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MOSCOW — Italian utility Enel scooped up a blocking stake in OGK-5 on Wednesday for $1.52 billion, driving up valuations in the power sector by paying an unprecedented premium of 18 percent to the market price. In a climate of tightening state control over strategic industries, Unified Energy System’s sell-off of all its assets is the country’s last large-scale privatization, and foreigner investors have not made many inroads into the power sector yet. “We are so happy that it was Enel,” said UES spokeswoman Tatyana Melyayeva. “Yes, because they are a foreign company, but also because they have real experience working in Russia.” The purchase of the 25.03 percent stake in OGK-5 in Yekaterinburg will bring Enel’s exposure to the Russian power sector to $4.4 billion. |
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INSIDE INVESTMENT
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The interior of the new pavilion of the Lenexpo exhibition center that is hosting the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. See special business section. |
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MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated on Wednesday that Russia had “firm solidarity” with Serbia on Kosovo, in a sign that Moscow is unwilling to change its stance on the Balkan province ahead of the Group of Eight summit. “The Serbian government has proposed the continuation of talks, and we support this. We will not agree to any unilateral imposition of a decision on Belgrade,” Lavrov told reporters at a meeting with Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic.
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All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Fifty-one people were detained during an overnight protest in Stavropol to denounce the killing of two students, police said Wednesday. Two were still being held Wednesday. About 1,000 young people took part in the protest, denouncing non-Russians and brawling with police. Most were skinheads and members of ultranationalist organizations such as the Movement to Stop Illegal Immigration, a Stavropol city police spokesman said by telephone. The slain students, Viktor Chadin and Pavel Blokhin, were stabbed to death Saturday night in what ultranationalists call an ethnic hate crime. The deaths came less than two weeks after an ethnic Chechen student, Gilani Atayev, was killed in a street brawl in the southern city. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin hinted Tuesday that Mayor Yury Luzhkov might stay on after his term ends in December, telling him that it was too early to retire. |
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 The majority of work on St. Petersburg’s dam is expected to be completed by the end of 2008, the Federal Agency for Construction and Housing (Rosstroi) announced this week. As a result, the agency will considerably reduce its spending in the city over the next few years to focus on infrastructure projects. |
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“Banks: Capitalization, Stability, Competitiveness” is the agenda of the 16th International Banking Congress, which runs June 6 through June 9 at Pribaltiiskaya Hotel in an event organized by the Central Bank of Russia and City Hall. |
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Despite a recent compromise in the conflict over the Mobi Dick container terminal in Kronshtadt, the Federal Agency for Construction and Housing (Rosstroi) and the Mobi Dick company continue to accuse each other of violating agreements. At a news conference on Monday, the Deputy Head of Rosstroi, Vladimir Blank, addressed Mobi Dick managers and shareholders with new accusations. “It’s the Finnish company’s unpredictability that is preventing Rosstroi from operating normally. With no legal right to do so, they are keeping hold of the land,” he claimed. It was evident that Blank prepared the accusations in advance. He easily switched the subject of the news conference around to Mobi Dick, holding up discreditable photographs of protesting Mobi Dick activists and extensively citing decrees and agreements concerning the company. |
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 St. Petersburg ranks as one of the regions in Russia with the lowest level of investment risk. In November last year the national rating agency Expert RA put the city in first place in a list of Russian regions with “the lowest investment risk in 2005-2006,” praising it for “the high efficiency of regional governance. |
 Foreign investment into the city economy is expected to rise more than one and a half times over the next three years to $8.6 billion, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko revealed May 23, at her annual address to the Legislative assembly. Experts consider this feasible. |
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Three seems to be the magic number for the economic forum in St. Petersburg this weekend. Three summits will be held over three days for 10,000 people — roughly triple the number who attended last year. |
 Last year St. Petersburg saw a record number of state-of-the-art shopping and retail centers and hypermarkets launched across the city. Veteran property consultants admit they have never registered such buoyancy in investment over the years of monitoring the market. Within the past twelve months alone property developers succeeded in nearly doubling the city’s stock of retail properties that meet international standards, having built more shops than in all the previous years of the new century put together. |
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 International investment funds have been increasingly active in St. Petersburg over the past twelve months. The city saw the first transactions involving the sale of lucrative properties. |
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The annual meeting of suppliers to Moscow’s Kremlin took place in the Kremlin’s Bolshoi Palace. A ceremony was held to award the regalia for new admissions to the Guild of Suppliers to the Moscow Kremlin. The ceremony’s guests then had the chance to view the “Suppliers to the Court of His Imperial Majesty – Suppliers to Moscow’s Kremlin” exhibition. |
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 This week’s Group of Eight summit is one that is likely to be a triumph of process over substance. The reasons for this are many and multifaceted, but at their core lie two fundamental problems. The first is that it is hard to imagine a serious discussion about global issues when so much of the globe is clearly absent. |
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Most problems faced by foreigners investing in Russia can be traced back to one common element: not fully appreciating the adversarial relationship between the government and the people. |
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 St. Petersburg and Venice have always been linked in the popular imagination sharing, as they do, an antique urban space defined by a network of canals, stucco clad architecture, and a booming tourist trade. But as St. Petersburg is busy cramming mirror-clad shopping malls into the fabric of its historic center, Venice is truly a museum of a city that takes its heritage to heart. |
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In a recently established tradition, pompous official events such as the Economic Forum this weekend are routinely accompanied with the most monstrous music imaginable. |
 The cradle of Russian classical culture — from ballet and opera to architecture — St. Petersburg is becoming a modern dance mecca, as the annual Open Look festival unfolds in the city. The international festival, which began Tuesday, continues until July 13 offering a wealth of modern dance performances. It is the ninth such festival and, its organizers say, is the leading festival of its kind in Russia. |
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 After The Plastic People of the Universe, the legend of Czechoslovakian artistic resistance which performed in St. Petersburg last November, comes DG 307, a band that represents another aspect of underground music in the Czech Republic over the past three decades which also comes to Russia for the first time, thanks to support from the Czech Center in Moscow. |
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In NTV’s new talk show, “Bitch Love,” a drag queen called Zaza Napoli gathers confessions of passion, betrayal and obsession from a series of people who used to be famous at some point in the early 1990s. She also meets some carefully selected freaks, who aren’t gilded by the rays of fame but at least have a missing limb or two. Last week’s show began with a singer called Polina Griffis who used to be in the pop group A-Studio. She said that her ex-husband, a Danish singer, used to beat her up and lie around in a drunken stupor; then the camera cut to him at home with his new girlfriend, who said they were in love. They certainly seemed happy and quite possibly unaware of how that footage was going to be used. |
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 The Musical Olympus festival is celebrating its 12th year this summer. Among the many international festivals it has a unique mission of acquainting the public with young, stellar performers who are at the start of their professional careers. |
 The legend of Sergei Diaghilev and his ballet troupe is brought back to life at a new exhibition at the the Mikhailovsky (Engineer’s) Castle of the Russian Museum. The show, titled “Memory Album,” is drawn from the collection of the Italian dancer and choreographer Tony Candeloro, and shows his fascination for the atmosphere of the period and the myth surrounding the Ballets Russes, the company that Diaghilev formed in France in the early years of the 20th century. |
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 On June 20 St. Petersburg’s Military-Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signals Corps, simply known as the Artillery Museum, will a new exhibition called “A Matter of Honor: The Duel in Russia from the 17th Century to the beginning of the 20th Century. |
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An ambitious book by Robert Service pieces together the history of world communism — in all its forms. Comrades came in many varieties: the quintessential revolutionary icon Che Guevara; the most famous 20th-century artist, Pablo Picasso; the Cambodian mass murderer Pol Pot; and the now nonagenarian Spanish Civil War veteran from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Moe Fishman. The gentle Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin and the gray bureaucrat Konstantin Chernenko; the self-sacrificing activists in the Resistance during World War II and the self-aggrandizing functionaries of the ruling party elites of Eastern Europe; M.N. Roy of India and Agostinho Neto of Angola — they all proudly identified themselves as communists. |
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 Through whatever mechanism Russian immigrants managed to make the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn their own — be it demographic evolution or intelligent real estate design — things sure worked out well. |
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Stroganoff Steak House // 4 Konnogvardeisky Boulevard. Tel: 314 5514 // Open daily from midday to midnight // Major credit cards accepted // Menu in English and Russian // Dinner for three with alcohol 3,410 rubles ($132) This must be something of a trend — the number of excellent restaurants opening over the last few months on the other side of St. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
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