SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1621 (82), Tuesday, October 26, 2010
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TITLE: Petersburg Connection In Listyev’s Murder Case
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Investigative journalists from the Fontanka.ru online newspaper owned by the Agency for Journalistic Investigations have alleged that there is a St. Petersburg connection in the 1995 murder of Vladislav Listyev, one of the most popular hosts in the history of Russian television.
Yevgeny Vyshenkov, the agency’s deputy director, told reporters on Monday that a member of the notorious St. Petersburg Tambov criminal group has claimed that the gang allegedly had a hand in Listyev’s murder. The source also speculated that it was the exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky who orchestrated the contract-style killing.
The last three years have seen arrests and convictions of prominent members of the Tambov criminal gang, including its alleged leader, Vladimir Barsukov (a.k.a.) Kumarin, who was seized in 2008.
The report published by Fontanka.ru, claims that Yury Kolchin, a member of the Tambov gang who is serving a prison term for the murder of State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova, a champion of human rights and prominent democratic politician, gave the investigation a key piece of information that could shed light on the Listyev killing. Kolchin told the investigation he witnessed a meeting between the St. Petersburg mobster Kostya Mogila (Kostya the Grave) and his debtor, businessman Eduard Kanimoto, at which the two discussed the killing, which was later allegedly given Kumarin’s blessing.
Vyshenkov said Kolchin also confessed that he had procured an apartment in Moscow for Listyev’s murderers who included Kanimoto himself, another gangster Vladislav Sulikovsky and the actual killer.
Officials have remained tight-lipped about the allegations made by the journalists. The St. Petersburg branch of the Investigative Committee of the General Prosecutor’s Office did not confirm the reports on Monday and refused to offer any comment on the case, saying that they were not involved in Listyev’s murder case at any stage.
The official investigation into the murder was suspended in 2007.
Vladislav Listyev was gunned down on the evening of March 1, 1995 in the courtyard of his apartment block, when he was returning home after recording a new episode of his popular talk-show “Chas Pik” (“Rush Hour”). The murderer shot the journalist in the head and the arm, killing Listyev instantly, and taking neither his wallet, nor any of his belongings.
Several months prior to the shooting, Listyev, who was at the time Russia’s most popular television host, was promoted to the position of general director of the ORT television channel. The channel had been privatized and was controled by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, now living in exile in London, who is wanted by the Russian authorities in connection with several investigations. The Kremlin has been seeking Berezovsky’s extradition since 2003 but its efforts have been fruitless.
Part of Listyev’s job as general director of the channel was to control the titanic flow of advertizing revenues, which was reportedly largely paid in cash to avoid taxation.
According to the Investigative Committee of the General Prosecutor’s Office, more than 2,000 witnesses, including the tycoon Berezovsky, were questioned during the course of the investigation.
Russian legislation stipulates that the statute of limitations for a murder case expires after 15 years, meaning after March 1 this year in the Listyev case. However, the Prosecutor’s Office said there are exceptions to the rule that would apply in this case if the killers and those who masterminded the crime are caught.
The murderers could be jailed if the investigation proves that the killing of the journalist was premeditated and directly connected with his professional activities.
TITLE: Putin Orders Transparency at Transneft
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Saturday ordered state-owned oil pipeline monopoly Transneft to improve transparency and disclose information about pricing policy and investment programs.
The move comes amid the mounting frustration of oil companies, who have to deal with the monopoly’s habit of increasing tariffs to cover project costs, and coincides with efforts by the Finance Ministry to seek tighter control over state-owned firms’ borrowing and investment plans.
“We are monitoring the situation … but here the issue is the next step … the possibility of some kind of control, to say, ‘look, guys, this is excessive,’” Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin told reporters on Saturday, on the sidelines of a G20 finance ministers meeting in South Korea, Reuters reported.
The order, which does not mention Transneft by name but refers to “natural monopolies supplying services of transportation of oil and derivative products through pipelines,” introduces standards of disclosure that will effectively force the firm to publicize information on its shipping tariffs, financial affairs, investment programs, services and spare shipping capacity.
The decree requests the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service and the Federal Tariffs Service to approve “the form, timing and frequency” of disclosures relating to pricing and market access within three months.
The government owns 78 percent of Transneft’s equity capital but 100 percent of the voting shares. The company pumps 93 percent of Russia’s crude oil and controls 60,000 kilometers of pipeline. Its growing transit tariffs are a cause of complaint by oil companies, who say opaque pricing policies prevent them from reliably forecasting long-term spending — a must for planning investment in new projects.
“That’s why the market will see it as positive news. Shareholders want higher dividends and higher transparency from Transneft,” said Valery Nesterov of Troika Dialog.
Repeated calls to Transneft went unanswered Sunday.
Oil companies have complained for many years that ongoing increases of transit tariffs are having a noticeable impact on their balance sheets. Transneft announced last month that it would raise fees by 9.9 percent in December but promised that they would remain at that level next year.
The company has borrowed extensively to fund new projects, including the East Siberian-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline to China, Japan and South Korea, and has raised transport tariffs to cover its costs. Other current projects include the second phase of the Baltic Pipeline System, or BTS-2, and a projected 60 billion ruble ($2 billion) pipeline in the Arctic that it plans to build with TNK-BP, LUKoil and Gazprom Neft.
In May, minority investor Alexei Navalny won a court order forcing police to investigate the undisclosed beneficiaries of Transneft’s charitable donations, which totaled nearly 15 billion rubles ($494 million) between 2005 and 2008.
Uncertainty about Transneft’s investments and how it plans to reduce debt makes its tariff policy “a very big question mark for Russian oil companies’ future cash flows and revenues,” Nesterov said.
“The principle of the tariffs is cost-plus, but you need to know what the costs are,” Nesterov said. “You can buy a kilometer of pipeline for $1 million, or you could spend double or triple that.”
Preferred shares in Transneft plummeted last week after the government made it clear that the company would not be part of the planned $59 billion dollar privatization program, even though the Finance Ministry included the company on the initial list in July.
The proposal to sell the government’s stake was backed by minority shareholders but loudly opposed by the company’s management. Transneft president Nikolai Tokarev said in September that privatizing would the “the worst thing” that could be done to the company.
Prosperity and Eastern Capital, two portfolio fund managers that together with commodity investment manager Vostok Nafta hold 21 percent of the company’s preferred shares, wrote to Putin in August urging him to push ahead with a sale of 25 percent of the company.
TITLE: St. Petersburg Faces Total Gridlock by 2011
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The number of cars in St. Petersburg may reach the critical level of 1.7 million by next year, making traffic movement inside the city almost impossible, experts say.
During the first half of this year, the number of vehicles in St. Petersburg grew by 5 percent, Mikhail Brodsky, a representative of City Hall, told Delovoi Peterburg newspaper.
People believe that the crisis is over and have begun taking out loans to buy cars again, Brodsky said.
However, if car loans continue to grow at such a rapid rate, it will lead to a 10-percent increase in the number of vehicles in the city to the critical level of 1.7 million, Brodsky said.
The highest volume of car sales in Russia since January 2009 were registered this June, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“Today, every third St. Petersburg resident has a car. When every second person in the city has a car, the traffic will grind to a halt,” Brodsky said.
Constant traffic jams in the city already mean that many people spend more than two hours driving to work or home instead of the 15 to 20 minutes it would take to cover the same distance without traffic jams.
Alexei Grigoryiev, 35, an office worker who works in the city center and lives 30 kilometers from the center, said it takes him at least two hours to drive to his office every morning and another two hours in the evening to drive home.
Brodsky appealed to the city’s Legislative Assembly on Friday with a proposal to introduce amendments to the federal law on roads.
Under existing law, regional authorities can limit or close traffic only to perform roadwork or in unfavorable weather conditions.
Brodsky said the city needs the authority to order a complete ban on parking and traffic on some streets, and the forced evacuation of private cars.
Analysts say that to solve the traffic problem in the city, City Hall needs to completely rethink its approach to the problem.
Alexander Kholodov, vice president of the St. Petersburg Committee for the Protection of Car Owners’ Rights social movement, said the city should organize “some unified structure that would fully deal with traffic in St. Petersburg.”
“Currently, the city has several structures that deal with separate aspects of the traffic in the city. One organization is in charge of traffic lights, another is responsible for the quality of the roads, and so on. Therefore it is very difficult to coordinate all the work when solving the problems of dense traffic,” Kholodov said.
“I also think that in order to solve traffic jam problems, St. Petersburg should adopt the so-called Japanese way — that is, to computerize the traffic flows in the city,” he said.
In Japan, in order to prevent traffic jams, a computer system sends information to electronic road signs to inform drivers about traffic on their route and directs them to less clogged routes. Computers also regulate the work of traffic lights, and can increase or decrease the intervals, depending on the situation on the roads, Kholodov said.
Denis Shubin, general director of AutoClub24, a local automobile club that offers different services to car owners, agreed that St. Petersburg needs a state organization that would work as a “traffic manager” to control all the traffic flows in the city.
“Our club has developed a whole set of measures that would help to combat traffic jams in the city, including the introduction of various kinds of additional parking lots,” said Shubin. “Our suggestions could really help the city to successfully combat the problem of traffic jams.”
Kholodov said that Moscow, which is constantly choked with enormous traffic jams, has also so far failed to come up with any outstandingly innovative solutions for the problem.
“Obviously, Moscow is trying to do a lot of things to ease the problem,” he said. “It has opened one-way streets, which are considered to be one of the options for solving the problem of traffic jams. They have built wider roads, many interchanges and a whole set of ring roads. None of those measures have yet produced any visible effect,” he added.
Kholodov said it was hard to say whether the figure of 1.7 million cars could be described as “critical” for St. Petersburg.
“Of course, the city is still putting quite a lot of effort into easing the road situation — they are building new interchanges and the ring road is approaching completion. So, quite possibly, the figure of 1.7 million may not be a critical one for today,” Kholodov said.
TITLE: City Hall Permits March Against Hatred
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: City Hall issued a permit on Saturday for the March Against Hatred, due to be held on Sunday, Oct. 31. Dedicated to scholar and hate crimes expert Nikolai Girenko, who was murdered by extremist nationalists in 2004, the event will be held on Oct. 31, his birthday. Girenko would have turned 70 this year.
Due to be held for the seventh time this year, the March Against Hatred demonstrates the solidarity of St. Petersburg citizens who don’t accept ideologies based on hatred, the organizers said in a statement.
According to organizer Alexander Vinnikov, a coordinator of “Russia Without Racism,” this year’s march will be directed against the proposed cancellation of Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code that penalizes public incitement of national and racial hatred.
The organizers will also call for a fair sentence in the trial of the Borovikov-Voyevodin gang charged with Girenko’s murder, among other murders, which is now in its final stages.
“We are concerned about the general situation surrounding ‘migrant phobia’ and the general rise of political xenophobia in this country,” Vinnikov said by phone Monday.
In Monday’s statement, however, the March Against Hatred organizers said that St. Petersburg’s law enforcement agencies have had considerable success in solving cases involving hate crimes, leading to a decrease in the number of murders linked to nationalism.
“That’s a fact, there have been far fewer murders [of this kind],” Vinnikov said.
Vinnikov said that the law enforcement agencies are more active and faster at solving hatred-based crimes than they were seven or eight years ago.
Nevertheless, Vinnikov noted that the attitude of society and the prosecutor’s office toward crimes committed by migrants remains an unsettling factor.
“There’s no doubt that the image of an enemy is being created, and not without help from the prosecutor’s office and the migration agency, through the manipulation of statistics,” he said.
“The media accept these figures. But you can’t give the number of crimes committed by migrants in absolute figures; you should only give it in relative terms. Then the picture looks totally different. It’s a matter of principle.”
“Another problem is that the real statistics are unknown; they are concealed year after year — not only from society, but also from experts,” he said.
The issue of Article 282 is currently a hotly debated subject, as it has been used indiscriminately against dissenting citizens rather than extreme nationalists.
In one of the most prominent cases, musician Savva Terentyev from the city of Syktyvkar received a one-year suspended prison sentence under the article for inciting hatred toward the police as a social group.
Vinnikov insisted that the article should be kept.
“It’s a very dangerous situation,” he said.
“The thing is that on the pretext of defending freedom of speech, they suggest that [the article] should simply be repealed.
“In our society when the press is totally restricted, if the people who profess xenophobia get an opportunity to preach this xenophobia without being punished en masse, there will be irreparable consequences very soon.”
The March Against Hatred, which is due to start by the Yubileiny Sports Complex at 12:30 p.m., will end with a meeting at Ploshchad Sakharova.
TITLE: Report: Luzhkov Applying for Visa To Great Britain
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Yury Luzhkov has applied for a British visa but has no plans to abandon Russia after being ousted as Moscow’s mayor last month amid a flurry of state television reports linking him and his wife to possible corruption, Lifenews.ru reported Monday.
Luzhkov wants to visit Britain with his billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina, but is not fleeing the country, the report said, citing a close friend, crooner and State Duma Deputy Iosif Kobzon.
Luzhkov, who has spent much of his time at his wife’s chalet in Austria after being fired by President Dmitry Medvedev, applied for a visa at the British Embassy in Moscow because visa rules bar him from applying in Austria, an unidentified senior City Hall official told the web site.
British Embassy spokesman James Barbour did not reply to an e-mail Monday.
TITLE: Gay Activist Alexeyev Sues Rights Activist Alexeyeva
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW— Gay rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev has sued veteran human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva for calling him a liar, Interfax reported Friday.
He said in the defamation lawsuit filed in the Moscow Presnensky District Court that Alexeyeva, who heads the Moscow Helsinki Group and is not related to Alexeyev, had accused him “of lying often” in an Aug. 31 interview with Ekho Moskvy radio, the report said.
Alexeyev wants Alexeyeva to apologize and retract her remarks.
Alexeyeva, 83, confirmed by telephone Friday that she had called Alexeyev a liar.
As an example, she said, Alexeyev had invited Alexei Mitrofanov, a former State Duma deputy with the Liberal Democratic Party and a gay rights supporter, against her wishes to a news conference supporting gay pride parades that she had provided the venue for several years ago. She said she had opposed Mitrofanov’s participation because he had repeatedly spoken negatively about human rights activists in the past.
Alexeyev, writing on his blog Friday, said he could not be held responsible because the news conference had been organized at his request by another gay rights activist, Alexei Davydov. He also said Davydov had assured him that Mitrofanov’s participation would not damage relations with the Moscow Helsinki Group.
Alexeyeva said her group has continued to promote gay rights since the news conference but decided to work through opposition activist Sergei Konstantinov instead of gay rights activists.
She became upset while discussing the lawsuit.
“Who is this Alexeyev to be suing me?” she said, adding that the conflict was “not worth a farthing” and hanging up.
In late August, Alexeyev urged the opposition to join forces with gay rights activists, but an opposition leader, Eduard Limonov, refused to comment on the notion at the time, calling it a “slippery” issue.
On Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights issued a landmark ruling on a complaint filed by Alexeyev, ordering Russian authorities to pay 29,510 euros ($41,090) for not allowing him to organize gay pride parades.
TITLE: American Film Festival To Open in Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Sophie Gaitzsch
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: After five years of success in Moscow, the American film festival Amfest will be arriving in St. Petersburg for the first time this weekend. From Thursday to Monday, eight U.S. fiction and documentary films shot in 2008, 2009 or 2010 will be screened at Dom Kino, all of them in English with Russian subtitles.
“We will show the independent part of the program that we had at the beginning of October in Moscow, where about a third of the program consisted of mainstream movies,” said Alexei Layfurov, programming director of the festival’s organizer, Coolconnections. “It is composed of films that we spotted at international festivals and that have never been shown in Russia before,” added Layfurov.
Amfest has indeed set itself a demanding mission: To give Russian audiences the opportunity to acquire a more complete impression of American filmmaking than that provided by the standard selection offered at multiplexes. According to the Amfest web site, American cinema in Russia is overwhelmingly associated with Hollywood blockbusters that either do not reflect everyday American life at all or do so only in a very tenuous manner.
“All of the movies [on the program] are very different and represent good examples of today’s American independent cinema. To my mind, all eight films are very interesting and of equally high quality. I can’t recommend one in particular. I would really advise my friends to go and see any of them,” said Layfurov. “But if I had to pick a highlight, it would be ‘Surveillance,’ a very well made thriller by David Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer Chambers Lynch.”
The festival will open on Thursday night with Werner Herzog’s drama “My Son, My Son, What Have You Done,” starring Willem Dafoe and Chloe Sevigny, based on a real life murder committed in San Diego in 1979. The first evening will continue with “Surveillance,” the story of two FBI agents attempting to resolve a series of murders occurring in a small town. The film, starring Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond, won the best movie award at the Sitges Catalonian International Film Festival two years ago.
Over the following days, St. Petersburg film fans will have the opportunity to see “The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights,” a documentary film about the 2007 Canada Tour of American rock duo The White Stripes, along with four other feature films. The festival will close on Monday evening with a screening of “Teenage Paparazzo,” a documentary film examining the relationship between celebrity and society that was a “big hit at various festivals around the world,” according to Layfurov.
“The festival in Moscow went pretty well this year. We attracted a lot of people and were able to maintain 80 percent attendance in the screening rooms. St. Petersburg will be an experiment in the sense that we will not offer any mainstream movies. We don’t know how St. Petersburgers will react to such a program as independent cinema is not very popular in Russia. But we are looking forward to seeing how it works out,” concluded Layfurov.
Amfest runs at Dom Kino,
Karavannaya Ul. 12. Tel: 314-56-14, 314-06-38
For a full program,
visit www.amfest.ru/2010/en/piter
TITLE: Hundreds Demand Putin’s Ouster
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky and Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A crowd of up to 2,000 gathered on Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Saturday to demand the ouster of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Cabinet — just as the State Duma tightened the screws on legislation on protests.
The rally, staged two days after Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin took office, became one of the largest political rallies to be sanctioned by city authorities in recent years.
“Demands for Putin’s resignation have been voiced at rallies before, but this time it was the main slogan,” rights champion Lev Ponomaryov, who took part in the event, told The St. Petersburg Times on Sunday.
The protesters accused Putin’s government of having a poor record on social policies and preserving political freedoms, as well as failing to prevent last summer’s devastating wildfires. They also demanded the release of jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev.
Chess champion-turned-opposition politician Garry Kasparov and Khimki forest defender Yevgenia Chirikova were among the speakers at the rally, which was staged by a recently created union of Kasparov’s United Civil Front and several leftist public groups.
Moscow police said only 300 people took part in the rally, RIA-Novosti reported. But photos from the site challenged the figure, and Ponomaryov put the number of participants at between 1,500 and 2,000.
He also said he suspected that the rally had been authorized because the new mayor was seeking a temporary “compromise” that would allow him to judge the strength of the opposition.
“This was their wait-and-see moment. They wanted to see how many people would come in order to decide what further actions to take,” Ponomaryov said about the city authorities.
Sobyanin made no public comments about the rally while taking a Saturday tour of Moscow’s construction sites — all of them at a considerable distance from Pushkin Square.
Sobyanin upheld the tradition of his predecessor, Yury Luzhkov, in using the weekend to visit construction sites, although media broke with tradition by not following him on his trip.
Analysts say Sobyanin is likely to wait several months before gradually implementing a hard-line policy on public protests in line with the Kremlin’s general negative stance on the opposition.
Paving the way for possible crackdowns, the State Duma approved in a key second reading Friday a bill that would ban individuals convicted of administrative offenses from staging rallies for a year, Interfax reported.
The list of administrative offenses includes speeding, traveling on public transportation without a ticket and minor fire safety violations, as well as a broad range of offenses related to elections and organizing public gatherings.
The bill also allows authorities to change rally venues over traffic safety concerns, Interfax said.
The draft approved Friday is more lenient to protesters than the initial version passed in a first reading in July, bill co-author Sergei Markov of United Russia said by telephone.
The second draft excludes legal bodies, including political parties, convicted of administrative offenses from the rally ban, limiting it to individuals.
It also allows rally organizers to inform the public about their plans before local authorities even approve the date and place of the event.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Flights Canceled
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Finnish airlines had to cancel about 20 flights Monday due to a strike by Finnish engine mechanics, though flights between St. Petersburg and the neighboring Finnish capital Helsinki were unaffected.
On Tuesday up to half of all flights by Finnish airlines were expected to be canceled, and on Wednesday all Finnish flights may be paralyzed, Fontanka.ru reported.
If the strike continues, Finnair, Finncomm and Blue1 may cancel all their flights.
The strike is not however expected to affect the work of other foreign airlines.
About 900 motor mechanics are taking part in the strike to protest labor conditions, including reduced working hours for elderly workers. The trade union is also demanding that in the event of staff redundancies, temporary workers should be fired before permanent staff.
Israeli Consulate
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The government has approved the proposal of the Foreign Affairs Ministry to sign an agreement with Israel on the opening of an Israeli Consulate General in St. Petersburg, RIA Novosti reported.
According to a document signed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the consulate will provide services for St. Petersburg, the republics of Karelia and Komi, the Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Kaliningrad, Leningrad, Murmansk, Novgorod and Pskov oblasts, and the Nenets autonomous region.
Petersburg Tennis Open
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The 16th St. Petersburg Open international tennis tournament opened Monday and is set to run through Oct. 31.
Daily matches will take place at the city’s Peterburgsky Sports and Concert Complex (SKK) for the duration of the tournament.
The list of participants includes more than 20 tennis players from countries including Russia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Argentina, Germany and the U.S.
Witness Protection
MOSCOW (SPT) — Police Colonel Oleg Zimin, who headed the Interior Ministry’s witness protection department, has been fired by President Dmitry Medvedev, Interfax reported Friday, adding that no replacement has been named.
The Kremlin decree did not elaborate on the reasons for the dismissal, but an unidentified police official told Interfax that Zimin, 42, a veteran of many armed conflicts, was sacked because he had never managed to get along with the Interior Ministry’s top brass since being appointed to the job in 2008.
Zimin said last year that about 5 million witnesses nationwide received threats because of their testimony the previous year and more than 700 were given police protection.
Cup Bid Ditched
MOSCOW (SPT) — Russia officially pulled out of the race to host the 2022 World Cup finals Friday, with the aim of solely concentrating on its bid for 2018, the country’s bid committee said, Reuters reported.
Russia and England are bidding to stage the 2018 World Cup along with joint bids from Spain/Portugal and Belgium/Netherlands.
Tigers to Die Out?
STOCKHOLM (AP) — The world’s tiger population — including Amur tigers found in Russia — could soon be extinct because of poaching, shrinking habitats and the use of tiger parts in Eastern medicine, environmental experts warned Friday.
World Wildlife spokeswoman Marie von Zeipel said at a seminar in Stockholm that there are only 3,200 tigers in the wild, with the population shrinking 97 percent in 100 years.
Russia is holding a global tiger summit next month. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will host the four-day meeting in St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Six Extra Years Sought for Khodorkovsky
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Prosecutors on Friday demanded that jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky be imprisoned for an additional six years if convicted in a politically charged second trial, which is seen as a test of President Dmitry Medvedev’s commitment to the rule of law, Reuters reported.
Supporters have cast both trials as part of a Kremlin-driven campaign of revenge for perceived political, economic and personal challenges to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was president at the time of Khodorkovsky’s arrest and just this month suggested that there should be no leniency in his case.
Prosecutors on Friday asked for a 14-year prison sentence but said it should include the eight-year term that Khodorkovsky is serving, which will end in October 2011. Defense lawyers said the requested sentence was one year short of the maximum allowed.
With time served, the sentence could keep Khodorkovsky in jail until 2017, at the latest. But early release could see him out as soon as 2012, the year of the next presidential election.
Outside the courthouse, defense lawyer Konstantin Rivkin said the proposed sentence, although less than the maximum, was nothing to celebrate. “Yes, it could have been worse, but not by much,” he said. “Trying to put an innocent man away for 14 years is not my idea of leniency.”
Prosecutors made the request as they wrapped up closing arguments in the second trial of Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev.
Khodorkovsky, dressed in black and sitting in a bulletproof-glass defendant’s cage with Lebedev in the courtroom, listened attentively to prosecutor Valery Lakhtin’s statement.
Afterward, Khodorkovsky was marched smiling out of the courtroom in handcuffs. Asked by an Associated Press reporter about the proposed term, he said wryly, “It’s fine,” and shrugged.
His defense lawyers are to begin their closing arguments this week.
Once Russia’s richest man, Khodorkovsky, 47, has one year left to serve in an eight-year sentence imposed after a high-profile fraud and tax evasion trial that tarnished the country’s image during Putin’s eight-year presidency.
In the second trial, which has been grinding on in a drab Moscow courtroom for more than 18 months, Khodorkovsky stands accused of stealing billions of dollars’ worth of oil from Yukos production subsidiaries from 1998 to 2003.
When first announced, the charges carried a maximum of 22 1/2 years, but a retroactive change in sentencing rules for economic crimes introduced by President Dmitry Medvedev earlier this year reduced the maximum sentence for the charges to 15 years, prosecutors said. Earlier in October, they corrected downward the amount of oil Khodorkovsky is accused of stealing, blaming poor arithmetic and lack of evidence for their mistake.
Defense lawyer Vadim Klyuvgant said the law obliged the judge to count Khodorkovsky’s current eight-year prison term against any new sentence. “The judge is obliged to take into account the sentence from the first trial,” Klyuvgant said by telephone. “That is what the law says, but there is no law here.”
In the courtroom last week, Judge Viktor Danilkin, who is expected to reach a verdict in the coming weeks, appeared more sympathetic than ever toward the defense, whose supporters crowded the hall.
At previous hearings, Danilkin would often yell for order or eject those who laughed at the prosecutor’s remarks. But this time he laughed along. When prosecutor Lakhtin told the court not to be fooled by the “conniving” defendant’s ability to “act like a normal person,” the judge laughed so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes.
(SPT, AP)
TITLE: President Medvedev Tweets Happy Birthday
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev made a rare personal response with his Twitter microblogging account on Friday, answering a young student’s request for birthday wishes in a chipper tone at about 1 a.m.
It was one of few occasions that Medvedev has sent a Twitter message to a private citizen despite the thousands of messages directed toward him since he signed up for the service in June.
Yulia Oleinik, who was turning 17, asked Medvedev for the birthday greetings shortly after midnight on Friday, when she sent a message to Medvedev’s Twitter handle, @KremlinRussia. “Dmitry Anatolyevich!!! It’s my birthday today. Wish me a happy birthday! Yulia))).”
An answer followed about one hour later: “Sure, of course, Yulia! Happy birthday! I wish you happiness)))”
The emoticon “)” is the Russian version of the Western smiley face.
Oleinik, who goes by @oleynik_julia on Twitter and writes on Twitter and on her LiveJournal blog that she is a student in Moscow State University’s journalism department, thanked Medvedev later that morning.
She then typed: “Medvedev congratulated me on Twitter! It’s crazy. I didn’t expect such a great start to the day).”
Medvedev has a so-called verified account with the U.S.-based message service. Though a staffer could have made the “tweets” on his behalf, it is his personal account.
Oleinik did not respond to requests for comment from The St. Petersburg Times.
Her blog does not reveal her political interests or what she thinks of the president. She does, however, follow presidential aide Arkady Dvorkovich on Twitter.
A Kremlin spokeswoman said Friday that she could not explain why Medvedev replied to Oleinik’s message.
“Apparently, he decided to do so. I don’t think there is any official explanation for it,” the spokeswoman said on customary condition of anonymity.
Medvedev has more than 100,000 followers on his Russian-language Twitter account, as well as more than 50,000 for his English-language page, which is a translation of his Russian account.
Twitter shows countless messages addressed to @KremlinRussia, and the president has typed out nearly 300 tweets in Russian since the summer, when he opened his accounts at Twitter’s headquarters during an official trip to the United States.
But Medvedev usually reserves direct messages for officials, such as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger during his visit to Moscow earlier this month. In another instance, he reminded Kirov Governor Nikita Belykh following a Kremlin session on Aug. 31 that using Twitter during government meetings was distracting.
TITLE: UN Study: Poverty Rate Down
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The number of impoverished Russians has decreased in recent years and life expectancy has grown, but 14 percent of the populace is still living below the poverty line and gender discrimination remains rampant, a new UN study says.
The report, titled “The National Human Development Report in Russia 2010” and released by the United Nations Development Program on Friday, examines the country’s progress toward Millennium Development Goals — a set of social goals that all UN members have pledged to achieve by 2015.
“There is considerable progress in poverty reduction and an increase in average life expectancy,” UNDP representative Frode Mauring said at the report’s presentation.
The poverty rate has decreased by 3.7 percent from 2005 to 2009, and the monthly minimum wage reached 5,000 rubles ($164) last year compared with only 1,200 rubles in 2000. Male life expectancy grew from 58.8 years in 2005 to 61.8 in 2008, the report said. Corresponding figures for women grew from 72.3 to 74.1 years over the same period.
TITLE: ‘Margarine Oligarch’ Is Putin’s New Chief of Staff
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin quickly filled the vacancy created by Sergei Sobyanin’s move to City Hall on Thursday by picking State Duma Deputy Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin as his new chief of staff.
Volodin, a staunch Putin ally nicknamed the “margarine oligarch” by the media for his interests in vegetable oil factories, was also appointed as a deputy prime minister by President Dmitry Medvedev, thus acquiring similar political weight to Sobyanin.
While the prime minister appoints his chief of staff alone, the Constitution stipulates that the president appoints the prime minister and his deputies.
Medvedev told Volodin during a meeting at the Gorki presidential residence that he would also succeed Sobyanin as deputy head in the Kremlin’s Modernization Commission, according to a transcript of the talks published on the Kremlin web site.
Analysts have said it would be hard to find a suitable successor to Sobyanin, who served as Putin’s chief of staff for five years, first in the Kremlin and then at the White House. On Thursday, some said Volodin was a poor match for the job.
“This is a very bad choice — he has no experience in managing a chain of command,” said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Information, a think tank.
Unlike Sobyanin, Volodin is a politician, not an apparatchik, Mukhin said.
But Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the new chief of staff shared his predecessor’s credentials.
“It was expected that [Sobyanin’s successor] would come from Putin’s clan — loyal, disciplined and uncharismatic — and Volodin is obviously seen to possess these qualifications,” she said.
Volodin is seen as crucial in bringing the White House closer to United Russia before Duma elections next year and the presidential vote in 2012.
The chief of staff’s job is to see that orders by both the president and the government are carried out — notably in the regions.
He also oversees the state civil service and personnel decisions and the preparation of the prime minister’s speeches and statements, according to the job description published on the government’s web site.
The chief of staff has seven deputies, including influential figures like Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yury Ushakov, and his spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Anastasia Rakova, a deputy overseeing the government’s legal department, has been tipped as a likely candidate to follow Sobyanin to City Hall. Asked if more White House staff changes could be expected, Peskov said by telephone Thursday that it was too early to say.
Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panaroma think tank, said Volodin’s appointment was at best a sign of a compromise between two powerful government factions.
“He is neither part of the hardliners around [Deputy Prime Minister Igor] Sechin nor of the group that supports Medvedev,” Pribylovsky said.
At worst, he said, the appointment could mean that the battle between the two factions will go on.
Volodin, 46, joined a large pool of candidates only late Wednesday when he was mentioned by the national media, and many analysts had pointed to Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin as the most able candidate.
Mukhin and Pribylovsky said Naryshkin had been left in the Kremlin to keep an eye on Medvedev.
Volodin served as deputy governor of his native Saratov region before he was elected to the Duma in 1999 with the Fatherland-All Russia party, which two years later merged with Unity to form United Russia.
He was re-elected in 2003 and 2007 and has been a deputy Duma speaker since January 2004.
He has also served as first secretary of United Russia since 2005, and the post on Thursday was passed to Duma Deputy Sergei Neverov, who had served as his first deputy, the party said in a statement.
Volodin, who is married and has a teenage daughter, is among the wealthiest Duma deputies, declaring a 2009 income of about 360 million rubles ($11.7 million).
His official biography on the Edinros.ru party web site does not mention any business activities, but national media reports compiled by Pribylovsky on Thursday identified him as a co-owner of the Solnechniye Produkty holding, which consists of vegetable oil factories in Moscow and Saratov.
Because these plants mainly produce margarine and mayonnaise, Volodin has been nicknamed the “margarine oligarch” by national media. In 2006, Finans magazine ranked him as the country’s 351st richest person, with an estimated wealth of $95 million.
TITLE: New Moscow Mayor Sobyanin Promises to Revise City Spending
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — New Mayor Sergei Sobyanin on Thursday promised to invest city funds into social issues rather than private companies and hinted that he would revise the Genplan, a disputed plan for the city’s development through 2025.
Sobyanin, known for keeping a low public profile, did not speak to reporters before or after his swift confirmation as mayor by the Moscow City Duma and his inauguration immediately afterward.
Speaking before the City Duma vote, Sobyanin promised to focus on social issues, health care, education, transportation, construction, and fighting red tape and corruption.
He read his speech from a paper, stumbling a few times, but took the deputies’ questions confidently and without pausing for feedback.
In particular, he told the deputies that the Genplan, a brainchild of former Mayor Yury Luzhkov, is “not untouchable” and may be changed in accordance with the city’s current needs, Interfax reported. But he said the plan, which critics claim ignores the needs of ordinary Muscovites, has a “pretty solid foundation.”
Sobyanin also said the city budget needed a “revision” to shift the focus from investments in private companies to financing social issues, education and health care.
But City Duma Speaker Vladimir Platonov later told reporters that he was “sure” that Sobyanin “would not revise the budget but study it.”
Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin presented Sobyanin to the deputies, telling them that “in all his previous jobs Sobyanin showed qualities of an organizer, a manager who can achieve goals he sets … and a leader who can unite people around him.”
All 32 United Russia deputies voted for Sobyanin, while two Communists voted against him. One of the City Duma’s three-strong Communist faction was sick Thursday.
“Let’s work together for the benefit of Muscovites,” Sobyanin said after the vote.
Platonov told The St. Petersburg Times on the sidelines of the vote that he has known Sobyanin since 1996 when they both served as Federation Council senators on the same committee. He called him a “high-class professional” who is “progressive, even-tempered and makes balanced decisions.”
Medvedev offered his congratulations after Sobyanin took the oath of office at a City Hall ceremony attended by city officials, city lawmakers, local dignitaries and religious leaders.
TITLE: Wheat Export Ban Extended to July 1
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia, once the world’s third-biggest wheat exporter, has extended a ban on overseas sales of grain until July 1 to ensure domestic supply after drought damaged crops, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Friday, Bloomberg reported.
More than one-third of the country’s grain crop was ruined by the worst drought in at least a half-century, prompting the government to impose a grain-export ban Aug. 15. It was originally scheduled to be reviewed Dec. 31, Bloomberg reported.
“The stability of our internal food market and the feed for livestock must be the priority,” Putin said during a government meeting in Rostov-on-Don, which was broadcast on state television. He signed the extension Thursday, he said.
Wheat prices in Chicago have soared since June as Russia’s drought, flooding in Canada and parched fields in Kazakhstan and Europe decimated crops. Ukraine, once the world’s biggest barley exporter, introduced export quotas this month after a smaller-than-expected harvest.
Russian farmers reaped about 60 million tons of grain this year, and the country has enough supply to meet domestic demand, Putin said. Winter grain plantings totaled about 13.2 million hectares as of Oct. 20, almost 4 million hectares less than a year earlier, the prime minister said.
Winter grain plantings are almost 30 percent below forecasts, and “this lag will be impossible to overcome,” First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov said at Friday’s meeting.
Zubkov also warned regional leaders not to ban grain from leaving their regions, saying the government would investigate each such case individually.
“In certain regions, there have been bans on removing wheat under the pretext of phytosanitary requirements. In fact, these are attempts to hold back the grain — ‘just in case,’” Zubkov said, according to comments posted on the government web site. “That shouldn’t happen. Regional leaders need to sort this matter out, and the government will deal with each individual case.”
The first deputy prime minister also urged Russian Railways to pay close attention to grain companies’ requests for shipments within the country.
Russian wheat exports are forecast to slump to 3.5 million tons in the 12 months ending in June 2011, compared with 18.56 million tons a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Wheat futures rebounded from a two-week low after the announcement.
Prolonging the shipment ban is “a little psychologically supportive” to prices, Shawn McCambridge, senior grain analyst for Prudential Bache Commodities, told Bloomberg. “Most people are not expecting Russia even to consider coming back in until after next year’s harvest,” he said.
Wheat futures for December delivery climbed 2 cents, or 0.3 percent, to settle at $6.71 a bushel early Friday afternoon on the Chicago Board of Trade. Futures still dropped 4.8 percent for the week, the second straight weekly decline.
TITLE: China, EU Complicate Talks on Turkmen Gas
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Turkmenistan and Russia bolstered their natural gas relationship on Friday during a visit by President Dmitry Medvedev to his counterpart Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, with both sides hedging their bets as the Chinese market grows and the European one shrinks.
Berdymukhammedov was clear in his welcoming comments to Medvedev, in the port city of Turkmenbashi, that his country would like Russia to consider taking more gas.
“We are ready to expand the volume of [gas] exports,” he said, according to the Kremlin’s web site.
Medvedev allowed his energy tsar, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, to respond in detail. Sechin said Gazprom may consider upping its purchase of Turkmen gas from the current 10 billion to 12 billion cubic meters.
“These volumes will stay … and, if opportunity permits, Gazprom will take into consideration our partner’s request. But this is a matter of corporate agreements,” Sechin said.
The current volume is still about 20 percent of what Russia was buying from Turkmenistan prior to the April 2009 pipeline explosion that halted deliveries for nine months and highlighted disputes about volume and pricing. By December 2009, Turkmenistan had commissioned a new pipeline and rerouted to China the volume of gas that Russia was no longer taking — while Russia carried on with negotiations with China to become a major gas supplier.
Sechin described the differences between the two countries’ approach to the Chinese gas market.
Gazprom is “working on different terms, since Chinese companies are lending money to Turkmenistan and participating in pipeline construction there. But we aren’t competing,” he said.
Analysts say Sechin’s comments were focused much more on politics than business.
Sechin reconfirmed Russia’s interest in a project aimed at delivering Turkmen gas via Afghanistan and Pakistan to India, known as TAPI.
“Gazprom may participate in this project in any role: builder, designer, partner or other,” Sechin told reporters, Bloomberg reported.
Sechin, who is also Rosneft’s chairman, said the company’s participation in energy exploration on Turkmenistan’s Caspian shelf is being discussed.
“And now … we are talking about Rosneft joining the project. That could reduce the amount of time needed to bring the field on-stream by a couple of years,” he said.
Sechin also took a shot at Nabucco, the pipeline planned to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian gas, which is in competition with the Russian-driven South Stream project.
“Taking into account the estimates by the Turkmen side and European experts, as well as world experts, the current market situation on the gas track allows us to say, and I am saying this without sarcasm, that Nabucco has no future,” he said.
Turkmenistan’s role in the Nabucco project was called into doubt earlier this month when the German utility responsible for planning said it is in talks to get gas from northern Iraq and Azerbaijan, and “if those materialize, there will be no room for Turkmen gas anymore,” Bloomberg reported.
Nabucco’s spokesman Christian Dolezal declined to react to Sechin’s comment, but said in a statement to The St. Petersburg Times that “the project will be realized … the financing is on track,” with 4 billion euros ($5.6 billion) lined up, environmental and social impact studies underway, country support agreements to be signed this year and gas supply contracts under negotiation.
Analysts are less certain about Nabucco’s future and say that South Stream definitely has a speed advantage.
“I would not state with 100 percent certainty that attempts to move ahead with the Nabucco project are devoid of perspectives, but it will definitely go forward slower than Russia’s South Stream,” Valery Nesterov, a Troika Dialog oil and gas analyst, told The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Energy Firms Make Deal Over Capacity
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Several major energy companies signed the first capacity supply agreements Thursday in a ceremony that started laying the groundwork for future investment into the Russian energy industry.
Siberian Coal Energy Company, known as SUEK, along with OKG-6, Fortum, Inter RAO and others signed the agreements with the industry’s self-regulating groups such as the Market Council.
The agreements offer the firms involved a guaranteed rate of return on the energy they produce with their new plants for at least 10 years. Other strong economic incentives include preferential treatment at long-term capacity auctions.
In exchange, the signatory companies will be expected to invest in a range of fossil fuel-fired generating assets to fixed deadlines over the next five to seven years, amounting to a generating capacity of some 25 gigawatts.
Companies involved and the regulating authorities have trumpeted the agreements, which should all be signed by December, as a milestone in the government’s strategy of harnessing private firms to expand the country’s insufficient power generating capacity.
“I can say that these signings are quite an epoch-making event in the Russian legal system, the Russian energy industry and the Russian economy,” Dmitry Ponomaryov, the Market Council chief executive, said at the signing ceremony in reference to the entire signing campaign.
Analysts have welcomed the introduction of the new agreements for bringing clarity to both generators and investors.
“It draws a line under a substantial area of uncertainty for the power producing companies,” said Derek Weaving, a utilities analyst at Renaissance Capital. “Companies now know what they have to build and when.”
When the energy monopoly Unified Energy Systems was broken up and privatized in 2007, buyers took on commitments to expand generating capacity because the government was concerned by squeezes on energy supply at the height of the pre-crisis economic boom.
But the incentive for the expansion was based on the assumption of an ever-growing market — that failed when the economic crisis came along in 2008.
“As the 2008 crisis showed, you can never be sure what your returns will be. So there was a reluctance on the part of some companies to sink investment into new plants,” said Alexander Kornilov, chief utilities analyst at Alfa Bank.
Electricity demand plummeted 6 percent to 7 percent during the economic crisis that hit Russia at the end of 2008, Weaving said.
The agreements now being signed “set up a concrete schedule for the commissioning of newly built capacities and give the government assurance that all of this capacity is going to be commissioned on time,” Kornilov said.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin originally signed off on the drafting of new agreements in February, but the deadline was repeatedly put back as generating companies negotiated over legal language and the deadlines for construction of new plants.
TITLE: Putin Leads Meeting
On Hockey, Heating
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The traditional fall discussion about the country’s preparation for winter was preceded by an optimistic discourse about hosting the Ice Hockey World Championship and welcoming a new Moscow mayor on board at Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Cabinet meeting Thursday.
“The bid will be submitted by May of 2011, and the championship will be held in 2016,” Putin said.
Putin also said Russia would be ready for the upcoming winter, despite a debt of $4.4 billion by companies and individuals to the public utility sector.
Vladislav Tretyak, president of the Russian Ice Hockey Federation and legendary Soviet goalie, said there is a unique opportunity for the country to win the bid to host the championship.
The Czech Republic, Finland and Sweden will have hosted the championships by 2016, Tretyak said, so Russia’s prime competitors will be Ukraine and Denmark. Latvia had also wanted to take part but changed its mind at the last minute, he said.
Tretyak proposed in the interim to organize a series of matches between Canada and Russia to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1976 successes for the Soviet hockey team.
Tretyak proposed holding the matches in August 2012, with four matches in Canada and four here at home, where Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and possibly Sochi would be potential host cities.
“If the stadium in Sochi is ready [by 2012], holding it there will make a lot of sense because … not all owners of professional hockey teams want to send us their players. This will be a good way to show the kind of level we will be holding this competition on,” Tretyak said.
The sport discussion segued into a review of the country’s preparation for winter.
The government is planning to crack down on debtors to the public utility sector, Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said. “We believe there is about 134 billion rubles worth of accumulated debt to public utility companies,” he said.
This money should be spent on repairs to the central heating system and equipment, he said, urging local officials to avoid cutting corners.
Shmatko promised increased oversight of repair works. “Under the conditions of possible budget deficit, some may get an urge to economize, which is why, together with the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Atomic Inspection, we will be conducting detailed checks,” he said.
Shmatko repeated earlier statements by Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin that 15 percent of Rosneft would go on the block. “The company is undercapitalized,” he said.
TITLE: Bureaucrats Go to School for Lessons in Honesty
AUTHOR: By Darya Henkina
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian Academy of Civil Service has started one of the most ambitious anti-corruption programs yet, and it’s aimed directly at the source of the problem — bureaucrats.
By the end of this year, as many as 500 officials from the Interior Ministry, the Prosecutor General’s Office and other government agencies will have completed a one-week course at the Kremlin-run academy on how to combat corruption.
The first 100 officials have completed the course on direct orders from President Dmitry Medvedev, said Igor Bartsits, deputy rector responsible for the program at the Russian Academy of Civil Service.
Over the next two months, the course will enroll 400 more officials from specialized anti-corruption departments in their respective organizations. Most students, Bartsits said, are from the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The officials will complete 36 academic hours on 11 topics, including the analysis of the competence of a government employee, criminal and legal methods to fight corruption, and how to refrain from illegal activities. Each class will last 1 1/2 to 4 1/2 academic hours, including hands-on practice modules and open discussions.
The course is taught by academy professors as well as visiting lecturers, including Yury Tikhomirov, deputy director of the Institute for Legislation and Comparative Jurisprudence; Nikolai Stolyarov, deputy chief of staff at the Audit Chamber; and officials from the legal division of the presidential administration, the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service and the Prosecutor General’s Academy.
“Upon completing the program, the civil servants must be able to give a fair assessment of their colleagues’ statements submitted in connection with internal investigations without exceeding the boundaries of their roles, as well as report any attempts to bribe or corrupt them to their superiors and the prosecutor’s office,” Bartsits said.
Those who successfully pass the final examination will get a certificate in continuing professional education.
Until recently, Russia did not have much to offer in terms of an academic approach to the fight against corruption. However, the department of government management at the Academy of National Economy, sponsored by the federal government, now offers three relevant courses as part of its programs: fighting corruption, economic security and corruptibility analysis. Just like the courses at the Russian Academy of Civil Service, they are in demand mostly with government agencies, even though they are open to the general public. The courses last 30 to 70 academic hours, department chairman Sergei Zuyev said.
Incidentally, the Russian Academy of Civil Service, which answers to the presidential administration, and the Academy of National Economy merged into one organizational structure Sept. 20.
Several universities have offered anti-corruption programs that were custom-made for a single government organization. The Higher School of Government Audit, which is a faculty within Moscow State University, ran such a course last year specifically for the employees of the Audit Chamber.
The government faces a daunting task in curbing corruption because it is 30 years behind the rest of the developed world in its fight against corruption, said Yelena Panfilova, director of the Russia office for Transparency International, which compiles an annual index measuring the perception of corruption in 180 countries. Last year, Russia was ranked 146th (with 180th being the most corrupt), a notch up from 147th the previous year and on par with Kenya. The 2010 index is to be released this week.
By offering the anti-corruption courses, Russia is following the lead of most developed countries, Panfilova said. Many developed countries also have a code of conduct for civil service employees and an established system to monitor their adherence to it, she said.
But officials who attend the course offered by the Russian Academy of Civil Service need more than one week to learn anti-corruption measures, said Alexander Vasilyev, director of the Higher School of Government Audit.
He said his school, whose longest course on the subject lasts two months, was only able to include the basic issues in its program.
Vasilyev said even more time was needed to fully cover the variants of corruption specific to each branch of civil service.
“It is also very important to have a practice module, especially in the area of developing expert analysis skills on anti-corruption issues,” he said.
Claire Cameron, director of Public Administration International, a British-based consultancy that runs its own anti-corruption training programs, said each topic in her organization’s anti-corruption course — such as averting corruption-related risks, government transparency and freedom of information — is studied in separate modules lasting one to two weeks. Courses include meetings with experts, international case studies, visits to government agencies and interaction with the media.
Similar programs developed by other international training providers are also usually quite detailed. Norwegian-based U4 runs two-day crash courses and one- to six-week programs devoted entirely to one topic each, insisting that knowledge is better absorbed this way. A standard training course by the Australian Independent Anti-Corruption Commission, which was set up 21 years ago, lasts two weeks.
The course recently introduced at the Russian Academy of Civil Service was originally designed to take two weeks as well, but the school was pressured to cut it down to one to limit the time that government employees took off work to complete it. The emphasis, the school said, has been made instead on what it calls a procedural learning model. It is based on legal rules and is considered a necessity because corruption-related cases in Russian courts are frequently conducted with gross procedural errors, the school said.
Olga Kolovitskova, head of continued professional education at the Academy of National Economy, said training programs for civil servants are the most important component in the country’s fight against corruption. She said, however, that all educational efforts will stop making sense in real-life conditions if government employees are not constantly monitored and do not fear certain punishment for corruption-related offenses. Otherwise, Kolovitskova said, corruption will remain a mass phenomenon.
The fate of the program will be decided in December by the president’s anti-corruption council.
TITLE: RusAl Rejects ‘Derisory’ $9 Billion Offer for Norilsk Nickel
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — United Company RusAl on Friday rebuffed a “derisory” $9 billion offer from billionaire Vladimir Potanin to buy its 25 percent stake in Norilsk Nickel.
RusAl’s investment “is not for sale at any price and is viewed as a critical component of RusAl’s future strategy of diversification,” said Nathaniel Rothschild, chairman of En+ Group, billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s investment company that controls RusAl.
Potanin’s offer “is derisory,” Rothschild said in an e-mailed statement.
Based on Friday’s close in London, Norilsk had a capitalization of $35.2 bil- lion, which would suggest a market price of $8.8 billion for RusAl’s stake.
Potanin said he wrote to RusAl chairman Viktor Vekselberg urging him to discuss selling RusAl’s interest in No- rilsk, Russia’s biggest mining company.
Potanin, whose Interros Holding also owns 25 percent of Norilsk, told reporters in Moscow that RusAl should either sell out or merge with Norilsk.
“About $9 billion, that’s the starting point for the talks,” he said.
Norilsk Nickel shareholders voted Thursday against an effort by United Company RusAl to oust the current board of directors, a win for rival shareholder Interros and management, which both opposed the maneuver.
A total of 46.9 percent of shareholders participating in the emergency shareholders meeting voted against ending the current board’s power, with 37.88 percent voting in favor.
Another 0.41 percent of shareholders taking part in the meeting, held at the President Hotel in Moscow, abstained from voting. Interros and RusAl had campaigned aggressively in recent weeks for support from smaller shareholders.
Norilsk said about 92 percent of shareholders had cast votes by the end of the meeting, up from a preliminary tally of 70.5 percent before the start.
Norilsk chairman Vasily Titov, a deputy CEO of state-run VTB, said the vote was “legally correct” and meant that the board would retain its power.
“We’ll continue working,” he told reporters after the shareholders meeting.
Representatives from the Federal Service for Financial Markets, Russia’s securities watchdog, participated in the vote counting.
“They saw the entire procedure. … We’ve fulfilled all the requirements of the voting,” he said.
RusAl and Interros, which each control 25 percent stakes in Norilsk, have been battling intermittently since RusAl became a shareholder in 2008. RusAl lost its parity with Interros after the nickel and palladium giant’s annual shareholders meeting in June.
Interros re-elected four directors to the 13-member board, compared with RusAl’s three. The company’s management also won three seats, which RusAl said was the result of voting manipulations using Norilsk shares controlled by subsidiaries of the company.
The rival shareholders had accused each other of trying to run the company in their own interests, to the detriment of other shareholders.
In a statement after the meeting, RusAl thanked minority shareholders who supported their position.
“RusAl welcomes the fact that many Norilsk Nickel shareholders share our vision for the company. The fact that we were not able to secure enough votes will not distract us from the positive agenda that was outlined earlier,” the statement said.
“RusAl remains convinced that proper corporate governance, professional management and a clear growth strategy would deliver enhanced value for all shareholders,” it said.
The company also said Norilsk’s management had voted with the treasury shares held by subsidiaries, under influence from Interros “to prevent minority investors from electing new, independent non-executive directors.”
The two dominant forces in the shareholder dispute — RusAl CEO and largest owner Oleg Deripaska and Interros owner Vladimir Potanin — were not in attendance Thursday.
The voting showed that most minority shareholders who voted — or about 75 percent — supported the re-election of the board, said Maxim Sokov, RusAl’s corporate development director, who represented the aluminum producer.
“It’s clear that the joint voting by Interros’ stake and the treasury shares made it possible to not re-elect the board,” he told reporters, adding that RusAl planned to continue working with minority shareholders to increase Norilsk’s capitalization.
The market took the news in stride, however. Norilsk’s shares gained 1.4 percent on Thursday, behind the MICEX Index’s 2.3 percent gain but roughly in line with the exchange’s metals and mining index, which finished 1.3 percent higher.
Sokov declined to comment on whether RusAl would contest the vote, saying only that it planned to discuss the situation.
RusAl voted to oust the board, he said. The company used its shares to vote for Deripaska, Sokov, former Norilsk chairman Alexander Voloshin and three independent directors to be elected in the new board.
Voloshin lost his seat after the June shareholders meeting, with Titov — whose VTB is a major Interros creditor — becoming chairman.
Interros said it had expected Thursday’s outcome.
“There are many professional and experienced investors among the minority shareholders who make informed decisions,” Interros spokesman Andrei Kirpichnikov told The St. Petersburg Times.
“Shareholders demonstrated a responsible approach. We hope this situation will become a starting point for casting aside public disputes and switching to a constructive dialogue among the board of directors,” he said by telephone.
Interros also hopes that the Federal Service for Financial Markets’ participation will prevent any attempts to challenge the outcome of the voting, he said.
Titov said there had never been “evident signs of the conflict” in the board during his chairmanship.
“We certainly argued, but we always found a way to make decisions,” he said, adding that he hoped Norilsk’s directors would be able to find compromises in the future.
Norilsk’s board recommended that shareholders vote against terminating its power, the company said in materials distributed to shareholders before the meeting.
TITLE: Headhunters Turn to Networking Sites
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Web sites devoted to job vacancies are facing serious competition in the form of another kind of web site altogether: Social networking sites. Of 3,500 top and middle-level managers surveyed by Antal Russia, 70 percent of candidates consider social networking sites to be one of the most useful sources for finding interesting job offers.
According to research published by comScore, Russia has the most active social networking community in the world. As of August this year, 34.5 million Russian Internet users — or 74.5 percent of the online population — had visited at least one social networking site.
Russians spend an average of 9.8 hours per visitor per month on social networking sites, more than double the worldwide average of 4.5 hours.
The top social networking site in Russia, according to comScore data, is VKontakte, with 27.8 million visitors, followed by Odnoklassniki with 16.7 million visitors. Facebook, which enjoys a strong leadership position worldwide, ranks just fifth in Russia, but is rapidly gaining popularity.
Social networking has not only become an instrument for communication and sharing private information, but also a media for career development. Social networking provides easy access to potential employers and employees, and allows users to find and share information about vacancies. It also enables people to expand their network of business contacts.
According to Antal Russia experts, between 10 percent and 30 percent of candidates, depending on the professional field, are found via social networking sites. The most active profession in this regard is marketing specialists.
“Social media is an excellent tool that makes the search for the required people much quicker,” said Oksana Chirko, head of the HR department at Antal Russia. “Recruitment agencies and representatives of major companies actively use it to look for personnel.”
“But predictions that soon all the recruitment process will be done via social networking sites are unlikely to come true,” she added. “In any case, finding the necessary contacts is just the first step.”
“Social networking can serve as an additional search instrument when the recruiter is looking for specialists from certain companies or they need to find employees with a narrow field of specialization,” said Irina Ponizova, a consultant at Ancor recruitment agency in St. Petersburg.
Using such sites as a recruitment tool is far from problem free, however. Firstly, there is the risk that a candidate’s social networking profile may contain inaccurate information.
“That’s why only primary contact with the potential job-seeker can be established based on the information there,” said Ponizova. “The information is checked at the stage of sending the CV to the recruitment agency and during the interview with recruiters.”
Headhunters prefer to use specialized networks, such as LinkedIn, Professionali.ru, Webby.ru and Pro2.ru to search for candidates.
“At my previous job, I often used LinkedIn to search for necessary candidates,” said Olga Demidova, the manager of Antal-Laurence Simons, which specializes in recruitment in the legal field. “To explain to people with whom they were communicating, I included my workplace, position, general duties and a photo in my profile. Some time later, the HR manager of Antal Russia found me and made me a job offer.”
“It emerged later that she had found my profile in the search system, and after reading information about me and studying the recommendations of my clients and partners, she invited me to a meeting,” she said.
Though professionally-oriented sites are most often used to hunt for candidates, there are exceptions, and sites such as VKontakte, Moi Krug and Odnoklassniki can also be used in the recruitment process.
“If the person has entered information in the ‘career’ and ‘education’ fields of their profile, they could attract the attention of recruiters who have a commission for a professional with specialized education or experience at a specific company,” said Ponizova.
“I was publishing my articles about travel on [blogging site] livejournal, and I got an offer from Vokrug Sveta magazine, who wanted to publish my work on their Internet version. It turned out to be an effective collaboration,” said Sergei Zagatsky, a journalist and freelance writer for Vokrug Sveta magazine.
“The point about this social networking was that the employer could see all the text in its virgin state, without any third-party editing, so he could form an opinion about my professional skills,” he said.
Social networking can help to find candidates’ contact information or to look for other people who can help with the search.
“Recently I had to find the contact information of a certain candidate, and it was a difficult task,” said Yevgenia Logvinova, a financial consultant with Antal Russia. “I found his profile on Odnoklassniki.ru, but he wasn’t active on it and furthermore, was not registered on any other social networks.
“His wife’s profile was in his list of friends, so I set my status as ‘I’m looking for a chief accountant for a major company’ and visited her page several times. As a result, his wife sent me his contact details and we managed to place him in the company.”
Candidates who would like to be tracked down by headhunters are advised to follow certain recommendations, however. The first is to treat profile information carefully. Profiles on social networking sites are in fact equivalent to the CV you would send to a recruitment agency or publish on recruitment web sites, say Antal Russia experts.
“The information on your page shouldn’t be too brief: It is necessary to specify your professional discipline and describe your work experience,” said Michael Germershausen, general director of Antal Russia. “Moreover, your profiles on various web sites shouldn’t contain any contradictory information.”
“The content of your profile ought to be relevant to your aim — it’s preferable not to publish photos or information that are too informal. Remember that photos from a fun party could become the reason for you not getting that job interview.”
The next advice is to use the opportunity to spread information rapidly.
“We hear of many examples when posting the status ‘I’m looking for a job’ on Facebook or VKontakte helped people to find a job quickly,” said Germershausen. “The majority of social networking sites make it possible to spread information with the speed of a virus, which is one of the main reasons that recruiters use them as a place to post vacancies.”
Recruiters usually look through recommendations posted on candidates’ profiles, or request them from the candidate’s colleagues, who are also easy to find.
In this way, recruiters can offer people new ways of professional development. And who knows — it might be you who turns out to be exactly the employee that that company needs.
TITLE: Salaries Grow Amid Job Market Recovery
AUTHOR: By Sophie Gaitzsch
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As the serious economic downturn of the last two years appears to recede, the financial situation of St. Petersburgers is improving. More than half of St. Petersburg companies have increased their employees’ salaries during the past few months or plan to do so by the end of the year. Pre-crisis levels are still some way off, however.
“The human resources market has been recovering remarkably well since the beginning of the year,” said Yury Mikhailov, a managing partner at Consort St. Petersburg recruitment company.
In Moscow, recruitment agencies “have seen their search portfolios come back to pre-crisis levels and are hiring more consultants to cope with the influx of search assignments they are getting from various companies, both international and Russian,” added the expert.
“This means that companies in and around Moscow are back on track,” said Mikhailov. “They are either taking people back on or attracting more staff to develop their business. The St. Petersburg market has been slower in that respect, but it is on the move trying to recapture the lost ground as well.”
According to a survey carried out by Avanta Personnel recruitment company, this improvement is reflected in the amount of money people receive at the end of the month: 57 percent of local employers have raised wages since the beginning of the year or intend to do so by the end of December.
“In the majority of cases, the revision applies to the whole staff, and not only to a few specialists, as was the case last year. The average increase was 9.5 to 10 percent,” Avanta wrote in notes accompanying the research, which was carried out between January and June this year and surveyed 72 companies with a total of 47,700 employees.
Another survey conducted last April by Case personnel management firm among 48 Russian and international enterprises operating in St. Petersburg came to an even more optimistic conclusion. According to the results, 81 percent of businesses were planning an average 9 percent salary increase for 2010. Case also stressed that 44 percent of the concerns taking part in the study planned to hire new personnel before the end of the year — another indicator of stabilization.
What human resources specialists have seen on the ground since those two surveys were published confirms the trend. “Overall, we are observing growth,” said Svetlana Loseva, a consultant at Consort Petersburg.
“During the crisis, industry, accounting, retail trade, marketing, human resources, construction, banking and insurance suffered salary cuts,” she said. “But things are now improving and wages are going up. The general financial situation of the population has got better, which has in turn provoked a rise in demand for goods and services. Therefore, it is those spheres that should continue to develop actively in the near future.”
The steady rise in activity on the labor market has been especially marked since the end of the summer holidays, with a larger number of vacancies appearing, according Irina Babenko, a senior consultant at Consort St. Petersburg, indicating that the situation is indeed improving for job seekers in general.
“Not only is the quantity of vacant positions growing — so is their quality: The myth of qualified people who would accept very low-paid positions appearing on the market during the crisis did not pass the test of time, forcing many employers to return to pre-crisis wage conditions,” she said.
While optimism among experts can be keenly observed, the St. Petersburg labor market still has some way to go before it recovers completely. Accoding to Mikhailov, “companies are still cautious about sounding their business development successes, and it may take another two or three quarters before we see the labor market fully bounce back — with the proviso that the economy is not faced with another major catastrophe.”
TITLE: Russia’s Disabled Fight For the Right to Work
AUTHOR: By Olga Sharapova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia’s estimated 13 to 15 million disabled people face a range of difficulties, not least of which is finding a job.
“Although every disabled person has the right to apply to the state employment agency to find a job, in reality it is difficult for jobseekers with physical or any other kind of problems,” said Grigory Trofimov, coordinator of the Association for Helping Disabled People and Those with a Limited Ability to Work.
“It is strange, but at such employment agencies there is no distance training or possibility of contacting consultants by e-mail or telephone. You have to be there in person every time.”
“Of course, we have a lack of financial support from the state,” he added. “The biggest disability allowance is about 10,000 rubles ($329). But the main problem for everyone with any kind of disability is their isolation from normal life, potential work and communication with others.”
A lack of information on how to find a job or news about local and international social and volunteer programs is another difficulty faced by disabled people, according to Svetlana Katayeva, director of Avrio Group Consulting recruitment company.
Although in recent times some positive changes have been seen in Russia, such as wheel-chair-friendly transport and disabled access in some places, if people are not a member of the association for the deaf, blind or other societies, it is very difficult for them to tackle problems alone.
The main task of such organizations is the support and rehabilitation of disabled people. They give people a chance to work and forge contacts with employers.
“There are employers who are open to taking on disabled people,” says Yegeniya Zhilieyeva, regional recruitment director at Kelly Services in St. Petersburg.
“They are McDonald’s and some clothing factories which accept deaf or partially sighted people.”
Among the disabled population, there are many highly skilled specialists, who often find themselves at a disadvantage due to their restricted mobility. “Our main task is to help people find all kinds of jobs, from simple work that can be done at home to creative work that requires specialized knowledge, such as translation, writing, editing and programming,” said Trofimov. “For instance, we are currently working on a commercial project for a photography and design service.”
Comparing the situation in Russia and abroad, it is clear that while officially everyone has equal rights and opportunities, many stereotypes about disabled people remain. Firstly, there is so-called hidden discrimination, when employers do not reject disabled candidates outright, but try to pay them off.
“According to the law on the social protection of disabled people, there is a guaranteed quota (2 to 4 percent) of jobs for disabled employees,” said Trofimov. “But most heads of companies think that taking on a disabled person will only be a burden to them, so they prefer to give applicants money rather than offer them a job.”
Pyotr Bukalyuk, a member of the Association for Helping Disabled People and Those with a Limited Ability to Work, believes that discrimination is an inevitable part of any social system. According to him, employers are not interested in their employees’ problems.
“It doesn’t matter whether you are a young mother who needs to leave work early to collect your child from kindergarten or a disabled person,” said Bukalyuk.
Such pessimism may be the result of the legacy of the Soviet Union, when disabled people were hushed up and largely ignored by society and the authorities.
“It is a terrible problem,” said Kelly Services’ Zhilieyeva. “The treatment of disabled people is the main difference between Russia and European countries and the U.S.”
To break this circle of incomprehension and indifference, disabled people propose changing the list of documents required to register with the state employment agency and increasing employers’ compulsory payments to the budget for rejecting disabled candidates. Another task is to create a general database of job opportunities for disabled people and simplify the process of looking for a job.
TITLE: Working Women Get Raw Deal
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Women in Russia are often paid up to 40 percent less than men for doing the same job, according to data compiled by Ancor recruitment agency.
HR experts say that so-called oblique discrimination — when, with the use of various bonuses and incentives, men officially have the same salary as women, but are in fact paid more — is widespread.
“Men simply get more opportunities to earn more money; they are given more profitable and serious projects, and sent on highly paid business trips,” said Rima Sharifullina, the president of Peterburgskaya Egida nonprofit labor law firm. “Moreover, a lot of women agree with this, as there is a stereotype that the man should be the family breadwinner.
“Just add up all the losses incurred during a woman’s whole professional life,” she added. “If every month the woman gets 40 percent less than she could have, it will be a huge sum in total over many years.”
Such attitudes are rooted in the past. It was only in the 20th century that the new social role of the working mother appeared.
“Not so long ago, women wanting to have a successful career was regarded as a deviation from the norm,” said Olga Serebrennaya, director of Ancor’s St. Petersburg office. “Yet nowadays, we follow the opposite trend — women focus equally on both their career and children. And men are tired of their role as the only bread-winner in the family and tend to spend more time with their children.”
The gender wage gap is also explained by women’s dominance in lower-paid fields and the division of positions into “male” and “female.”
“Employers have fixed stereotypes of the professional preferences of men and women,” said Serebrennaya. “Traditional ‘female’ positions are administrative roles, accountancy, education and the service industry.”
The science, defense and energy industries, on the other hand, are traditionally men’s worlds, according to Egida’s specialists.
Top posts are in general the men’s realm. In the public sector, 80 percent of workers are women, though only 13 percent of the top positions are occupied by women, while the other 87 percent are occupied by men, according to Egida data.
“As Russia was for many years a patriarchal country, female senior managers were something unusual,” said Olga Anokhina, sales director at HeadHunter recruitment portal in St. Petersburg. “Recently, the situation has changed and the number of businesswomen is increasing, though they are still outnumbered by men.”
In senior management, the situation is unlikely to change cardinally in the future, consider experts.
“The average woman gives birth to a child twice during their lifetime, which means that she is isolated from professional activity for at least three years,” said Anokhina. “And this could become an irretrievable loss for a business.”
According to Egida data, 30 percent of job vacancies published in the media specify gender requirements, which is discrimination. There are however only individual appeals to the courts. Ancor specialists say that there is often a preconceived attitude among employers to female jobseekers, based, first of all, on the presence of children or the prospect of maternity leave.
According to the Labor Law, jobseekers who have applied for a job and been rejected have the right to demand the grounds for the decision in writing.
“But HR managers will never indicate in the official document the gender, age or nationality as a reason for the rejection,” said Anokhina. “Usually, even if the candidate has been rejected on the basis of one of these factors, they will get a reasoned explanation of the disparity between their professional qualities and the requirements of the position.”
“Ultimately, the employer-company will hire those employees it would like to have for such a position,” she said.
Among other factors behind the gender wage gap may be different approaches among men and women. Statistically, women are less assertive than men regarding their working conditions and salary.
“During a job interview, men are 30 percent more likely to talk about money than women,” said Serebrennaya.
Modern women face difficult decisions when juggling a career with a family.
“There are compromises to be made on whether to cut short the maternity leave or not, or even to forego such leave,” said Serebrennaya. “Often women who are not prepared to fight hard have to agree to any conditions, even discriminatory ones.”
Sometimes, however, talk of discrimination is exaggerated, according to HeadHunter experts.
“Sometimes women unfairly write off their own mistakes as being down to discrimination,” said Anokhina. “Often, colleagues listen to the man’s opinion simply because his decision is more sound from the business point of view.”
Another gender equality problem faced by women is sexual harassment. Although cases are rarely officially reported, a lot of Russian women receive inappropriate proposals, according to Petersburgskaya Egida. Office workers are the most likely to encounter such harassment.
“The problem is that women cannot prove the fact of the sexual harassment,” said Sharifullina. “There is a certain unwillingness from the state to protect women. If women receive indecent proposals, they can write to the prosecutor’s office, but the woman has to prove herself the fact of harassment. But often women are humiliated in official structures until they finally withdraw their complaint.”
In Nordic countries, by contrast, proceedings can be instituted as soon as a woman speaks out against having been harassed. In a high profile incident in Finland about two years ago, a woman appealed to the state body responsible for gender equality with a complaint against a government minister who had sent her an obscene message. As a result, he was forced to tender his resignation.
Experts have several pieces of some advice for women facing this problem.
“Firstly, take with you a dictaphone to record any offensive word,” said Sharifullina. “Then, complain constantly to friends and colleagues to let people know you are being harassed. And finally, apply to non-governmental organizations for help.”
The problem in Russia is that there is no such legal notion as “discrimination.”
“The laws that we have are still at the stage of development, but they are not yet established,” said Sharifullina.
The most developed countries in terms of gender equality are the Nordic ones. Here, women earn more than 70 percent of what men do, according to Ancor data.
“The minimum gender correlation in terms of income is in countries with a developing economy, such as Egypt, Pakistan, Mexico and Chile. Here men earn three times more than women,” said Serebrennaya.
Perhaps more surprisingly, there are also developed countries where women earn less than half of what men do. Such countries include Japan, Belgium, Italy and Spain, according to Ancor data.
TITLE: Employers Lure Staff With Social Benefits Packages
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Along with salary and career growth opportunity, social benefits are among the top criteria for job hunters, according to data from HeadHunter recruitment portal.
The Labor Law guarantees employees the right to paid sick leave, an official salary, a paid 28-calendar day vacation and obligatory medical insurance. Any extra perks offered by employers are aimed at attracting and retaining staff.
At the onset of the crisis, many companies reduced their social benefits programs, and the first area to see cuts was training and educational programs. Now compensation packages are gradually returning to their pre-crisis state.
“The trend of gradual recovery on the labor market is having an impact on the compensation packages offered by employers,” said Michael Germershausen, general director of Antal Russia recruitment company. “Since the summer, companies have slowly started to increase the volume of investment in staff education.
“Those companies who had stopped providing additional medical insurance for their employees have in most cases changed their position and brought back voluntary health insurance. But of course, we can only dream about excesses in social benefits — employers today are only prepared to include necessary services,” he said.
There are, however, some exceptions. If the company wants to recruit an excellent specialist who currently enjoys good social benefits, the new employers will have to offer a package at least equivalent to what the candidate is used to. Many companies compete with one other to offer the most attractive perks.
“There is real competition over extended social benefits, which usually include sports facilities, free meals and life insurance,” said Natalya Shchegoleva, a consultant at Ancor recruitment agency in St. Petersburg.
Eighty-five percent of Russians consider social benefits to be an important factor that increases the quality of their job, according to HeadHunter research.
Voluntary health insurance is one of the most important social benefits, consider 73 percent of employees. In 2007, this kind of insurance was actively introduced, which has given it a good position in popularity rating.
“Many employees have got used to this compensation, but in the event that it is not included in the social benefits package, it won’t be a drastic minus or a reason for turning down a job offer,” said Shchegoleva.
“But in all cases, employees add social benefits to the salary in their mind and it seems that the more social benefits included, the bigger the salary,” she said.
Free meals are also a highly appreciated perk, especially if the workplace is situated out of town.
“In this case, free meals play the biggest role,” said Shchegoleva. “If the office is in the city center, it could be organized meals or compensation. It is always considered by employees to be a bonus to the salary.”
Forty-five percent of employees are prepared to take a pay cut in exchange for having more social benefits, according to HeadHunter research.
Thirty-seven percent of employees would like to have their cell phone bill paid for by the company, but only 5 percent of employers offer this perk.
“When an employee needs a cell phone for their work and it is not paid for by the company, it causes a negative reaction,” said Shchegoleva. “The same is true of company cars. If they are not strictly necessary for the job, their absence is regarded as neutral, and their presence as a bonus.”
Twenty-one percent of employees prefer to have transport expenses paid for as part of their social benefits package, according to HeadHunter specialists, while only 5 percent of companies offer them. The same proportion of jobseekers would like to be eligible for favorable loan conditions through the company.
Offering employees the company’s products for free does not influence job seekers’ decisions.
In general, social benefits requirements vary according to the groups of personnel.
The size of senior managers’ bonuses varies according to the field of work. In banking, for example, the annual bonus can sometimes equal the size of the annual salary. Employees with top positions may be entitled to medical insurance for their entire family, including life insurance, a company car and even training abroad.
About 52 percent of employees consider flexible benefits, which can be chosen from a range of options, to be quite important, while only about 16 percent are offered them, according to Antal Russia research. Among crucial bonuses, employees cite medical insurance and then an annual bonus, while flexible working schedules that include working from home or flexitime are not so sought after.
The social benefits offered by Russian and international companies also differ. The top priority at international companies is medical insurance, followed by an annual bonus scheme and car allowance, according to research carried out by Antal Russia. At Russian organizations, on the other hand, the most widespread service offered is an annual bonus scheme and then insurance.
An unlucky 22 percent of employees at Russian companies do not have any perks at all, according to HeadHunter data, while only 5 percent of people who work for international companies do not receive any benefits, said Antal Russia experts.
TITLE: French Firms Focus on Russian Staff
AUTHOR: By Elmira Alieva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: During the past three years the number of vacancies at French companies operating in Russia has increased by six times, according to research carried out by HeadHunter recruitment portal. The subsidiaries of French enterprises on the Russian market are attracted by Russia’s rapid growth, market size and also by its skilled manpower.
According to statistics from the French embassy in Moscow, about 400 French companies, subsidiaries and Russian companies created by French expats exist in Russia, principally in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Most of these companies work in the areas of public building, transport, IT, the environment, electronics and aircraft construction.
“Quite a lot of highly skilled Russians are employed at French enterprises in Russia,” said Mikhail Zhukov, general director of HeadHunter. “A distinctive feature of French employers in Russia is their desire to transfer knowledge to their Russian colleagues, limited only at the top of a firm or in a number of key positions that need to be filled directly from France,” he said.
For Russian employees, the main attraction of French employers is that they hire production and technological personnel from industries that are not highly paid in Russia, such as electronics, industrial information systems and car and aircraft manufacturing.
“For really highly skilled Russians, working for French companies is a rare and attractive opportunity to receive proper compensation and to learn new technologies in their profession,” said Zhukov.
Representatives of major French companies in Russia say that they are satisfied with the level of education and skills of Russian professionals.
“Our company seeks to maximize the presence of Russian personnel in its projects and encourages its contracted companies to follow the same approach,” said Pierre Nerguararian, general director of Total E&P Russie, and chief representative of Total Group in Russia. “Our Russian staff professionals are highly skilled and educated, and importantly, they are very highly motivated and are eager to advance, and to move further,” he said.
“Russia has one of the best higher technical education schools,” said Laurent Valroff, Dassault Systemes director in Russia and the CIS. “There are a lot of highly qualified Russian IT-specialists working in our company. Furthermore, we can’t underestimate their knowledge of the national mentality, since business is built on human relations; in this aspect it’s hard to compete with Russian specialists,” he added.
The process of headhunting by French companies in Russia is usually thorough. They demand a high educational level and experience in specific areas of industry as well as knowledge of the French language.
“The major French home-improvement and gardening retailer Leroy Merlin built two hypermarkets in St. Petersburg and employed a huge staff including managers of departments,” said Yury Mikhailov, managing partner of Consort Petersburg. “French managers occupy top positions and they are located in Moscow, but they are few,” he added.
“It’s not the nationality that counts most, but the skills,” said Alexei Zakharov, president of the SuperJob.ru recruitment site. “In Russia, a Russian with a good Russian education, western MBA diploma and work experience in Russia and abroad is in higher demand than a foreign senior manager. However, there are not so many qualified specialists with Russian and foreign experience on the market, so the demand for foreign senior managers is still high,” he said.
The choice between hiring a Russian or French specialist depends on the industry. “In Russia there are more companies with an American management style, so we have more senior managers used to working in this business climate,” said Maxim Kaurov, director of Staffwell recruitment agency. “When such a senior manager receives an offer from a French company, they might have some doubts whether they will be able to get used to other corporate standards and mentality. However, business tasks, salary and the personality of the head are the most important factors when deciding whether to accept an offer from a French company or any other,” said Kaurov.
For many international companies, maintaining a balance between the majority of Russian staff with good knowledge of local markets and foreign employees who have different experiences and practices is key.
“It is a balance — Russians are generally more effective on the local market, while the presence of French managers makes it possible to maintain a specific corporate environment and monitor the implementation of key decisions from headquarters,” said Stanislav Smetana, senior consultant at Consort Group.
“French employers are focused on the transfer of knowledge and values to Russian personnel — from production personnel to senior managers, spending probably more than representatives of all the Western countries on the training and development of their staff,” said Zhukov. “This is a clever policy, aimed at the long-term growth of French companies in Russia,” he said.
TITLE: Older Staff Face Higher Retirement Age, Prejudice
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While as recently as three years ago, the government had no plans to raise the retirement age in Russia, the prospect of such a move today seems ever more likely.
Last week, the Ministry of Finance said it was possible that the retirement age for men could increase from the current age of 60 to 62, and from 55 to 60 for women.
“The phased increase of the retirement age is possible, but it will happen not in one year and not now, but in five years,” said Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin at a meeting of the Communist Party faction at the State Duma last Tuesday.
Kudrin said that the decision could be made within a year or two, and then the raise would begin step-by-step, at intervals of half a year or a year.
Kudrin added that the plan would require additional evaluation.
Speculation about the prospect of increasing the retirement age in Russia appeared fairly abruptly.
In spring 2007, then-president Vladimir Putin said in his address to the Federation Council that “there would not be any objective necessity to raise the retirement age in the foreseeable future,” a standpoint that he went on to reiterate repeatedly.
However, in January this year, Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Shatalov called for “the beginning of a discussion of retirement age issues as soon as possible.”
Analysts said then that the government would have to increase the retirement age in the next year or two. It was speculated that it could be increased by five years for men, and by seven or even 10 years for women.
The debate is part of the Finance Ministry’s attempts to solve the problem of the deficit in the national pension system.
Mikhail Dmitriyev, head of the Strategic Development Center, said at the end of last year that Russia “clearly needed to increase the retirement age.”
“Since 2007, the size of the working age population has been decreasing by 500,000 to 600,000 people every year. If we don’t initiate a later retirement age, the economy won’t grow and develop,” Dmitriyev was cited as saying by Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily.
Kudrin said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June this year that the growth of the deficit in the Russian Pension Fund “would inevitably lead to an increase in the retirement age.”
For every 100 pensioners in Russia, there are 128 workers, Kudrin said. In developed countries, that ratio is 100 to 160. In addition, the retirement age is lower in Russia than in many other countries, he added.
The deficit of the country’s Pension Fund is about one trillion rubles, Kudrin said.
By international standards, Russians retire relatively early, in comparison with both developed and developing countries.
In the U.K., Italy and Poland, the pension age is 60 for women and 65 for men. In the U.S., the age for everyone is 65, while in Norway it is 67.
A number of former Soviet republics have already changed their retirement age in recent years, including Kazakhstan from 58 to 63, and Georgia from 60 to 65. In Japan, where the life expectancy is one of the highest in the world, both men and women retire at the age of 70.
A number of European countries have already taken steps toward increasing the retirement age.
In France, where the pension age was previously 60, the government this year moved to increase that figure up to 62.5, sparking major protests in the country.
Italy’s parliament has also tackled the issue by making the transition to a higher retirement age gradual. By 2050, Italians will retire three years later than they do now.
Opponents of plans to raise the retirement age in Russia say that it would be unfair to people, many of whom — particularly men — are statistically unlikely to live to the retirement age. The average life expectancy of Russian men is 60 — the same as the current retirement age.
HR experts have various opinions on the potential increase of the retirement age in Russia.
Svetlana Katayeva, general director of Triza Exclusive St. Petersburg and a partner at Avrio Group Consulting recruitment company, said increasing the retirement age could make it even more difficult for older people to find employment than it is now.
“Taking into account the fact that the majority of pre-pension age specialists in Russia are already far from in demand, increasing the retirement age may complicate the situation even more in regard to them finding a good job,” Katayeva said.
“Unfortunately, recruitment agencies do not consider candidates approaching the retirement age as a matter of principle for their clients, who recruit personnel via agencies and are interested only in the ‘active’ age category — the so-called ‘golden age’ from 28 to 40 years old,” she said.
Katayeva said there are rare exceptions such as when the professional market is very narrow and there is a lack of candidates with certain experience and qualifications. Usually “it’s the heads of construction and industrial fields in some rare fields, or engineering and technical specialists,” she said.
Margarita Ponomaryova, general director of BusinessLink Personnel recruitment company, said the possibility of increasing the retirement age in Russia was “very high,” and added that it could result in some positive changes.
“Increasing the retirement age may happen due to several factors, including the small size of pensions and active way of life among many people of pension age,” Ponomaryova said.
“In practice, many people of pension age continue to work, and do so effectively. Therefore officially raising the retirement age will only confirm a well-established practice,” she said.
Ponomaryova said increasing the retirement age would make employers value older staff “more objectively.”
“Currently, there is certain prejudice against candidates over 45 years old,” she said.
“For some reason, employers often fear that older people don’t have the capacity to work at full steam, which in reality almost always proves to be the opposite,” Ponomaryova said.
The positions that employers most frequently consider older people for include chief accountants, head engineers, safety labor engineers and security services, she said.
Ponomaryova said that about 30 percent of people who apply to recruitment agencies are pensioners or people approaching the retirement age.
“Very few of those people aspire to career growth,” she said. “Their priority is usually stability, the opportunity to work for at least another five years and a good salary.”
Yelena Kolkova, general director of Staffwell recruitment agency, also said her company did not see “any special interest of employers toward pension-age employees,” adding that such an approach was obviously a mistake.
“Demand for such specialists mainly depends on the staff policy of an employer,” said Kolkova. “If an employer is prepared to consider candidates approaching and past the retirement age, then it could be a fairly wide range of positions — administrative, financial or engineering. Most often, people of this age can be considered for leading positions due to valuable management experience they have accumulated,” she said.
Employers rarely pay attention to candidates approaching the retirement age, Kolkova said.
“It’s a shame, because in our opinion, such candidates can often be energetic despite their age, have a wide range of experience and developed emotional and social intellect, and can develop effective communication with their colleagues and the authorities. Furthermore, such candidates are usually focused on a stable job with the same employer, and don’t tend to change job often,” Kolkova added.
TITLE: The NATO and Russia Embrace
AUTHOR: By Anders Fogh Rasmussen
TEXT: When I gave my first public speech as secretary-general of NATO just over a year ago, I focused on the NATO-Russia relationship because I believe that it is crucial for global, not just European, security. At that time, I thought the relationship to be in urgent need of repair and that NATO and Russia should make a “new beginning.” So I made several specific proposals for laying the foundations of a far more productive future relationship. A year on, how do we measure up?
We have, first of all, reinforced our practical cooperation in a range of areas.
• Fighting terrorism. Because terrorism is a transnational scourge, we can defeat it only if we work together. NATO and Russia have agreed on a joint assessment of terrorist threats, and we are already making considerable progress on a number of concrete projects. We are working together, for example, to counter the threat of attacks on mass transport and other public gathering places. Under a joint program called Stand-Off Explosives Detection, we have brought together leading research institutes and laboratories in NATO countries and Russia to integrate various technologies into a single system for detecting explosives and identifying potential attackers.
• Preventing proliferation. The proliferation of nuclear capabilities and ballistic missiles is a major concern for the international community as a whole and a grave and growing threat to NATO countries and Russia. Experts from NATO and Russia have met several times to discuss how their countries can best address this threat together, and a working group on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation is now taking this cooperation forward.
• Stabilizing Afghanistan. Russia’s interest in a stable Afghanistan is as strong as NATO’s. In spring 2010, the first cargo containers reached the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force via Russian territory, opening an important additional line of communication. The NATO-Russia project to provide counter-narcotics training to personnel from Afghanistan and Central Asia has produced more than 1,300 graduates, many of whom have already used their new skills to intercept some of the largest heroin shipments in the region. In addition, following suggestions that I made in Moscow in December, Russia’s leaders are considering additional contributions of helicopters and training to the Afghan National Army.
Beyond increasing our practical collaboration, we have rejuvenated the NATO-Russia Council and have broadened and deepened our dialogue over the past year. We have held open, frank and constructive discussions on a broad range of Russian and allied security concerns and on proposals to address them. While these discussions have not led us to see eye-to-eye on all issues, they have certainly helped build a greater degree of mutual trust and confidence, which will certainly benefit our future cooperation.
The same is true of our joint review of common security challenges, which has progressed extremely well, with agreement on five threats and challenges that call for enhanced cooperation: terrorism, Afghanistan, piracy, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and natural and man-made disasters. We are already fleshing out the details on appropriate practical projects to be undertaken together.
In addition, NATO has been fully transparent with Russia on the development of the alliance’s new strategic concept, which I hope will encourage similar transparency from our Russian partners as they develop their own strategic documents.
Taken together, these achievements show that a new beginning in NATO-Russia relations has indeed been established. But my optimism about the future of our relationship does not blind me to the difficulties that remain. NATO allies still have concerns about Georgia, where fundamental differences of principle are at stake. Russia, too, continues to have concerns — for example, over NATO’s open door policy. I believe that these worries are misplaced and that NATO enlargement has enhanced security and stability for Russia.
Despite these remaining differences, we should have enough confidence to set out an ambitious agenda for the future. One of our priorities should be to enhance our operational cooperation. Back in the 1990s, we worked together with great success to stabilize the Balkans. I would like to see more joint peacekeeping operations, not only on land, but also at sea to enhance maritime security — in particular, greater cooperation in our efforts to combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden. Moreover, our operational cooperation in Afghanistan could be stepped up. Russian donations to the Afghan National Army could make a huge difference to the Afghans’ ability to ensure their own security, which is in the interest of us all.
But missile defense, in my opinion, offers the greatest potential for enhancing the NATO-Russia relationship. Earlier this year, in light of the growing threat of proliferation of nuclear capabilities and ballistic missiles, I proposed a common “security roof” stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok. I hope that in the coming months and years we will have the political will to make this a reality — a reality underpinned by NATO-Russia cooperation on missile defense.
A healthy NATO-Russia relationship is vital to the security of us all. Now that a solid foundation for it is in place, together we can look to the future with renewed confidence and ambition. I will do everything in my power to ensure that we fulfill the tremendous potential that the NATO-Russia relationship holds, and I count on the support of all members of the NATO-Russia Council to achieve this goal.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen is secretary-general of NATO. © Project Syndicate
TITLE: Bullish on the Bear
AUTHOR: By Richard Lourie
TEXT: Russian policy is now driven by two factors: the imperative to modernize and the fear of China. Both dictate a move to the West, which is now well under way.
On Oct. 18, President Dmitry Medvedev met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in France to formalize Russia’s relations with the European Union in security matters. Medvedev will also attend the NATO summit in Lisbon on Nov. 19 to 20. That was only possible because Russia had announced it was withdrawing its troops from Perevia, a Georgian town it had occupied in the 2008 war that had become a sticking point in negotiations with NATO. This comes after a significant concession by the Kremlin when it canceled the sale of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.
Of course, none of this means that Russia is about to become the West’s lackey. For example, on Oct. 15 Medvedev and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez signed a deal for Russia to build Venezuela’s first nuclear power plant. Russia has also sold Venezuela more than $4 billion in weaponry over the past five years. None of these transactions were designed to curry favor with Washington. Medvedev, however, termed the nuclear power plant deal strictly business. The little matter of Chernobyl aside, Russia offers a very good value proposition on nuclear energy. It will build the reactors, supply the energy at an attractive price and dispose of the waste — a decision, as one commentator remarked with mock wistfulness, that could not have been made quite so easily in a more democratic country.
But Russia has been losing ground in some of its traditional core competencies, including arms sales. Though still second to the United States, Russian sales have been hurt by Chinese “knockoffs at bargain prices.”
China became more assertive the moment it passed Japan to become the world’s No. 2 economy. This was displayed in its recent clash with Japan over a Chinese trawler captain held by Japanese authorities, its reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo and in the recent embargo of rare earth minerals both to Japan and to the United States. Russia’s economy would not, of course, be much affected by an embargo of this sort, but many Russians will see these as the opening salvos in what former Mayor Yury Luzhkov once told me would be “the resource wars of the future.”
Coincidentally, the coming world water shortage was the cover story — “The New Oil” — of Newsweek’s Oct. 18 issue. It calls Russia, along with Canada and Alaska, one of the “winners” in the world of the “new oil,” seeing Siberian entrepreneurs selling water to an increasingly parched China. But those same resources also make Russia more attractive for a takeover, especially since the eastern reaches of the country are sparsely populated — 7 million Russians compared with 100 million Chinese on the other side of the border. Territorial disputes, although quiet for the time being, can always come back to life. Historically, China has always considered itself the injured party, its territory seized by “unequal treaties.”
Russia is interested in Western capital, know-how and security pacts but not Western values. A few concessions might be made, like a reduced sentence for former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But Russia will definitely improve economic and legal conditions to attract capital. The coming decade should be good for investment in Russia. For the first time in quite a while, I am bullish on the bear.
Richard Lourie is author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”
TITLE: NATO: Raid in Afghanistan Kills 15 Militants
AUTHOR: By Katharine Houreld
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL, Afghanistan — A raid by NATO soldiers and a subsequent airstrike in southern Afghanistan killed 15 insurgents on Monday, NATO said, although a local official initially reported a higher death toll.
NATO confirmed there had been an operation involving coalition and Afghan security forces to detain a senior Taliban leader followed by an airstrike in Helmand province.
“Upon arrival at the suspected location the joint security force immediately took fire from several insurgents in a series of engagements. The joint security force returned fire, killing four insurgents,” the statement said.
Nearby compounds were searched and a bomb-making factory and weapons cache discovered, NATO said. The soldiers decided to destroy them, but 11 gunmen on motorbikes and in three vehicles approached the site at high speed. The soldiers determined they were a threat and killed them, the statement said, before calling in an air strike to destroy the compounds.
Earlier, the head of Helmand’s provincial council, Fazal Bari, said local officials had told him that around 25 people had been killed. He said four Taliban commanders were among those killed in the raid in Baghran district, Helmand’s northernmost district about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.
“People are very angry,” said eyewitness Salah Ayap, a 26-year-old driver in Maigan village where the incident took place. He said foreign troops arrived in the village around 2 a.m. and there was a fierce gunfight before the airstrike.
Only two walls and one small room of a building he described as a mosque were now standing, said Ayap, and villagers were digging the dead out from under the rubble with farming tools and washing them for burial.
He said nearby houses had also been damaged, and some civilians were wounded and a 10-year-old child killed.
NATO said that they had no report of a mosque damaged or any civilians injured or killed.
Last year, NATO tightened the rules of engagement, including the use of airstrikes, if civilians were at risk. Deaths attributed to allied troops have since dropped by nearly 30 percent.
In the capital Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told reporters that once or twice a year Iran gives his office $700,000 to $975,000 for official presidential expenses. He said the U.S. has known about the Iranian assistance for years and that Washington also gives the palace “bags of money.”
There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials.
Karzai’s remarks came in response to report in The New York Times a day earlier that Iran was giving cash to the Afghan president’s chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, to buy his loyalty and promote Iranian interests in neighboring Afghanistan.
The newspaper quoted unnamed sources saying the money had been used to pay Afghan lawmakers, tribal elders — even Taliban commanders.
Karzai says several nations give his office money because it lacks revenue.
In an unrelated incident, an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan killed a NATO service member, the coalition said in a statement on Monday, bringing to 50 the number of coalition soldiers killed this month. The statement did not provide further details on Sunday’s death.
In the eastern province of Khost, a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle at a checkpoint, killing two civilians and a police officer, said provincial police chief Abdul Hakin Esaqzoy. He said five police and five civilians were also wounded.
The Afghan insurgency has traditionally been fiercest in the country’s south and east, along the border with Pakistan. Most of the insurgency’s top commanders are believed to be hiding in the mountainous Pakistan border area. NATO and Afghan troops have been trying to wrest back control of the southern provinces from the Taliban since July, but attacks and roadside bombs continue to occur daily.
NATO has also been trying to kill or capture Taliban leaders in airstrikes and in joint ground operations with the Afghan army.
Residents say the push has resulted in patches of security in the south, but the insurgency has stepped up attacks in other parts of the country, including the north, which has traditionally been more stable.
In northern Afghanistan Monday, a suicide attacker blew up his explosives-laden car in Pul-e-Khumri, the capital of Baghlan province, said Mahmood Akmal, a spokesman for the provincial governor.
The attacker died, but no one else was injured in the blast, which appeared to be targeting a coalition convoy, he said.
TITLE: Witness: 13 Die In Mexican Rehab Hit
AUTHOR: By Marian Martinez
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TIJUANA, Mexico — A client at a drug rehab center in the Mexican border city of Tijuana said Monday that a gang of armed men burst into the building and gunned down 13 recovering addicts there.
Prosecutors have not yet confirmed the number of dead. Police at the scene say at least 10 were killed.
The witness, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Jesus, for fear of reprisals, said he was attending a movie showing on the first floor of the center, and had stepped out for something to eat when the attack occurred late Sunday.
When he returned, his fellow clients told him the attackers had made the addicts lie on the floor, and then sprayed them with bullets. Other clients sleeping upstairs in the center also survived. There are normally about 45 clients at the center.
The attack on the ramshackle, privately run center is the first such mass killing at a rehab center in Tijuana, a city praised by some for its anti-gang efforts.
Several such attacks have killed dozens of recovering addicts in another border city, Ciudad Juarez, and a voice was heard over a police radio frequency later saying “this is a taste of Juarez.”
While police have not identified the motive in the Tijuana slayings, drug gangs have attacked such centers before to target rival gang members.
In Ciudad Juarez, prosecutor spokesman Arturo Sandoval said three municipal police officers were found shot to death outside their patrol vehicle on Sunday.
And in the southern Pacific coast state of Guerrero on Sunday, state police found the bound, executed bodies of six men on a highway outside the resort city of Acapulco.
The men had been blindfolded, their hands and feet bound, and shot to death with assault rifles, the state Public Safety Department reported.
The killers left three handwritten messages with bodies, a tactic frequently employed by Mexico’s drug gangs to threaten their rivals or authorities, but police routinely do not reveal the contents of such messages.
Nationwide, more than 28,000 people have been killed in drug gang violence since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed soldiers to battle the cartels in their strongholds in northern Mexico and along the Pacific coast.
While the government says most of the dead were involved in the drug trade, innocent bystanders have also died, like three people killed in the crossfire of a shootout between gunmen, police and soldiers in northern Coahuila state Sunday.
The victims were a 14-year-old boy and two women aged 18 and 47, according to a statement by the state prosecutors’ office.
In Ciudad Juarez, meanwhile, the death toll from a birthday party massacre late Friday rose to 14 when an 18-year-old man died of his wounds.
TITLE: France Counts Cost of Strikes
AUTHOR: By Elaine Ganley
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS — France’s massive strikes are costing the national economy up to 400 million euros ($562 million) each day, the French finance minister said Monday, as workers continued to block ports, oil refineries and trash incineration plants to protest a plan to raise the retirement age to 62.
France’s 12 refineries remained shut down Monday after nearly two weeks of protests despite raids last week by riot police that forced some to open access to fuel stocks. At ports in Marseille and Le Havre, dozens of tankers are still anchored offshore, waiting to unload.
Nearly 10,000 tons of garbage have been piling up in southern Marseille and its suburbs, and a garbage incineration plant outside Paris was shut down by strikers who huddled around a campfire and barbecue grills outside.
With French life expectancy increasing and the country’s debt soaring, French President Nicolas Sarkozy insists that the retirement age must be raised to save the pension system. Unions, meanwhile, see retirement at 60 as a cherished and hard-won right.
The Senate voted 177-153 on Friday to pass the pension reform, following its approval in the lower house. On Monday, a group of lawmakers from the upper and lower houses were trying to agree on the definitive version of the bill so there can be a final vote by both chambers later this week.
The bill’s passage through parliament has not deterred unions, which have already announced two new nationwide protests — for Thursday and Nov. 6.
The strikes have hit a wide swath of the economy and life in France, sporadically in some cases like at schools and post offices. A national train strike that started Oct. 12 has been tapering off, but oil refinery workers, who control the crucial energy sector, have been striking steadily for about two weeks.
French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said on Europe-1 radio that it was difficult to put a daily price tag on the strikes, but she estimated it between 200 million euros and 400 million euros. Beyond that, the strikes are damaging France’s image, she said.
Lagarde said foreign news stations were constantly playing clips of the French protests.
“The territory’s attractiveness is put into question when you see images like that,” she said.
TITLE: Japan, India Sign Deal Aimed At Boosting Trade, Civilian Energy
AUTHOR: By Malcolm Foster
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TOKYO — The leaders of India and Japan signed a sweeping agreement Monday to increase trade and agreed to speed up talks toward a civilian nuclear energy deal — despite sensitivity in Japan over India’s past atomic test blasts.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the conclusion of nearly four years of negotiations on the economic partnership agreement a “historic achievement.”
The deal, which needs to be ratified by Japan’s parliament to come into force, slashes tariffs on goods from auto parts to bonsai plants and introduces measures to promote investment and deal with intellectual property rights.
“It will open up new business opportunities and lead to a quantum increase in trade and investment flows between our two countries,” Singh said at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Naoto Kan.
Forging this kind of pact is increasingly a priority for Japan, which sees itself falling behind regional rival South Korea in this area.
The deal could also be a step toward reducing Japan’s heavy dependence on the Chinese market after a spat over disputed islands has strained ties between Beijing and Tokyo and led to anti-Japanese protests in China, some calling for boycotts of Japanese products.
Despite the size of their economies, Japan and India have had limited trade, which totaled 636 billion yen, or about $7.7 billion, for the first six months of the year, just 1 percent of Japan’s global trade.
Trade with China, Japan’s top partner, totaled $176 billion over the same period.
Kan and Singh also agreed to speed up talks toward a civilian nuclear cooperation deal that would allow Japanese companies to export nuclear power generation technology and related equipment to India — a boost to Japan’s flagging economy.
But India’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has stirred up some public opposition to Tokyo’s decision to pursue talks with India on the matter.