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DAVOS, Switzerland — Troika Dialog brought Russia to Davos — and the invitation-only party offered a lot more than five Moscow chefs sending meat pies and blini out of the kitchen. Simply put, the glitzy gathering with Olympic stars at the Valliant Arena Ice Stadium on Thursday night was the place to be for investors wishing to see Russia’s best side. For investors with lingering reservations, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin sat down with them at a private meeting the next day. Worries about Russia’s future were far from people’s minds Thursday night. Kudrin, the highest-ranking Russian official to attend this year’s World Economic Forum, which ended Sunday, joined at least 200 guests in enthusiastically applauding from the bleachers as 17 champion skaters twirled on the ice below. |
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 Twenty five political and social organizations gathered peacefully on Saturday to protest against Kremlin policies, and those of its ally City Hall, as well as to “demonstrate both the autonomy and cooperation of the members of social movements,” as the Movement for Civil Initiatives (DGI), the local NGO that coordinated the rally, put it in a statement. |
 St. Petersburg on Saturday celebrated the 64th anniversary of the complete end of the Siege of Leningrad perpetrated on the city by Adolf Hitler’s army during World War II. To mark the date, residents laid flowers at the places connected to the 1941-1944 blockade, including a memorial at 14 Nevsky Prospekt; on Victory Square (Ploshchad Pobedy); and the Piskaryovskoye and Serafimovskokye cemeteries where many of the hundreds of thousands of city residents who perished in the Siege are buried. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Semyon Mogilevich, a suspected organized-crime boss who is wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigations for alleged fraud and racketeering, has been arrested along with Arbat Prestige owner Vladimir Nekrasov. A posse of about 50 armed police commandos detained Nekrasov and Ukrainian-born Mogilevich near the city’s World Trade Center, the Interior Ministry said Friday. The Ukrainian security service, the SBU, has investigated the purported involvement of Mogilevich with RosUkrEnergo, the controversial gas trader that acts as a middleman in Russian gas exports to Ukraine. Mogilevich, 61, was using the name Sergei Shnaider when detained. Mogilevich’s lawyer, Alexander Pogonchikov, confirmed in a Friday interview that his client was born in Ukraine as Semyon Mogilevich, but has changed his name to Sergei Shnaider. |
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MUSICAL CHAIRS
REUTERS/Dmitry Astakhov/RIA Novosti
First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (r) and opera singer Yelena Obraztsova attend the first night of ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ at the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg on Saturday. |
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Wrong Home Destroyed MOSCOW (AP) — Returning home after an absence can mean unpleasant surprises — a leaky roof, a pet’s mess, even a break-in. But a Nizhny Novgorod woman got a nastier surprise when she returned from her dacha. Her home was gone, torn down mistakenly by construction workers clearing a site, NTV television reported Thursday “There was nothing left, not even a log,” Lyudmila Martemyanova said.
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MOSCOW — The government on Thursday assigned Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin to set up a body to combat inflation as it seeks tools other than ruble appreciation to rein in price rises, which soared again in January. The government said in a statement that Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov had asked Kudrin, the country’s chief economic policymaker and advocate of prudent budget spending, “to work out effective market tools to stabilize prices.” The Cabinet will meet Jan. 31 to debate measures, which may include caps on foreign borrowings by large state firms. The move comes as consumer prices jumped steeply in the first three weeks of January, putting new pressure on the government and the Central Bank to let the ruble appreciate — one of only a few tools they have to fight inflation. |
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 City Hall will sign a contract for the reconstruction of the Apraksin Dvor complex with Glavstroi-Spb, after the tender committee chose a project designed by Chris Wilkinson over that of Norman Foster. |
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Sberbank Looks East MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, aims to expand into China and India and will begin talks on opening branches in the world’s two most-populated countries this year, Chief Executive Officer German Gref said. State-run Sberbank also wants to expand into Vietnam and through the former Soviet republics, Gref told reporters Friday at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It is one of the tasks in our strategy,” Gref said. “These markets are interesting, however the process of entering them is a lengthy one.” Bank Assets Secure NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Switzerland’s Noga has not blocked any of the Russian Central Bank’s assets, the Russian Finance Ministry stated Friday. |
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 The new Finnish Consul General to St. Petersburg says his main goal is to ease the mobility of people between Russia and Finland as much as possible. “No doubt, the first aim for my time as a consul will be to improve the visa issuing procedures for people traveling to Finland,” said Olli Perheentupa, 60, who was appointed to St. |
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St. Petersburg has a deficit of 300,000 car parking spaces, and the number of cars in St. Petersburg increased by 28 percent last year up to 1.35 million cars, the press service for the city governor said last week in a statement. Local officials plan to improve the situation by developing multistory car parks, for which purpose Governor Valentina Matviyenko has ordered district authorities and City Hall committees to analyze available land plots and find opportunities for new developments. |
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MOSCOW — The Moscow District Federal Arbitration Court on Friday ordered beleaguered oil company Russneft to pay 20 billion rubles ($800 million) in back taxes. |
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There are situations when weaknesses can be converted into advantages. While the international banking sector is weathering a storm, Russian banks, whose involvement in international business is not very extensive, are still feeling brave. Last week I sent a short questionnaire to eight banks with a significant retail portfolio, asking what they expect for the retail market in 2008 and what factors could slow its development. Bankers are cautious in their forecasts for 2008, but none of them had any doubt that the amount of retail banking will grow — perhaps not as fast as in 2007, when it doubled in some sectors such as mortgages and increased by a good 50 percent in general, but 30 percent growth is generally expected, according to my small survey. |
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 The annual World Economic Forum is rightly perceived as a global barometer. But the superb sunshine in Davos these days cannot avoid the shadows of the financial crisis that have enveloped the world, casting an atmosphere of gloom and doom on this year’s meeting. |
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Modern banking is peppered with tales of rogue traders blowing holes in their employers’ balance sheets. The case of Jerome Kerviel, the rogue trader at France’s Societe Generale, is, however, in a class of its own. When Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank, in 1995, risk management became a more serious business. |
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In my bi-weekly Vedomosti columns, I’ve been expressing alarm about turbulence in global financial markets and the weakness of the U.S. dollar, with particular attention paid to what it could mean for the Russian economy. In particular, I have warned that Russia could become a weak link in the global economic system — just as it was in 1998. It is heavily dependent on raw materials and has become spoiled by record high commodity prices. Its economic structure is both inefficient and nontransparent and, most important, its neo-Soviet political system, for all its outward solidity, may prove brittle when stressed by an economic downturn. The online edition of Vedomosti has a forum where registered readers can sound off and discuss articles. |
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 The Beijing Olympics this summer were supposed to be China’s coming-out party, celebrating the end of nearly two centuries of weakness, poverty and humiliation. |
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1968 was truly a momentous year. Polish students staged protests, and the communist intellectuals of Czechoslovakia, who led the reform movement called the Prague Spring, attempted to build “socialism with a human face.” The demonstrations by Parisian students in May were the climax of 1968. We saw the unarmed uprising with its barricade of the Sorbonne and President de Gaulle’s hasty exodus from the city. |
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MATESIH, Indonesia — Former Indonesian president Suharto was laid to rest with full military honours Monday, ending a controversial chapter in the history of the nation he ruled with an iron fist for 32 years. The ex-dictator, whose rule became a byword for rampant corruption and rights abuses despite huge economic progress, was buried at a family mausoleum in the town of Matesih. |
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CANBERRA, Australia — An Australian teenage girl has become the world’s first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a “one-in-six-billion miracle. |
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ZAGREB, Croatia — Russians Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin were crowned European figure skating ice dance champions Friday after a perfect performance in the final of the event’s three legs. Saturday’s competition saw Italian Carolina Kostner capture her second successive women’s title, after Czech Tomas Verner had won the men’s event with a flawless free skating performance Thursday. |
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Brit to Coach Finland HELSINKI (Reuters) — Finland appointed Briton Stuart Baxter as head coach on a two-year contract on Monday, the Finnish FA said. |
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Issues Archive