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MOSCOW — Coming against the background of boardroom battles at TNK-BP and Norilsk Nickel, a conference Friday on the issue of corporate governance appeared to be either the lucky beneficiary of current events or the victim of bad timing. Senior government officials made the most of the situation, stressing Russia’s commitment to achieving higher standards of corporate governance, both at state-owned companies and private corporations. Newly appointed First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov pushed the government’s message at the conference, emphasizing that better corporate governance would be vital as the country embarked on enormous new investment to develop infrastructure and diversify the economy. “If Russia is to become a major financial center, we need to embrace evolving corporate standards and be very clear about the niche we want to fill,” Shuvalov said. |
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LIVING DOLLS!
Ilya Naymushin / Reuters
Girls in folk dresses perform a dance during a procession in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk during the celebration of International Children’s Day on June 1. |
 Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of reports about the key challenges facing Russia today. It’s early evening at the upscale Scandinavia restaurant, and its courtyard a few meters off Tverskaya Ulitsa in Moscow is starting to fill up with customers. Bustling servers bring out plates piled high with beef burgers, while diners indoors tuck into the pricier steaks and fish.
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The Kuibyshevsky Federal Court on Monday ruled that the Soldiers’ Mothers human rights group and Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper must pay 22,000 rubles ($895) in damages to military unit No. 3727 of the Russian Interior Ministry’s signal corps for publicizing cases of St. Petersburg recruits allegedly being forced into prostitution. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he approved of a plan to give Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia autonomy but not full independence. But Georgia accused Moscow of trying to annex the region after the Defense Ministry sent unarmed troops on Saturday to rebuild a railroad in Abkhazia. |
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TBILISI — Georgia summoned Russia’s ambassador to its foreign ministry on Monday to protest against the deployment of about 400 Russian soldiers into the breakaway region of Abkhazia to repair damaged railway lines. |
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MOSCOW — Two men attacked and robbed lawyer Viktor Parshutkin on Friday, a few days after he successfully defended media activist Manana Aslamazyan against currency-smuggling charges. Parshutkin said the men attacked him with clubs at around 3 a.m. after a Moscow gypsy cab dropped him off on a dark street far from his central apartment. |
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Karabakh Talks in City MOSCOW (Reuters) — Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s leaders will meet on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum this week to discuss the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh for the first time since Armenia’s change of president, Interfax reported. |
 St. Petersburg has from 3,000 to 10,000 street children but their number is gradually decreasing, experts have said. “It’s hard to count these children and hard to give exact statistics. However, we have noticed that the number is decreasing,” Vera Klimova, coordinator of work with neglected children at Innovations Center, said at a press briefing dedicated to the problem last week. |
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Experts have raised concerns over the alarming rate of alcoholism and drug addiction in St. Petersburg, citing a lack ofboth public awareness and official commitment as major hindrances in their fight against substance abuse. |
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The third Russkoye Slovo (“Russian Word”) festival, the final stage of which took place in St. Petersburg late last month, named the winners of Russian language contests among children, students, teachers and families. Among the children’s winners were first-placed Marina Serenok, from Klimovo village in the Bryansk Oblast, Darya Kudanova, from Salavat in Bashkortostan (second), and Ilsiya Shaikhutdinova (third). In the final the children wrote a commentary to a video. Among the student winners, Dina Bobrova from Rostov-on-Don was victorious, while Lyudmila Shesterova, a teacher from Vladikavkaz, won the teacher’s contest. The Cherdantsevs from Chelyabinsk won the family contest. |
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 KORALLOVO, Moscow Region - When the prison gate opened, Marina Khodorkovskaya rushed toward the gray building, she said. She was only allowed to see her son, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for three hours, and she wanted to spend every possible minute with him. |
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MOSCOW — Ahead of a trip by President Dmitry Medvedev to Berlin this week, Germany’s foreign minister has met with a lawyer representing Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a German diplomatic source said Saturday. Foreign Minister Franz-Walter Steinmeier met an unidentified lawyer representing Khodorkovsky at a Moscow hotel during a visit to Russia in May, the German source said. The source declined to give further details. German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Steinmeier had discussed the possibility of getting Khodorkovsky transferred to Moscow on humanitarian grounds from his Chita prison, where he is serving an eight-year sentence. Medvedev will visit Berlin on Wednesday for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. |
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 Two years ago, a scandal raged about the prize-winning author Mikhail Shishkin’s alleged plagiarism of a diary written by a girl from Rostov-on-Don in the early 1900s. |
 Few people would associate the automobile with Soviet communism. Reflexively we link the car to the United States: from its birth as an icon of mass production in the era of Henry Ford to its status in American popular culture as a metaphor for mobility, freedom and youth rebellion. Yet, undoubtedly, the car had a life in the Soviet Union. |
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 Ideas were exchanged, projects presented and problems and solutions discussed by representatives from architectural bureaus from all over the world last week at the Architectural Dialog Forum which ran from May 23 through May 31. The main objective of the forum, according to Nikolai Fedotov, general director of the Artindex publishing and exhibition center, was “to facilitate the development of concrete recommendations, drawing on the experience of other countries in the form of dialog and discussions. |
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A consortium of Intarsia and PO Vozrozhdenie has won a tender for the reconstruction and restoration of the eastern wing of the General Staff Headquarters building on Palace Square, the Triumphal Arch and the adjoining internal courtyards. |
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LSR Plans Sale of Bonds MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — LSR Group, the Russian developer and maker of building materials, plans to sell 5 billion rubles ($210 million) of bonds. The St. Petersburg-based company registered the new issue and will sell the bonds when it believes “the market conditions to be most favorable,” the company said in a Regulatory News Service statement on Monday. Dixy Sales Increase 49% MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Dixy Group, Russia’s third-largest publicly traded supermarket chain, reported a first-quarter profit after debt-servicing costs fell and set a goal of expanding its store network by a quarter this year. Net income was $6. |
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 MOSCOW — TNK-BP’s embattled chief executive, Bob Dudley, on Saturday defiantly dismissed a call by the company’s Russian shareholders for him to quit and warned that boardroom infighting could threaten its future. |
 PARIS — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Friday that he would hike wages, pensions and social benefits to compensate for rising prices and smooth the effects of anti-inflation policy. “Through raising wages, pensions, social benefits and subsidies, we will try to minimize negative consequences of our anti-inflation policy for the people,” Putin said in an interview with the French daily Le Monde attended by Reuters and released on Saturday. |
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Getting hold of money is becoming more and more expensive for companies. A few months ago, they could borrow from Russian banks at about 12 percent interest, but now the interest rate has increased up to 14-16 percent. Businesses are appalled. But do they have any choice? Borrowers have nowhere to go and no other sources of money, several bankers have admitted when asked. Just a year ago, companies could issue eurobonds or borrow money abroad. But those times ended with the international financial crisis, which has decreased the wealth of European and American banks. Russian banks also have no more access to foreign financing. At the same time, wealthy Russian companies have withdrawn their money from the national banks in order to finance their new investment projects. |
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 Russia’s 15-year flirtation with the World Trade Organization intensified last week as multilateral consultations on accession resumed in Geneva. Although Russian WTO negotiators stumbled over still-unresolved issues - farm subsidies, export taxes on wood and Gazprom’s pricing policies — they were optimistic about its impending membership. |
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Everybody loves to hear exclusive and classified information — including CEOs of major corporations, editors of the largest newspapers and presidents and prime ministers, as well as ordinary citizens. For them, academic research that is obtained from open sources seems to carry little weight compared with a report compiled with the help of backroom informants. |
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 St. Petersburg-based Vadim Pak won a scholarship last year from MBS Worldwide. He started the MBA for Financial Managers and Finance Professionals in January 2008, and currently works as head of import and marketing at the St. Petersburg-based company Sotrans. “I trained as a medical doctor and then studied world economics at the St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University. I was looking for a U.K. |
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 Career enhancer, panacea for success — MBAs have much to offer, and they will continue to do so as MBAs continue to evolve to meet busy executives’ needs in the global market place, explains Nigel Banister, CEO of Manchester Business School Worldwide. |
 Elena Demidenko completed her MBA for Financial Managers and Finance Professionals last year at Manchester Business School Worldwide. She currently works for Deloitte & Touche in Sydney, Australia. “I was a Financial Controller at a shipping company when I enrolled on my MBA. |
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Manchester Business School Worldwide is launching its second MBA scholarship for Russian students to join the course in January 2009. The scholarship, which is worth $8,700 (403,089 rubles) and covers 50 percent of the MBA fees, can be won by answering the following question: “Explain in 1500 words how an MBA from Manchester Business School could benefit your career and your organisation in the context of Russia’s evolving business climate. |
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 For the past week, Russian television has been stoking the public’s passions over Estonia’s charges of war crimes against Arnold Meri. Judging from the coverage, you would think that serious domestic problems, such as increasing neo-Nazism or the lack of housing for veterans, have been resolved. |
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For a while in the mid-1970s, whenever I met an American, I would typically be the first person from the Soviet Union they had set their eyes on. I gladly practiced my English by relating to them the horrors of Communist oppression and lamenting the lack of freedom in the country that I left behind. |
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The U.S. presidential election campaign is entering its decisive phase. The candidates for the rival parties seem to have been determined, and now the real struggle begins. U.S. President George W. Bush is suffering record-low approval ratings, and his exit is eagerly awaited both at home and abroad. |
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WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nominating contest in Puerto Rico on Sunday, but still badly trails front-runner Barack Obama as he draws closer to clinching the party’s presidential race. Clinton’s win in Puerto Rico, a territory where residents are not allowed to vote in the November election, gave her more fuel for her argument that she has won more popular votes in the five-month nominating fight and is the best Democrat to face Republican John McCain. |
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VIENNA — Russia have been riding a wave of confidence in their Euro 2008 preparations after FC Zenit St. Petersburg’s UEFA Cup final success. With six members of Guus Hiddink’s squad at the club that outclassed Rangers in last month’s final—and a further five from 2005 UEFA Cup winners CSKA—there are plenty of players who have experienced top level battles. |
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Sweden was upset, the Netherlands cruised, Greece settled for a scoreless tie and Poland rallied to get a tie Sunday in European Championship warm-up matches. |
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LONDON — Lawrence Dallaglio signed off in style when the Wasps team he has served for 18 years outmuscled, outkicked and outlasted great rivals Leicester to win the English Premiership final 26-16 at Twickenham on Saturday. Wasps scored two first-half tries to lead 23-6 at halftime but two for Leicester closed things up and the difference was in the goalkicking of Wasps fullback Mark van Gisbergen, who landed six of his seven attempts, and Leicester flyhalf Andy Goode, who missed four from six. |
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PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad — Jermain Defoe's double strike helped England cruise to a 3-0 friendly victory against Trinidad and Tobago on Sunday. Fabio Capello must wish every match could be as easy as this stroll in the Caribbean sunshine at Port of Spain's Hasely Crawford Stadium. |
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BUDAPEST — Russia’s Ilya Frolov won the men’s modern pentathlon world championship on Sunday, easily beating the Czech Republic’s David Svoboda and Yahor Lapo of Belarus. Defending champion and world ranking’s leader Viktor Horvath, who started the last event in second place, was forced to pull out of the 3 kilometer cross country race with a leg injury. “After the riding event, I knew I have won,” Frolov said. “I’m the best runner (among pentathletes) in the world.” Frolov, last year’s world championship runner-up, took an early lead with solid shooting and fencing scores and never looked back. The day’s biggest surprise came before competition even started. |
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 NEW YORK — Jamaican sprinters electrified the Reebok grand prix in New York on Saturday with Usain Bolt setting a new 100 meters world record and Veronica Campbell-Brown posting the fastest time of the year in the women’s event. |
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