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 With more than 100,000 illegal immigrants working in St. Petersburg at the end of 2006, according to Fontanka.ru, amendments to the immigration law that came into effect on Jan. 15 were aimed at tightening the responsibility for companies employing them. But more than a week after the new regulations were introduced, confusion surrounds the amendments. “The lines are seemingly endless, it is impossible to move here or even get a copy of the application form,” a woman who spoke on condition of anonymity at the St. Petersburg office of the Federal Migration Service, or FMS, told the St. Petersburg Times on Monday. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Executive Chef Colin Flood attending the official opening of the Caviar Bar at the Angleterre Hotel on Monday. The Caviar Bar is on the corner of Voznesensky Prospekt and Malaya Morskaya Ulitsa. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that he would seek to speed up the construction of pipelines delivering oil and gas directly to European customers in a bid to ease concerns over the country’s ability to act as a dependable energy supplier. “We will in the most active way possible develop our transport network in order to have the opportunity to deliver our resources to our main consumers directly,” Putin said after two hours of talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
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MOSCOW — Russia’s ambassador to Georgia, Vyacheslav Kovalenko, was scheduled to return to Tbilisi on Monday, three months after he was recalled in response to the detention of several Russian military officers on suspicion of espionage. While the decision suggests an easing of tensions between the two countries, its impact could be dampened by Tbilisi’s plan to raise the issue of Russian sanctions against Georgia in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe this week. |
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MOSCOW — Alexei Frenkel, charged last week with organizing the murder of Central Bank official Andrei Kozlov, claims that the bank is plagued by corruption and involved in shady financial transactions. |
All photos from issue.
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LONDON — Former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko may have survived a first attempt to poison him with radioactive polonium-210 more than two weeks before receiving the dose that killed him, the BBC reported on Monday. “How to poison a spy”, a documentary by the BBC’s Panorama program, said a first attempt may have occurred on Oct. 16 last year at the Itsu sushi restaurant in London’s Piccadilly. Itsu first came to attention in the investigation into Litvinenko’s murder because of a meeting he held there with Italian contact Mario Scaramella on Nov. 1, the day the Russian fell violently ill. But the BBC said radioactive contamination discovered there by investigators was in a different part of the restaurant from where Litvinenko and Scaramella were sitting. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A competitor taking part in the second stage of the FIM Indoor Trial 2007 world championship on Saturday at the Ice Palace. The event was won by Tony Bou. |
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MOSCOW — A group of mostly United Russia deputies has submitted a bill to the State Duma that would allow authorities to bar public gatherings and marches two weeks before and after elections. Public Chamber members sharply criticized the bill Friday, and presidential administration deputy head Vyacheslav Surkov promised later in the day that the bill would be softened.
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MOSCOW — Pop singer Murat Nasyrov died Friday night after jumping from his fifth-floor apartment in northern Moscow. Police said he was under the influence of drugs. Nasyrov, 37, perhaps best-known for the 1990s hit “Malchik Khochet v Tambov,” donned a colorful outfit, hung a camera around his neck to take a self-portrait and then leaped from the balcony, RIA-Novosti reported Saturday, citing investigators. |
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Ninety-seven percent of the legal production of one of the world’s rarest industrial products — the intensely radioactive isotope polonium-210 — takes place at a closely guarded nuclear reactor near the Volga River, 700 kilometers southeast of Moscow. |
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The first signs of contamination were the traces of radiation on the laboratory desk of Israeli physicist Dror Sadeh, who was experimenting with an exotic radioisotope called polonium-210. Sadeh, part of Israel’s nuclear program in the 1950s, had taken what he thought were adequate precautions against the hyperactive element. |
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MOSCOW — Russia will equally split all new offshore oil and gas fields between state firms Rosneft and Gazprom, further limiting foreign and private access to its energy, a newspaper said on Monday. Vedomosti business daily quoted government sources as saying the decision was taken at a meeting of President Vladimir Putin and government officials last week. |
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MOSCOW — GV Gold, Russia’s eighth-largest gold miner, on Monday set an offer price for a planned share float that values the company at between $428 million and $515 million. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — The total number of transactions using UNIStream reached $1.85 billion last year compared to $750 million in 2005, the company said last week in a statement. In the CIS, the money transfer market grew 70 percent last year and UNIStream estimates its share at 25 percent. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — Karusel increased sales more than fourfold to $360.6 million last year, RBC reported Monday. In 2005 Karusel reported sales of $84.3 million. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — The National Reserve Bank’s St. Petersburg office doubled the number of mortgages it lent in 2006, Interfax reported Monday. The St. Petersburg office issued mortgages worth a total of $14.4 million. Since 2004 the bank has granted 460 mortgages to city residents worth a total of $25 million. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — Pulkovo airport increased passenger turnover by 9.6 percent last year up to 5.1 million passengers, Interfax reported Friday. According to the airport’s statement, Pulkovo dealt with over 2. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — St. Petersburg’s budget surplus accounted for 14.8 percent of all profits in 2006, Interfax cited vice-governor Mikhail Oseyevskiy as saying Friday. The city earned 215.2 billion rubles ($8.1 billion) and spent 183.4 billion rubles. The budget surplus accounted for 31. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — Freight turnover at the St. Petersburg Sea Port group of companies decreased by 10 percent last year to 11.8 million tons, Interfax reported Monday. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — Eurosib-Terminal, a logistic affiliate of the St. Petersburg-based group Eurosib, launched a new service — transportation of export and import cargoes in container block trains between First Container Terminal and Eurosib-Predportovy logistic terminal, the company said Monday in a statement. |
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TOKYO — Japan and Russia will on Tuesday begin their first high-level talks in four years as Tokyo aims to build a stable, long-term energy relationship with Moscow. |
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MOSCOW — RusAl, which produces about 10 percent of the world’s aluminum, will explore natural gas resources in Papua New Guinea as a potential source of power for aluminum projects in the region. RusAl said Friday that it had signed a memorandum with Papua New Guinea’s Ministry of Petroleum and Energy to explore jointly the potential for energy and aluminum developments based on the country’s natural gas resources. |
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MOSCOW — A bankruptcy receiver said Friday that initial valuation estimates showed the assets of bankrupt oil firm Yukos might be worth more than $22 billion. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s TMK, the world’s second-largest producer of steel pipes for the oil and gas sector, boosted shipments by 3.2 percent last year to an all-time high of 3.018 million tonnes. TMK, which raised over $1 billion listing nearly a quarter of its shares in October, said on Monday its share of Russian steel pipe exports rose to 56. |
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Ford, which emerged as the country’s best-selling foreign carmaker in 2006, plans to increase production at its Russian plant by 20 percent and sell a total of 150,000 units this year, Ford Russia president Henrik Nenzen said. |
 With babushkas now chatting on their cell phones and kids sending text messages to their school friends, mobile phone operators in Russia’s saturated market are pushing their clients to talk more to boost revenues. The mobile boom started a few years later than much of Europe’s, and firms have rushed to amass clients and gain market share, handing out free SIM cards and splurging cash on advertising. |
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American IT giant Hewlett-Packard announced plans to open a research center in St. Petersburg on Monday. Local experts considered the move positive, both for HP and Russian software developers. |
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MOSCOW — Services conglomerate Sistema is interested in buying a minority stake in Telecom Italia from Italy’s Pirelli group, Kommersant quoted Sistema’s president as saying Friday. “This giant telecommunications company is undergoing wide-scale restructuring and that is why things are complicated there,” Sistema president Alexander Goncharuk told the paper. |
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YEREVAN, Armenia — The Turkish-Armenian border has been shut for 14 years because of a dispute rooted in the centuries-old suspicions between Muslims and Christians in this remote part of the world. |
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It’s a tale of two firms, or rather two think tanks, (construction bureaus.) Both have a rich history of submarine design, with good contracts and comprehensive state funding. Obviously this was in the good old Soviet times, when the Army and Navy were not areas where one economized. The general constructors of both firms were respected masterminds, top experts in military shipbuilding and organization. In the early 1990s each enterprise had the same strengths and weaknesses. The number of contracts shrunk along with state prosperity; only limited funds were available for new research and development and even salaries often went unpaid. |
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Russia’s temporary halt to oil supplies through the pipeline crossing Belarus earlier this month was the latest in a sequence of public relations disasters for the Kremlin. The West’s romance with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia ended with the Yukos affair and since then Russia has generally gotten bad press, even when it had a good case. The Sakhalin-2 affair is a good example.
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At least one good thing has come out of the absurdly warm weather so far this winter. Even though the high temperatures cannot be attributed to global warming, politicians and many in the business community are paying more attention to this issue. The European Commission, for example, has announced an ambitious plan to cut European Union greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, and by 30 percent if the United States and other leading polluters sign on to the program. |
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Angela Merkel has a very different attitude to Russia from the last three or four German chancellors, perhaps because she grew up in East Germany, under Russian control. She’s not anti-Russian (she speaks the language fluently), but she doesn’t think that they deserve special treatment. |
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Even as U.S. President George W. Bush proposed a new strategy for victory in Iraq on Jan. 10, those who engineered the war kept on producing self-serving explanations of what, if anything, actually went wrong. |
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Unless projections by economists turn out to be radically wide of the mark, the Russian economy should post strong growth numbers in 2007 for a seventh straight year. Although 60 percent or more of the growth can be attributed directly to high world commodities prices and the resultant high profits for exporters, particularly in the energy sector, annual gross domestic product growth between 4. |
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Georgia is a small, mountainous country that somehow grips the imagination and commands a large amount of international attention. Despite having a population of less than 5 million and no natural resources, it is currently the main cause of the new mini-cold war between Russia and the United States, its government condemned as a militaristic threat by President Vladimir Putin, and just as extravagantly praised not only by U. |
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BAYGUSHI, Vladimir Region — A devastating fire, skyrocketing gasoline prices and the daily hardships of rural life would probably persuade any hardy farmer to hang up his sickle. Not Viktor Lomakin. The 54-year-old construction worker turned hog farmer says his indefatigable work ethic has sustained him since he started his farm in 1993. |
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 LONDON — Waste oil was seen coming from a stricken cargo ship off the southern English coast on Monday and coastguards said it had spread to around 8 kilometers. The MSC Napoli, abandoned by its crew after being holed during storms last Thursday, was deliberately run aground at Lyme Bay in Devon to stop it from sinking. |
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BRUSSELS — The European Union on Monday put a brave face on the lead of Serb hardliners in a key general election, insisting pro-West parties could still hold sway in parliament and go on to form a new government. |
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JERUSALEM — A retired general with years of experience fighting Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas has been chosen as the new chief of Israel’s armed forces, Israeli media reported on Monday. Gaby Ashkenazy, 52, an infantry commander and currently director of the Defense Ministry, will replace Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz who quit last week over his failure to crush Hezbollah in the July-August war, they said. |
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LONDON — In a tearful confession on Sunday, Jade Goody, the reality television star accused of bigotry and bullying on the “Celebrity Big Brother” show, has admitted that her comments were racist. |
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INDIANAPOLIS — Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy and quarterback Peyton Manning were reveling in the prospect of a trip to the Super Bowl on Sunday, after the team registered a long overdue victory over the New England Patriots. “We had to go through a great champion, and we got down 18 points to them and that’s not easy,” Dungy said after his team’s 38-34 NFC championship game win. |
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PARIS — Abbe Pierre, a Roman Catholic priest who renounced wealth to campaign for the homeless and became one of France’s most revered men, died on Monday aged 94. |
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 MELBOURNE — Top seed Maria Sharapova edged out Vera Zvonareva 7-5 6-4 to reach the Australian Open quarter-finals for the third time in her career on Monday. The 19-year-old Russian clinched a tight opening set to take the initiative and despite recovering from 5-2 down in the second, the 22nd seed could not fend off Sharapova, who won in an hour and 46 minutes on Rod Laver Arena. |
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LONDON — Late goals by Robin van Persie and Thierry Henry gave Arsenal a thrilling 2-1 win over Manchester United on Sunday, shattering the visitors’ bid to open a nine-point lead in the Premier League. |
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