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A scandal is brewing over the results of the elections to the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly as accusations of fraud are made and witnesses come forward with claims of clear irregularities at polling stations. Just Russia candidate Sergei Andreyev, who lost his seat to United Russia rival Anton Sikharulidze, an Olympic figure skating champion, has alleged massive ballot stuffing and a conspiracy intended to help Sikharulidze win. “Widespread ballot stuffing, which resulted in Sikharulidze unjustly winning the seat in the parliament, occurred at ten polling stations [nos. 539-548] in my district,” Andreyev said. “On average, between 800 and 1,000 fake ballots were stuffed into ballot boxes at these stations.” Andreyev said the fake ballots were printed on paper that differed in quality from the official ballots. |
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SPADE WORK
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A woman looking at a new monument to dvorniki, traditional Russian yard and street cleaners, on Ploshchad Ostrovskogo. The monument stands before the Housing Maintenance Committee building. |
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ULYANOVSKAYA MINE, Russia — A methane explosion killed 61 people when it ripped through a coal mine in Russia on Monday, a regional spokesman said, the deadliest accident in the area in about three years. Almost 40 miners remained underground several hours after the explosion at the Ulyanovskaya mine, in Siberia’s Kemerovo region. The media quoted rescue workers as saying the evacuation was being hampered by smoke underground.
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The Gazprom-City development has been renamed and will be funded differently, Gazprom chairman Alexei Miller announced in St. Petersburg on Friday, although a controversial skyscraper that forms the centerpiece of the plan looks set to stay. The radical overhaul of the $2.3 billion project means that a planned office complex will now be a community and business center to be known as the Okhta Center and jointly funded by Gazprom and City Hall. |
All photos from issue.
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About 1,000 supporters of the liberal and socialist opposition united Sunday in St. Petersburg to protest recent regional elections. The demonstrators, gathered around a monument to Vladimir Lenin, shouted: “For honest elections!” and brandished posters with slogans criticizing President Vladimir Putin. The elections on March 11, seen as a dress rehearsal for December’s State Duma election, handed Kremlin supporters a hefty majority and squeezed out its most outspoken opponents. United Russia won the biggest share of the vote in 13 of the 14 regions where elections took place. A Just Russsia, another pro-Kremlin party, led in the other region. |
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 MOSCOW — At least six people died and more than 20 were injured when a Tu-134 jet operated by UTAir crashed Saturday morning in heavy fog at Samara airport. |
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Friday ordered former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov to give up what it said was an improperly obtained luxury villa. The Federal Property Management Agency filed a suit against Kasyanov demanding that he return to the state the expensive riverside dacha and surrounding 11.5 hectare estate known as Sosnovka-1. Kasyanov dismissed Friday’s ruling as groundless, repeating earlier statements that he was the victim of a smear campaign started by the authorities after he announced he was joining the opposition and would run for president in the election next March. “I expected this decision,” Kasyanov said, Interfax reported. |
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 Scenes of institutionalized xenophobia, violent hate crimes and genocide are depicted in four movies and a photo exhibition exposing a Russian-European-African triangle of intolerance to be displayed at Dom Kino starting Wednesday, to coincide with the UN’s World Day Against Racism. |
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MOSCOW — The State Duma is moving to increase fines for reckless motorists to slash roadway deaths, prompting activists to denounce the plan as one-sided, ineffective and unfair. The measure, which passed the first of three readings on Friday, would increase the fines paid by motorists “to the extent that no one would want to pay them,” Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said. |
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Aricom Plc., an Anglo-Russian developer of mineral resources, has acquired a majority stake in the St. Petersburg-based mining design institute OJSC Giproruda, the group said Friday in a statement. Giproruda’s key area of specialization is iron ore. Aricom sees it as a specific benefit in terms of the analysis and design of a number of the group’s future and existing development projects. Giproruda will continue its work with other clients but will be given the opportunity to focus on Aricom’s portfolio of projects. “Aricom’s project portfolio now contains a sizeable amount of reserves and resources which are all located within 500 miles of the Russian Chinese border,” said Jay Hambro, Chief Executive of Aricom. |
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 St. Petersburg was duly present at the world’s biggest travel fair, the 41st ITB, that took place in Berlin from Mar. 7 through Mar. 11. Yet rather than consolidating itself as a recognizable brand on the international tourism market, the city left visitors confused and unimpressed. |
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At a Premium ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Ingosstrakh group of insurance companies collected premiums worth a total of 422 million rubles ($16.2 million) in the Northwest region last year, Interfax reported Friday. Premiums from voluntary insurance accounted for 292.566 million rubles (with the exception of life insurance). Insurance payments last year totaled 250.239 million rubles. Payments for compulsory third party motor insurance totaled 95.712 million rubles. Mineral Deposits ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Phosphorit industrial group, part of Yevrokhim holding, will invest 2 billion rubles ($77 million) to 2.8 billion rubles into development by 2010, Interfax reported Friday. |
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 Considering that “Good Morning, Russia!” claims to have 5 million viewers nationwide every morning, it’s surprising that its presenter Vladislav Zavyalov is not more famous. |
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 On Wednesday, there was a major reception at the British Embassy in Moscow to mark the departure of the Department for International Development, or DFID, the British government’s bilateral development program. DFID has been active in Russia since the early 1990s and has funded over 800 projects. |
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Transfer pricing rules were first introduced in Russia in 1999 and since then the “arm’s length” concept has remained relatively immature. The weakness of the legal framework played a great role in the notorious Yukos tax case where the tax authorities were forced to apply and further develop a “bad faith taxpayer” concept to penalize the company for tax evasions instead of adjusting the intra-group resale prices used. |
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MOSCOW — Warm weather continued to support Russian industrial production’s strong annual growth rates last month, data released by the State Statistics Service showed Friday. February industrial output rose 8.7 percent year-on-year after a gain of 8.4 in January, bringing year-to-date growth to 8.7 percent compared to just 2.7 percent in the same period a year ago. “The reason behind the increase is the same as last month — previous year’s weather,” said Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at UralSib Bank. He said the strong year-on-year growth rates in February and January were due to a low base for growth provided by an extremely cold winter in 2006. |
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 PRETORIA — South Africa is considering helping Russian state oil firm Rosneft and gas giant Gazprom in making liquid fuel from natural gas or coal, a cabinet minister said on Monday. |
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ST. PETERSBURG - Swedish construction concern Ruric AB plans to invest up to $5 billion into real estate projects in St. Petersburg by 2017, Interfax reported Friday citing the company’s general director Thomas Zakariasson. Ruric will construct about 1.5 million square meters of commercial real estate. |
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 Both the European Union and Russia are facing uncertain times. The EU remains deadlocked over the future of the constitutional treaty designed to strengthen the union and streamline its decision-making processes. In Russia all eyes are on the presidential election next March to see who will take over the Kremlin. |
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Nearly 150 years ago, poet Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy wrote a tongue-in-cheek history of Russia, with the oft-quoted refrain: “Abundant is our land, / It lacks only order. |
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The final shape of reforms to the country’s system of higher education appears to have already been decided. The government has already signed off on draft legislation that calls for universities to switch over gradually from the current system, which is geared toward the preparation of specialists and based on a five-year program, to a two-stage system offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees. |
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Last Sunday brought the last major elections ahead of the State Duma vote in December. These affected almost every region, including 14 that elected legislative assemblies, two that held referendums on merging territories within their regions, and others that held municipal elections. |
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MOSCOW — The barbed wire and watchtower visible through an archway across from the Marriot Hotel stand in stark contrast to the restaurants and upscale boutiques on Moscow’s fashionable Ulitsa Petrovka. They are part of one of the city’s most unusual, and neglected, museums, devoted to educating people about the horrors of the Soviet forced-labor camps. |
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 BAGHDAD — Four in five Iraqis have little or no confidence in U.S.-led forces and most think their presence is making security worse, but despite that only about a third want them to leave now, a poll showed on Monday. Four years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, insurgents kept up the pressure with bomb attacks in Kirkuk and Baghdad. |
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GAZA CITY — The BBC appealed on Monday for help to find a veteran British correspondent who was kidnapped at gunpoint in the Gaza Strip a week ago, saying concern was mounting for his well-being. |
 BEIJING — The United States said Monday it has struck a deal to release 25 million dollars of frozen North Korean assets, paving the way for progress in talks on ending the regime’s nuclear weapons program. The move was announced as envoys from six nations met in Beijing to resume round-table negotiations that had been stymied by a long-running dispute over the U. |
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HELSINKI — Finnish opposition conservatives made strong gains in a general election on Sunday, coming a close second to the ruling Center Party and staking a claim to a place in a new coalition government. |
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KARACHI, Pakistan — Several times after a poor performance by the Pakistan team he coached, Bob Woolmer would remind journalists grilling him that there were more important things in life than cricket. Inevitably, however, Pakistani newspapers on Monday linked his death from a suspected heart attack to the national team’s World Cup defeat to Ireland, a minnow of the cricketing world. |
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DUBLIN — Ireland’s hopes of a first Six Nations title since 1985 were undone twice by last-minute French tries in yet another tournament of high expectation that ended in frustration. |
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