulitsa. Metro Marina Roshcha. Tel. 495-698-7844, www.satirikon.ru. Running time:
1 hour, 50 minutes.
TITLE: In the Spotlight: Sobchak & Volochkova
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: This week, the former Bolshoi ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, sacked for being too “fat,” is interviewed by OK! magazine. She is a pretty entertaining character, what with her plastered-on makeup, her decision to wear three dresses at her wedding (pink, white and pistachio), and her ambition to be mayor of the Olympic town of Sochi — sadly foiled when she forgot to put her date of birth on the application form.
The interviewer here is the outspoken it-girl Ksenia Sobchak. The pair had previously not spoken to each other for 10 years, the magazine writes, after they quarreled over a man. The women pose in boxing gloves for photos for an interview billed as “provocative, open and emotional.”
Sobchak pulls no punches in her questions, which concentrate on Volochkova’s love life and the size of her boyfriends’ wallets. She frankly admits that she “does not understand” anything about ballet.
The only problem is that Sobchak’s insults bounce off Volochkova, whose brain seems to be as fluffy as her tutus.
Volochkova was laid off by the Bolshoi in 2003 amid rumors that she was too tall and heavy to be lifted by partners. The “fat ballerina” angle was irresistible to journalists, though she was never remotely overweight. Since then she has carved out a career doing limited ballet runs and solo shows. With her soppy, pastel image, she appeals to people who like ballet’s frillier side.
In her far more colorful love life, Volochkova has been married once but was previously linked to a string of oligarchs including playboy billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, best known for crashing his Ferrari in the south of France in 2006 with a nubile television presenter inside.
Sobchak zooms in on this apparent anomaly. “You’ve created a contradictory image. On the one hand, the ‘white swan’ that always makes me laugh and on the other hand a love affair with Kerimov,” she says. “You knew he was married, after all, but you had a relationship with him for years.”
“Yes, Suleiman Kerimov was in my life,” Volochkova confesses. She says Kerimov’s being married “did not stop him” and that they had a “wonderful” time.
Sobchak hints at Volochkova’s popularity among the moneyed class of men.
“Is it true that you used to have the Forbes rich list before you married and that beside each name was a tick, a minus sign or a question mark?” Sobchak asks. Volochkova just laughs and calls it a good idea.
Digging in the knife, Sobchak asks: “Why don’t you admit … that rich men helped you in your career and that sex wasn’t always for love?”
“That’s all in the past,” Volochkova responds, asking why Sobchak doesn’t want to know about her concerts for children.
In the worst insult, Sobchak, who has written a book of style tips, attacks Volochkova’s fashion sense. Why did she team a poncho with jeans decorated with crystals? she asks.
“They’re Roberto Cavalli,” Volochkova parries. “So much the worse,” Sobchak says. “No one wears Cavalli jeans any more.”
Only at the end does Sobchak explain why she hates Volochkova so much — that Volochkova stole her boyfriend, Vyacheslav Leibman, who is in construction. Sobchak says she found their text messages — which she quotes word for word — and train tickets for a trip. “I still keep them,” she adds menacingly.
Volochkova denies that she slept with Leibman, arguing that she did not fancy him and only went to dinner with him on Sobchak’s mother’s suggestion.
After letting off steam, Sobchak turns nicer. “I think you were sincere at some point,” she says. “And I think that one day you will throw off your white swan tutu and become a normal person.”
TITLE: Web Firms Pan Internet Bill
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Five leading Internet companies published an open letter on their web sites Thursday urging Russian lawmakers to exclude intellectual property rights infringement from their realm of responsibility, and proposing what they say are internationally accepted methods to address the problem.
A bill regulating the Internet, including property rights issues, is now under review by the Communications and Press Ministry.
The letter, which recommends that copyright holders resolve disputes directly with alleged individual violators, was signed by the senior management of Google Russia, Mail.Ru, Vkontakte, Yandex, and the merged Afisha and Rambler.
The question of who is responsible for intellectual property violations — Internet companies who hold content, or average users, who, unknowingly or on purpose, upload illegally obtained content, like video or audio files — is the chicken-or-egg dilemma of the dispute.
Internet companies argue that by prosecuting them for pirated content, legislators restrict the freedom of the web. Property rights owners say content providers are just trying to protect their business interests and should bear full responsibility for the fate of the content they store.
Since intellectual property rights protection is a particularly sore subject for Russia, the companies called for legislators to use practices and rules applied worldwide in resolving such disputes.
The Internet companies propose allowing the rights holder to dispute with the violator directly. They say when they get an infringement claim from a rights holder, they will freeze access to the object of dispute and inform the user of the complaint. If the user wants to dispute the allegation, he would then be put in contact with the rights holder via the Internet company, and the two parties can attempt to find a resolution, with the Internet company acting as an intermediary.
It is a reasonable suggestion that will eliminate the problem of identifying the alleged infringer, said Yelena Trusova, head of intellectual property at Goltsblat BLP.
The Internet companies said that as of now, “in Russia, copyright holders prefer to put responsibility not on those who upload or distribute content illegally,” but on the companies providing the platform.
“Meanwhile the following indisputable fact is being ignored: Companies that offer their services to millions of users have neither the rights, nor the technical capability to track every action of every user and evaluate its legality,” the letter said.
The five companies that signed the letter had been discussing the issue for some time, said Alla Zabrovskaya, a spokeswoman for Google Russia. The idea to write an open letter floated around for a few months before the final draft was published.
“For a complicated issue like this one, this is remarkably fast, given that we have to agree on every word,” Zabrovskaya told The St. Petersburg Times.
Internet companies argue that it would be virtually impossible for them to track down all the copyright infringers even if they hired “an army of a million administrators.”
“Twenty-four hours of video are uploaded every minute [on YouTube]. This is a huge amount of information — the equivalent of having to watch 150,000 feature films a week,” the Google Russia spokeswoman said.
But many people disagree, saying the Internet companies are just lazy and have the technical means and the money to inhibit copyright infringement.
TITLE: Letter
TEXT: In response to “Medvedev Meets Musicians, Makes Putin Crack” by Sergey Chernov, published on Oct. 15.
Dear Editor,
I have always believed your newspaper to be a model of impartiality. On Oct. 15, I read your article by Mr. Chernov and I realized that I have been very much mistaken. The article was about President Medvedev’s meeting with our country’s famous musicians. The article contains numerous distortions and inaccuracies.
Firstly, the article states that the musicians were “carefully selected” for the meeting. Interesting — by whom? As the owner of the club where the meeting took place, I invited my close friends — Grebenshchikov, Shakhrin and Kortnev. I didn’t receive any instructions about this from anyone. (Shevchuk, incidentally, is not a close friend of mine — why should I have invited him?) The band Mashina Vremeni (and myself in particular) are dubbed musicians who are “loyal to the Kremlin.” In that context, I would very much like to hear the name of one of our songs that would confirm this position. I think that if Mr. Chernov listened to what we have been recording in recent years, he would be very surprised, both in terms of our political orientation and our thoughts about what is happening in the country in general. I’m afraid that this is of no interest to him, however. Neither Grebenshchikov, Kortnev, Shakhrin, Ilya ‘Chort,’ nor Mashina Vremeni have taken part in pro-Kremlin concerts (we once took part in a concert dedicated to the end of the elections, but I wouldn’t describe this as a “pro-Kremlin” event — elections in any country are, after all, elections). I’m afraid that the article’s author may have confused us with the band Lube. The little-known musician Borzykin may believe us to be the “Kremlin pool’s rock musicians” — that is a matter for his conscience. But when it reads as the newspaper’s opinion, that is upsetting. Borzykin goes on: “Every question asked was put in a very gentle form, so they didn’t require serious answers.” Politeness, I believe, is absolutely normal here (or perhaps I should have been rude to the president?). But if you believe the freeing from prison of Bychkov (in the town of Nizhny Tagil) or the saving of the Khimki Forest (an issue that has yet to be resolved) are not serious issues, then I really don’t understand this.
Personally, I have never considered myself to be pro-Kremlin or anti-Kremlin, and I have always reserved the right to speak and to act as I see fit. I have no need to justify myself. And any way you look at it, the idea of the country’s president asking to visit the musicians whose music he grew up with doesn’t horrify me. It’s unfortunate that, because of the political situation, people try to pigeonhole us into two camps — one black, one white. And in so doing, they don’t take into account the actual state of affairs. It appears that they find it easier that way.
Andrei Makarevich, NOT A MEMBER of United Russia, Musician
TITLE: Wealthy Businessman Draws the Line at Sin
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Anyone who was single, in a sexual relationship and working in the business empire of Vasily Boiko-Veliky was forced to say their marriage vows before a clergyman last week or be fired.
“A holy man lives according to God’s rules, and people who follow religious rules are the best employees,” Boiko-Veliky, 51, said during an interview in his office, surrounded by icons and books on religion.
The multimillionaire, whose interests range from dairy products to nuclear power stations, ordered his employees who were “living in sin” to enter church marriage by Thursday, when Orthodox Christians celebrated a holiday known as Intercession of the Theotokos, or Pokrov.
People who were married at ZAGS, the state marriage registration office, were also told to retake their vows in a Russian Orthodox church.
Those who did not comply will be dismissed because their positions will be terminated, Boiko-Veliky said, making no attempt to hide the fact that the termination of the positions is only a pretext for what basically amounts to employee discrimination on religious grounds. He first warned his employees in August, giving them the two months’ notice required by law to terminate a position.
Boiko-Veliky, head of the Your Own Financial Caretaker investment company with a fortune estimated at $100 million by Finans magazine, has long identified himself as a Christian, claiming to have even been expelled from the Soviet-era youth organization Komsomol over his beliefs in 1984.
But his own business background is not squeaky clean, replete with greenmail accusations, shady privatization deals and even an ongoing criminal case that required him to pay a record bail of 50 million rubles ($1.7 million) to avoid detention — an event that Gazeta.ru said played a crucial role in fanning his religious ardor.
Public activists have lashed out at Boiko-Veliky over his church marriage demands, accusing him in the media — though not in court — of violating the rights of his employees.
Laying off an employee for religious reasons is a “pure violation of the Constitution, which guarantees religious freedom,” said Lyudmila Kuzenkova, the head of human leasing and industrial projects at Ventra Employment.
She expressed doubt that the two months’ notice would stand up in court. “A marriage is not part of the relationship with the employer. He or she can go to court and win back their job,” Kuzenkova said.
But Boiko-Veliky said most of his 6,000 workers are Orthodox believers and his methods are a “way to take care of employees.”
He also vowed to fire any female staffer who has an abortion. “We are not following anybody, but it would be easy to find out,” he said of any employee who got an abortion.
His spokesman said late Wednesday that about a dozen employees had gotten married since the ultimatum was made and no one had been fired yet.
Boiko-Veliky said he came up with the idea of mandatory church weddings for employees after this past summer’s devastating forest fires — which he called punishment from God.
“The heat was a punishment for our deeds and the deeds of our fathers,” said Boiko-Veliky, referring to decades of Communist rule when atheism was the state ideology.
He has gone so far in his anti-Communist crusade as to publish open letters to President Dmitry Medvedev in several newspapers asking him to remove Vladimir Lenin’s body from the mausoleum on Red Square and Soviet-era red stars from the Kremlin towers.
While Boiko-Veliky has received no reply from the Kremlin, he was able to present dairy goods produced by his company Ruzskoye Moloko to Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin earlier this month.
The Kremlin released photos of Medvedev and Putin sampling a basket of the Ruzskoye Moloko goods that Putin received during a visit to an agriculture expo in Moscow. Among the items is Ruzskoye Moloko milk, which Boiko-Veliky said uses no preservatives, and retails at about 70 rubles ($2.30) per liter, making it among the most expensive milk brands in Russia.
In his religious drive, Boiko-Veliky was also accused of waging a bizarre war against Communist supporters in the Ruza district of the Moscow region, where his dairy and other agricultural interests are located. He is the district’s major employer. In June, party supporters accused him of destroying a local statue of Lenin, which he called an “idol” and a “scarecrow.”
But his efforts failed in August when the Communists and the local administration restored the monument. His attempts to turn Ruza farmers employed by his company into devout believers also have been met with resistance.
One manager at the agricultural enterprise complained that the combine drivers declined to put stickers reading “For a Holy Russia!” on their harvesters, asking instead for stars — a popular Soviet-era symbol used to distinguish the best workers.
Moreover, as Boiko-Veliky has sought to turn Ruza, where he owns about 37,000 hectares, into a religious stronghold, local farmers have accused him of swindling them out of more than 3,600 hectares, prompting the criminal investigation, which is ongoing.
The entrepreneur, who spent 20 months in custody in 2007 and 2008 over the case, has said he wanted to make Ruza a “local Switzerland” by building a golf course and several hotels.
Boiko-Veliky denied wrongdoing in the interview, saying he paid reasonable sums to buy the land from its previous owners. “More than 60 rulings passed by arbitration courts have proven that I am right,” he said.
Several attempts to speak with Boiko-Veliky’s current and former employees were unsuccessful. Two former employees flat-out refused to discuss their ex-boss, saying the issue “was not interesting.”
A Ruza resident who has several friends working at Boiko-Veliky’s dairy plant said they have complained to him about being forced into the church marriages. “What else can they do if there is nothing to eat?” he said.
The businessman was born Vasily Boiko, but changed his last name to Boiko-Veliky (“Boiko the Great”) soon after posting bail and being released from detention in 2008. He said he did not want to be confused with Oleg Boiko, a wealthy entrepreneur involved in the casino business.
Boiko-Veliky started his business in the early 1990s when he got involved in the most trademark dealings of the era — buying up shares in key enterprises sold by the government in murky and often dubious privatization sales.
In particular, his company acquired a blocking state in the Bratsky aluminum plant in 1995, later reselling it to other investors.
Boiko-Veliky is also currently involved in the construction of several nuclear power plants across the country — which comes as no surprise considering that he has a background in nuclear physics and even worked for the state nuclear corporation Rosenergoatom in the early 2000s.
His opponents accuse him of amassing his fortune through greenmail, which BusinessDictionary.com defines as the practice of purchasing enough shares in a company to threaten a takeover, thereby forcing the target firm to buy those shares back at a premium in order to suspend the takeover. The Kompanya business magazine has called Boiko-Veliky a “Russian Kenneth Dart,” referring to the U.S. foam cup king who waged a long battle against Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky over the oil company’s assets in the 1990s.
But Boiko-Veliky insisted that he has always played by the rules, even in the 1990s.
“We have done everything honestly. We haven’t robbed or killed anyone,” he said.
He spoke with apparent humility about his own detention, but some bitterness shone through. “I took no offense against anyone, and I have forgiven all my offenders,” he said, echoing an Orthodox prayer. “But I realized that when you are placed in detention, everyone thinks that you have already been found guilty.”
Looking forward, he said all employees would soon be required to take religious lessons right in the office — a place with a relaxed atmosphere but with Orthodox icons dotting the walls and all female employees sporting modest long skirts.
“Every company has its own rules. Some need English. But we want people to know God’s rules,” Boiko-Veliky said.
TITLE: Super Typhoon Megi Devastates Philippines
AUTHOR: By Ted Aljibe
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BAGUIO, Philippines — Super Typhoon Megi smashed into the northern Philippines on Monday, causing landslides in mountainous areas, whipping up huge waves along the coast and killing at least one person.
Forecasters said Megi was the strongest storm to hit the Philippines since Typhoon Durian unleashed mudslides that buried entire towns and killed over 1,000 in 2006, and was likely the most powerful in the world this year.
It pummeled remote coastal areas of the northern Philippines with gusts of up to 260 kilometers an hour on Monday morning as it made landfall, tearing roofs off houses and bringing down power lines.
“We are marooned inside our home. We cannot go out. The winds and rain are very strong. Many trees are being uprooted or snapped in half,” Ernesto Macadangdang, a resident of Burgos town in Isabela province, told DZBB radio.
Megi’s force slowed marginally after making landfall with maximum wind gusts of 225 kilometers an hour, but it continued to dump huge amounts of rain across the northern half of the main island of Luzon throughout the afternoon.
The northeastern provinces of Isabela and Cagayan were the first to feel the typhoon’s fury on Monday morning.
“There are landslides in the mountains, we have swells, storm surges and big waves along the coastline, and now we have flood alerts,” chief weatherman Graciano Yumol said in an interview with GMA 7 television.
Isabela and other provinces in Megi’s direct path are mostly agricultural and fishing areas, with a few million residents who are well drilled in preparing for the many storms that hit each year.
Over 3,000 people had already been moved from their homes in the northern provinces as part of a “pre-emptive evacuation” of threatened areas, the civil defense office said.
Local television showed footage of debris, including fallen trees and electrical posts, littering the highway leading to Isabela’s capital just hours after Megi hit land.
Flights to and from northern Luzon were also suspended and ships there were told not to leave port.
Military, police and relief agencies had positioned supplies and rescue units to provide swift assistance to any affected areas, the civil defense office reported.
The government said the U.S. military had also offered six heavy lift helicopters to help if needed.
Authorities reported one death by late Monday afternoon, but with many areas remained cut off from communications, officials fear the death toll could rise.
Cagayan province governor Alvaro Antonio said rising waters had made many bridges impassable, adding that strong winds made it dangerous to venture out.
“You cannot travel. It is very dangerous even if you use a vehicle. The wind is very strong and the rains are getting stronger,” he said.
“We cannot as of yet give you a complete picture or assessment of the extent of the damage.”
The sole reported fatality was of a man who drowned in a river while fishing, the nation’s civil defense chief, Benito Ramos, told reporters.
The state weather bureau said Megi was expected to exit the Philippines’ western coast for the South China Sea by midnight (1800 GMT) Monday, but said storm alert signals remained hoisted over much of Luzon island.
More than 1,100 people were killed when Tropical Storm Ketsana and Typhoon Parma struck Manila and other parts of Luzon within a week of each other last year, triggering the worst flooding in recent history.
TITLE: China-Japan Row Simmers After Protests
AUTHOR: By Harumi Ozawa
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: TOKYO — Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan urged China on Monday to guarantee the safety of Japanese companies and citizens after a wave of rowdy weekend protests sparked by a bitter territorial row.
The war of words between the Asian giants, triggered by Japan’s arrest last month of a Chinese skipper in disputed waters, showed no sign of abating, with Japan’s foreign minister labeling Beijing’s reaction as “hysterical”.
Both nations have sought to arrange a summit meeting later this month to ease their worst spat in years, but weekend street protests in both countries highlighted how the issue has inflamed nationalist passions.
Thousands of mostly young Chinese protesters took to the streets of at least four cities to assert China’s claim to a disputed island chain where a maritime incident six weeks ago kicked off the heated diplomatic dispute.
In protests apparently organized on the Internet and via text messages following an anti-Chinese rally in Tokyo Saturday, thousands of protesters took to the streets, calling for a boycott of Japanese goods.
In several of the rallies, demonstrators smashed windows of Japanese businesses, including a Panasonic outlet and an Isetan department store, and attacked Japanese brand cars, news reports in Japan said.
The protests, which Chinese authorities struggled to contain, were the largest since 2005, when Japan’s then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi stoked fury by visiting the controversial Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo.
Asia’s two biggest economies and traditional rivals have been embroiled in the worst feud in years after Japan arrested a Chinese trawler captain near the disputed islands on September 8, although it later released him.
The uninhabited island chain, called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, lies between Japan’s Okinawa island and Taiwan, in a part of the East China Sea with rich fishing grounds and thought to contain energy deposits.
China has issued a barrage of protests and angry editorials in its state media, while also taking punitive economic steps, including halting the export of rare earth minerals crucial for high-tech products.
“I think the countermeasures China has taken are extremely hysterical,” said Japan’s Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara, known as a China hawk.
“As for the rare earth issue, the Chinese commerce ministry says they haven’t taken such a measure, but we still can’t conclude at this moment that shipments have returned to normal,” he told parliament.
Beijing and Tokyo have sought to repair their relationship, and possibly hold a summit later this month, but the weekend protests in both countries showed that the incident has reawakened historical animosities.
“The government has expressed its regret over the demonstrations against Japan,” Kan told parliament, adding that Tokyo has asked “that Japanese nationals and companies be protected”.
On a conciliatory note, he said Sino-Japanese ties are “a very important bilateral relationship” and that “both sides need to make efforts to handle the situation calmly so as to seek a strategic mutually beneficial relationship.”
Thousands marched on Saturday in the Chinese southwestern city of Chengdu, the central city of Henan and the ancient capital of Xian. On Sunday, demonstrators gathered in Mianyang in the southwest.
“About 10,000 youths marched down the street outside our shop,” a woman in Zhengzhou said. “They were shouting ‘Defend the Diaoyu islands’ and “Boycott Japanese goods,’” said the woman, who declined to give her name.
After the first protests Saturday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said: “It is understandable that some people expressed their outrage against the recent erroneous words and deeds on the Japanese side.”
But, apparently seeking to calm the situation, Ma added: “We maintain that patriotism should be expressed rationally and in line with law. We don’t agree with irrational actions that violate laws and regulations.”
Japanese media said the protests broke out, mostly in more lightly policed inland cities far from the capital, while political leaders were in Beijing for a communist party congress, possibly catching authorities by surprise.
TITLE: Iraq’s Maliki
Visits Iran For Dialogue On Leadership
AUTHOR: By Jay Deshmukh
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: TEHRAN — Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was in Tehran on Monday to garner support for his premiership bid, as his chief rival Iyad Allawi accused Iran of meddling in Baghdad’s political affairs.
Maliki flew to Tehran from Amman and went straight into a series of meetings, including with Iran’s first vice president Mohammad Reza Rahimi and with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to local media.
State news agency IRNA also reported that the Iraqi leader was later Monday headed to the holy city of Qom.
Maliki had been in Jordan on Sunday as part of his tour of Middle East capitals aimed at drumming up support as he fights to keep his job after an inconclusive March 7 general election.
His Shiite-led State of Law bloc finished a narrow second behind Allawi’s mainly Sunni-backed Iraqiya alliance but neither came close to securing a parliamentary majority in the vote.
Allawi’s Iraqiya bloc controls 91 of the 325 seats in the Iraqi parliament, two more than Maliki’s State of Law alliance.
TITLE: French
Pension Dispute Escalates
AUTHOR: By Rory Mulholland
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: PARIS — French truck drivers blocked roads as protests against pension reforms intensified Monday after the prime minister vowed to do whatever necessary to stop fuel supplies running out.
Truckers staged go-slows on motorways near Paris and several provincial cities, and drivers blocked access to goods supply depots and joined oil workers blocking fuel depots to defend their right to retire at 60.
The truckers’ action marked an escalation of the protests that have brought millions onto the streets in recent weeks. Another day of mass strikes and nationwide protest rallies is planned for Tuesday.
High school students joined the protest en masse last week, and on Monday riot police fired tear gas at masked youths who set a car on fire, smashed bus stops and threw stones outside a school in a Paris suburb.
The violence erupted after around 300 students tried to blockade the Joliot-Curie lycee in Nanterre, one of 261 schools across France that officials said were affected by the protests against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reforms.
Labor wants to force Sarkozy into backing down on his plan to raise the minimum retirement age to 62, which is in the final days of its journey through a parliament in which the right-wing leader enjoys a comfortable majority.
Sarkozy has staked his credibility on the reform package, but unions are hoping for a repeat of 1995, when then-president Jacques Chirac backed down on pension reform after a lengthy transport strike that paralyzed France.
Most French back the current protest movement, with a poll published Monday in the popular daily Le Parisien showing that 71 percent of those asked expressed either support for or sympathy with the anti-reform protests.
With 11 out of France’s 12 oil refineries shut down by strike action, and many fuel depots blocked by pickets, panic buying led to a 50 percent jump in petrol sales last week.
Around 1,500 petrol stations on the forecourts of French supermarkets had run out of fuel by Monday, their industry association said.
Some 4,500 of France’s 12,500 filling stations are attached to shopping centers, and they are the country’s busiest, supplying 60 percent of the fuel used by French motorists.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon had on Sunday sought to calm fears of petrol shortages, and he vowed to take any “necessary decisions” to ensure the country’s fuel supplies flowed.
“I will not let the French economy be choked by a blockade of fuel supplies,” Fillon told TF1 television.
“The right to strike is respected, but this is not the right to block access to fuel, or to deny non-striking workers access to their workplaces,” he said.
The premier did not say what those measures might be, but the threat did little to deter the truckers who on Monday joined oil workers who maintained their pickets or threw up new ones outside fuel depots.