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MOSCOW — The government’s antitrust probe into rising coal prices widened Wednesday to include Evraz Group and Raspadskaya, just days after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attacked miner Mechel. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said in a statement Wednesday that it had launched an investigation into whether Evraz and Raspadskaya had abused their “dominant position in the market for coking coal, setting unjustifiably high domestic prices and discriminated against the domestic market.” The service said Raspadskaya’s and Evraz’s coal prices had “roughly doubled” from September through May. Evraz is part-owned by former Chukotka Governor Roman Abramovich, a close ally of Putin’s. |
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KARMA ARTISTS
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Buddhist monks from Tibetan Drepung Datsan monastery using sand to create a mandala — a symbol of the cosmos and man’s place within it — at 20 Nevsky Prospekt. The third annual international Russia-India-Tibet Festival opened on Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev expressed frustration on Thursday over his government’s inability to break the vicious circle of red tape and corruption which he said was hampering small businesses. Medvedev, who took office in May, has promised to ensure the “rule of law” and make the economy more stable and life easier for small and medium-size businesses, which he wants to become major drivers of economic growth.
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MOSCOW — The international athletics ruling body IAAF temporarily suspended six Russian athletes after discovering DNA convergence in their samples given for dope testing last year, the head of the Russian athletics federation, Valentin Balakhnichev, said Thursday. “We received a letter from IAAF, which said that six of our athletes — Yelena Soboleva, Daria Pishchalnikova, Gulfia Khanafeyeva, Tatyana Tomashova, Yulia Fomenko and Svetlana Cherkasova — were temporarily suspended,” Balakhnichev said. The IAAF later confirmed a provisional suspension for 1,500 meter and 5,000 meter runner Olga Yegorova. “The reason for the suspension was the convergence of DNA in the samples that were given by the athletes for dope testing last year,” Balakhnichev said. |
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 MOSCOW — Two small, manned submarines reached the bottom of Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, on Tuesday in a show of Moscow’s resurgent ambitions to set new records in science. |
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MINSK — A U.S. lawyer went on trial behind closed doors in Belarus on Wednesday charged with carrying forged documents, drug offenses and industrial espionage — crimes that could carry up to seven years in prison. Emmanuel Zeltser, a New York-based specialist in Russian law and organized crime, was arrested in March at the height of a diplomatic dispute between Belarus and the United States. |
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Thousands of people are heading for Novosibirsk to observe a rare, total solar eclipse on Friday, when the sun will be fully obscured by the moon’s shadow for about two minutes. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — With President Dmitry Medvedev stressing the importance of combating corruption, one regional politician is offering citizens an extra incentive to rat out crooked officials: money. Yevgeny Rogoza, head of the Chelyabinsk city branch of pro-Kremlin party A Just Russia, is promising citizens a 1 million ruble ($42,000) reward next month for handing over evidence of corruption in the Chelyabinsk City Hall. “We want to make our bureaucrats nervous,” Rogoza said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “If they are aware that every person they deal with can earn some money by turning them in for corruption, the climate of impunity they enjoy now will disappear. |
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 Frustrated and disappointed by what they called “the shocking indifference of Governor Valentina Matviyenko,” a group of cheated investors in off-plan residential property developments on Thursday suspended a hunger strike they had held since July 21. |
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SUKHUMI, Georgia — The last of 400 soldiers sent by Moscow to repair a railway in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia began to pull out on Wednesday, ending a deployment that angered Tbilisi and its Western allies. Loudspeakers played music from a brass band and children handed out flowers and Abkhaz flags to Russian soldiers at the opening ceremony of the 54-kilometer railway line. |
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Finland is ousting unlicensed Russian taxi operators from the door-to-door transportation market and intends to further toughen the rules, impose fines and cancel travel visas from Friday, August 1. A year ago, in August 2007, a law was passed in Finland making licenses compulsory for transport companies, individuals involved in the taxi business, and those who unofficially provide services in their vehicles, carrying up to eight passengers in addition to the driver. |
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Having conducted failed negotiations with Italy’s near-bankrupt airline Alitalia, the Russian flagship carrier Aeroflot will now try to enter the European air passenger market by taking part in a tender announced on Thursday for the privatization of Serbia’s cash-strapped JAT Airways. |
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MOSCOW — The board of TNK-BP will review the firm’s investment plan for 2008, one of the points of contention in a fierce shareholders’ dispute, CEO Robert Dudley said Wednesday. Dudley, who is managing TNK-BP from abroad after he left Russia last week amid the conflict, said the board had agreed to review the budget, approved in November 2007, following a request by some directors that it be cut by some $900 million. “I continue to believe that the level of capital investment proposed to and approved by the board last November is the appropriate level for the company, underpinning our production, the continued safe operation of our facilities, and our continued investment in attractive options for future growth,” Dudley said in an e-mailed statement. |
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 MOSCOW — Norilsk Nickel shares closed up 8.4 percent on Wednesday amid speculation that the company would enter merger talks with billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s United Company RusAl. |
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Finland’s biggest hotel chain and restaurant operator, Sokos Hotels, marked the entrance of its brand onto the Russian market with the official opening of its four-star Sokos Hotel Olympic Garden in downtown St. Petersburg last Friday. The latest addition to the city’s hotel scene is aimed at Finnish business travelers, said Juhani Jarvenpaa, president and CEO of SOK Holding at the official opening ceremony. |
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 With all of the tremendous political weight that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accumulated over the last eight years, he has the rare ability to wreak havoc on financial markets with only one short phrase. Putin’s harsh criticisms on July 24 of the Mechel coal and steel company caused the value of its American Depositary Receipts to fall by 36 percent, or nearly $6 billion, on the New York Stock Exchange. |
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There has been little mutual trust lately between the governments of Russia and the European Union. Diplomatic relations between Britain and the Kremlin are at a low since Alexander Litvinenko was murdered — allegedly by a Russian agent — in London in 2006. |
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 Tartu is the second largest city in Estonia, after Tallinn, and is a far cry from the capital in many ways. Whereas Tallinn is the Baltic country’s political and financial capital, Tartu, which is occasionally referred to (with a touch of irony in conversations and utter seriousness in tourists’ booklets) as the “Athens on the Emajogi,” is considered its intellectual and cultural capital. |
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Alina Simone, the Ukraine-born, U.S.-based singer/songwriter, who made her local debut by performing a solo set at Revolution last year, will release a new, highly unusual album in the U. |
 The Brothers Karamazov opera, shown last week at the Mariinsky Theater, was billed as a world premiere. Written by St. Petersburg composer Alexander Smelkov at the theatre’s request, and directed by up-and-coming Vasily Barkhatov who now has four Mariinsky productions to his name, it stood out in the Stars of the White Nights summer festival as the first new opera at the venerated theater in 30 years. |
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 Rodion Shchedrin’s musical vision of the famed Russian soul received its first stage incarnation with the premiere of “The Enchanted Wanderer” at the Mariinsky Theater’s concert hall last Sunday. |
 “A machine doesn’t feel, it doesn’t think, it only sweeps people underneath it, this evil juggernaut of history.” Mila Bibikova’s words to her fiance from behind the Iron Curtain in the late ‘60s tell a common story from the Soviet Union: The authorities’ invasion into personal lives and their petty denial of personal happiness. But the rest of her story is anything but common. Her fiance was Mervyn Matthews, a young British academic who had been expelled from the Soviet Union after a flirtation with the KGB had ended in his refusal to betray his country. |
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 MOSCOW — Carrying bags of stolen groceries, Oleg Vorotnikov takes out the batteries of his mobile phone before entering the secret headquarters of his underground art collective on the outskirts of Moscow. |
 Saturday sees the epic celebration of Russia’s elite paratrooper division but the holiday — this year marking 78 years since the first airborne units were formed — suffers from a less than joyful image: the servicemen who celebrate it have a reputation for public thuggery and drunkenness. |
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Borsalino // Angleterre Hotel // St. Isaac’s Square/24 Ulitsa Malaya Morskaya Tel: 494 5666 // Menu in Russian, English and Italian, major credit cards accepted // Lunch for two without alcohol 3,630 rubles ($155) Traditionally, the summer season in St. |
 This week, the tabloids have been airing Naomi Campbell’s dirty laundry, as they discuss the bizarre story of the supermodel’s stay at The Ritz-Carlton hotel, which may or may not have ended with a burnt sheet and some extremely brave staff asking the supermodel to pay up for the damage. Tvoi Den ran the story on Monday with a typically exaggerated headline, “Naomi Campbell almost burned down a hotel in Russia. |
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 THE HAGUE — Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic appeared before a U.N. war crimes judge for the first time on Thursday to answer genocide charges and said he had been kidnapped and feared for his life. Karadzic, who was arrested last week after 11 years on the run, wore a dark suit and tie, and appeared gaunt, his trademark shock of hair whiter and shorter than when he was last seen in public out of disguise more than a decade ago. |
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BEIJING — The media should have been told they would not have total Internet freedom before arriving for the Beijing Olympics, a senior IOC official said on Thursday, as rights groups piled criticism on both the IOC and host China. |
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ZURICH — World soccer’s governing body FIFA has told clubs they must release any players aged under 23 selected for next month’s Beijing Olympics after rejecting a protest by three European teams. In a statement issued on Wednesday, FIFA said Players’ Status Committee member Slim Aloulou had ruled as a single judge that the release of players was mandatory for all clubs. German Bundesliga sides Werder Bremen and Schalke, and Spain’s Barcelona had argued against the need to release players because the Olympics were not included on FIFA’s international match calendar. “The single judge determined that the international match calendar is not of relevance in establishing whether clubs are obliged to release players,” FIFA said in its statement. |
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 MONACO — Russian Yelena Isinbayeva broke her own women’s world pole vault record on Tuesday when she cleared 5.04 meters at her third attempt at the Monaco grand prix. |
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Zenit St. Petersburg and CSKA Moscow played out an entertaining 0-0 draw at Luzhniki stadium in Moscow on Wednesday, but neither side will be happy after failing to secure all three points. While Zenit was seeking to climb into the top half of the table after a lackluster start to the season, CSKA was seeking a win to keep up the pressure on Rubin Kazan and the other league leaders. |
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Issues Archive