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MOSCOW — With its chief executive scuttling off to a secret location, dozens of foreign employees flooding out of the country and the threat of impending court battles, TNK-BP’s messy shareholder dispute has helped push Russia’s indexes into a downward spin. The location of CEO Robert Dudley remained unknown over the weekend to some of his closest colleagues, who insisted that the veil of secrecy would be lifted once he had succeeded in setting up the logistics to run Russia’s third-largest oil company from abroad. “No one is pretending it’s going to be perfect,” said one source inside the company. “But it was way less than perfect when he was here. |
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IN THE NAVY
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Sailors join in the celebrations of Navy Day on Palace Square on Sunday. On the same day it was announced that Russia would commission the construction of six aircraft-carriers and all necessary supporting vessels for the Russian fleet. |
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MOSCOW — Embattled coal and steel major Mechel, which had $6 billion wiped off its stock price after being accused by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of price-fixing, on Friday said it was ready to cooperate with the government. In a terse, conciliatory statement, the company said it agreed to help the government in combating rising prices, though it stopped short of promising to cut its coking-coal prices outright.
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The Regional Press Institute (RPI) was ordered to leave its premises in the House of Journalists by the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court last Tuesday, after ruling in favor of City Hall’s Property Committee (KUGI). KUGI originally sued RPI over non-payment of rent in November, but the case hinged on a disputed lease. |
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MOSCOW — Russian armed forces will commission half a dozen aircraft carriers and the necessary support ships, a senior commander said Sunday during Navy Day celebrations. |
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NYON, Switzerland (AP) — UEFA Cup champion Zenit St. Petersburg was fined $58,000 by UEFA on Thursday for racist behavior by its fans. The fine was for racist chants directed at players from Marseille during a UEFA Cup match in Russia in March. Zenit fans also broke UEFA rules by unveiling a political banner and setting off fireworks. |
All photos from issue.
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Eight local investors who have been cheated out of their properties are continuing a hunger strike aimed at getting City Hall to intervene, as city officials remain adamant that disputes should be settled in court. The hunger strike is already taking a physical and emotional toll on its participants, who have begun to faint and display other dangerous symptoms. Since the start of the strike on July 21, five people have been sent to local clinics, with two investors confined to hospital. One of the hunger strikers, whose weight dropped by 7 kilograms over the course of the protest, has begun to eat on doctor’s orders but has stayed with the protestors at the local offices of the opposition Yabloko party. |
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 MOSCOW — Police blocked hundreds of Orthodox believers from attending a service led by Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Alexy II at a monument to St. Vladimir on the banks of the Dnepr River in Kiev on Sunday. |
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MOSCOW — Slimy boss David Brent and his beleaguered staff are set to move to Russia after Channel One signed a deal with BBC Worldwide to make a local version of hit comedy-drama “The Office.” BBC Worldwide announced Thursday that Channel One would produce 24 episodes of the show with its affiliated production company Krasny Kvadrat, or Red Square. The original show was only 12 episodes long, plus two Christmas specials, so Channel One has the right to develop new story lines. The statement did not say how much the deal was worth, and a Channel One spokeswoman said no one was available to comment Friday. The channel is currently airing the U. |
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 MOSCOW — Every summer, the 15,000 residents of Nikel worry about the wind. The wind blows southward for most of the year, carrying toxic fumes from the local nickel smelter away from the Murmansk region town, just seven kilometers from the Norwegian border. |
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 A luxurious five-star hotel complex is due to open in downtown St. Petersburg next year aiming to accommodate VIP guests, host international summits and meet the growing demand for hotel facilities in the city, which continues to enjoy a boom in tourism. |
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The RTS Index plunged into bear-market territory Friday and the Micex Index fell to the lowest since 2006 on Monday as investors took fright after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s stinging censure of coal and steel producer Mechel’s pricing policies. |
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GAZ hopes to create a $1 billion joint venture with General Motors but is also looking at Daimler as a partner in the project, GAZ executives said Friday. The venture will produce around 300,000 cars per year, allowing GAZ and its western partner to compete with French rival Renault in Russia, said Leonid Dolgov, head of GAZ’s light vehicles division. |
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MOSCOW — German auto giant Daimler on Friday announced that it was in talks to buy a 42 percent stake in truck maker KamAZ in a potential deal valued at $1. |
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VLADIVOSTOK — A Federal Road Agency official said Friday that a three-kilometer bridge intended to demonstrate the country’s economic revival to a 2012 summit must be built at all costs, warning far eastern officials that no delay would be tolerated. In his final live-television broadcast as president, Vladimir Putin in October promised to build the bridge joining the Pacific port of Vladivostok to Russky Island, the isolated and impoverish locale where most events of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit will be held. |
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MOSCOW — Work at more than half the coal mines in the Kuznetsk Basin has been suspended after officials said they uncovered a series of “gross violations of industrial safety. |
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BEIJING — China and Russia on Saturday agreed to strengthen a strategic partnership by expanding their cooperation in projects including oil trading, pipeline construction, explorations and nuclear power. “The first round of talks have achieved some positive results,” Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishang said Saturday during his meeting with visiting Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the official Xinhua news agency reported. |
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Ring Road in Sight ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Construction of the St. Petersburg ring road will be completed in spring 2010, Boris Murashov, CEO of the St. |
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The good times are most likely over in the construction of residential property. The total area of apartment space completed in the first half of this year was 821,000 square meters — 20 percent less than a year ago. Companies are slowing down building work because they are afraid they will not be able to sell the new property as quickly as before. |
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Investors across Russia could be excused for missing the controversial economic data that came out last Monday. Unlike its Western counterparts, the State Statistics Service prefers not to preannounce release times. |
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 The Russian Orthodox Church called on government authorities this month to condemn the Soviet communist regime. It’s odd that the church should think about this now. It’s been two decades since Mikhail Gorbachev initiated an avalanche of public disclosures about the horrors of the gulag and the masterminds of the bloody communist dictatorship — Lenin, Stalin, their accomplices and their followers. |
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My cousin once took her husband, a New York City narcotics detective, to her native Moscow. Late one night, as they chatted with friends on a boulevard, her husband took a walk to a nearby bush to answer the call of nature. |
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NAKHABINO, Russia — Sweden’s Mikael Lundberg birdied two of his last three holes to clinch the Russian Open on Sunday for his second European Tour title. The 34-year-old, who won his maiden tour title at the Moscow Country Club three years ago in a sudden-death playoff on the fourth extra hole, shot a four-under-par 68 in the final round to finish on 21-under 267, beating Spain’s Jose Manuel Lara by two strokes. |
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