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IRKUTSK — Competing rallies on Saturday were held in Irkutsk over plans to relaunch the Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mills, a day after majority owner Oleg Deripaska announced that he was planning to divest the controversial asset. The government, which owns a 49 percent stake in the plant, agreed Jan. 13 to reopen the facility and allow it to dump waste into Lake Baikal so that it could resume output of its most profitable products. The plant is the main employer in Baikalsk, a single-industry town of 16,000 on the lake’s shore. Deripaska, who controls the remaining 51 percent through Continental Management, a unit of his Basic Element holding, said Friday that the decision to reopen the plant was based on social considerations and that he would hand over his stake to the city as soon as the mill became profitable. |
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LIGHT MY FIRE
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
An effigy symbolizing winter burns in the village of Shuvalovka, to the west of St. Petersburg, as part of the Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) celebrations on Sunday. The traditional festivities are intended to see off the winter and welcome the spring. |
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MOSCOW — A Gazprom-led joint venture on Friday cleared the final hurdle to begin construction on Nord Stream, the $10 billion pipeline that will carry Russian gas to Europe and reduce the risk of supply disruptions. A regional Finnish agency issued a permit deeming the pipeline environmentally safe for the Finnish part of the Baltic Sea that it will traverse, giving the project its last go-ahead, Nord Stream AG, the venture building the pipeline, said in a statement.
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 Swedish furniture retailer IKEA has fired two of its top-ranking managers for turning a blind eye to a bribery case involving St. Petersburg’s Mega IKEA shopping mall. “The authorities of IKEA received information that the management of one of the company’s Russian branches had closed its eyes to a case in which a contractor company paid a bribe to guarantee electricity supply at MEGA shopping mall in St. |
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A national Internet provider has refused to name the court that it claims ordered the company to block access to several oppositional web sites, while continuing to deny access to them. |
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Police in St. Petersburg are investigating an elderly local man in connection with 127 criminal cases involving the alleged sexual abuse of minors over the course of three years, Interfax reported Monday. The suspect, 63, was detained in May on suspicion of sexually abusing several children, including some younger than 14 years old. |
All photos from issue.
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Vera Kamkina, a 34-year-old widowed mother of four, is in despair. The regional authorities in her hometown of Kolpino, 30 kilometers to the south of St. Peterburg, have taken Kamkina’s children from her home and are threatening to place them in an orphanage amid bureaucrats’ claims that the woman is “too poor to raise them.” Kamkina has outstanding utility bills amounting to 140,000 rubles ($4,230) and the Kolpino officials remain adamant that she will only get her children back when she repays her debts. Kamkina has three daughters — Larisa, aged 2; Yelizaveta, aged 5; Darya, aged 13 — and a son Ruslan, aged 9. |
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THE FINAL CUT
Simon Eliasson / The St. Petersburg Times
Two exhibits in the Festival of Ice Sculptures on the Peter and Paul Fortress beach. The event hasn’t been held for several years due to unseasonably warm winters. |
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MOSCOW — The parliament in the oil-rich Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district Monday approved State Duma Deputy Natalya Komarova as the region’s new governor. Komarova, a member of the ruling United Russia party, was approved unanimously and will become the country’s second female governor ever — after St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko — when she takes office March 1.
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MOSCOW — Entrepreneurs have not been shy about trying to capitalize on the popularity of top officials, with competing vodka brands like “Medvedeff” and “Putinka” having appeared on supermarket shelves in recent years. But controversial self-styled inventor Viktor Petrik may have taken things too far by not even altering the spelling of Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu’s last name on a water filter sold by the little-known scientist’s company. |
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MOSCOW — Russia and Nicaragua will hold joint military exercises, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on the sidelines of talks with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega during a working visit to Latin America, RIA-Novosti reported Monday. |
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VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Russian ice hockey player Svetlana Terentyeva became the first athlete to test positive at the Vancouver Olympics but escaped a ban as she took the substance before the Olympic period, the International Olympic Committee said on Thursday. Terentyeva used a light stimulant contained in an over-the-counter nose spray that is not banned in out-of-competition tests but was still in her body when tested in Vancouver ahead of the Feb. |
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MOSCOW — Both VTB and Sberbank are ready to start lending to developers this year, particularly those constructing residential housing, and VTB alone is planning to offer builders as much as $1.2 billion in 2010. State-run VTB Group is planning to loan between 20 billion rubles and 35 billion rubles ($662 million to $1.16 billion) to developers this year and is already in talks on a $400 million deal, senior vice president Pavel Kosov said last week, Prime-Tass reported. Of VTB’s total lending to developers, 60 percent to 70 percent will be for residential property. |
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ALL THE PRESIDENTS
Dmitry Astakhov/RIA-Novosti / Reuters
President Dmitry Medvedev and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev take a walk on Sunday at Medvedev’s residence outside Moscow during trade talks. |
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MOSCOW — Russia accounted for 10 percent of total worldwide mergers and acquisitions in the oil and gas exploration and production sectors, consulting firm Wood Mackenzie said in a report published Friday. A total of $16 billion was spent on M&A by Russian firms, more than 10 percent of the total $150 billion worth of deals conducted in 2009, up significantly from the $2 billion spent in 2008, said Luke Parker, a researcher at Wood Mackenzie who contributed to the report.
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Richest Man? MOSCOW (VEDOMOSTI) — Novolipetsk Steel owner Vladimir Lisin took first place in Finans magazine’s ranking of the richest Russian businessmen, said Oleg Tinkov, who made a video for Finans on the topic. “I’m glad that an industrialist (I’m not afraid of that word) and even an engineer (as far as I understand his education) became the leader in the billionaire race,” Tinkov said. |
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Developments in international financial markets may, at first glance, seem irrelevant to the dynamics of the Russian economy. But, as has been learned the hard way, the link is strong and the causation is one-way. We had a vivid reminder of this fact again at the end of last week when global markets became spooked by concerns about the tepid economic recovery in the United States and the fragility of sovereign debt in the euro zone as a result of Greece’s fiscal prolificacy. Those debt problems drove the euro down temporarily to below $1.36, bringing the dollar to an eight-month high. Because oil and other commodities are priced in dollars, gains in the dollar usually translate into declines in oil prices. |
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 A year ago at the 2009 Munich security conference, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden pronounced his now-famous “reset” speech. He signaled the high hopes that the administration of President Barack Obama had for improving U. |
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As a rule, I’m not much one for statistics, but every so often one stops me cold. In the December issue of Russian in Global Affairs, political scientist Igor Zevelev pointed out in his article “Russia’s Future: Nation or Civilization” that “Russians … now make up almost 80 percent of the country’s population (compared with 43 percent in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century and 50 percent in the Soviet Union). |
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BRUSSELS — Two packed commuter trains collided head on during rush hour outside a snow-covered Brussels on Monday killing up to 20 people and injuring 150 amid scenes of bloody chaos, officials said. The crash left a mass of twisted metal and several carriages on their side, according to witnesses, while an official said doctors were carrying out amputations at the scene. |
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 Across the globe, business schools are nervously monitoring the volume of applications to their MBA programs. After a huge spike in demand in the early part of 2009, when the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) registered record levels of interest, numbers have been steadily dropping off ever since. This has not been down to any lack of faith in the qualification itself, but rather due to widespread worries about accessing funding to cover the cost of study and the likelihood of finding a well paid job on graduation. |
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 Only the strongest schools and the best business programs survive during a crisis. Applicants are becoming more demanding and selective. “If several years ago, a combination of three magic letters — MBA — was almost all that an applicant cared about, today they are interested not only in the diploma itself, but in the knowledge and skills that they will obtain,” said Sergei Fyodorov, director of the Open Business School in St. |
 According to specialists, one of the current global trends is an increase in the number of students enrolling on full-time MBA programs, while demand for specialized business programs has decreased. “The demand for our Executive MBA general and strategic management is stable,” said Anastasiya Korshunova of Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School’s St. |
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“A total waste of time and money,” moaned my acquaintance about his daughter’s degree. According to him, shortly after graduation, his daughter and her fiance found out that the field they had specialized in was shrinking. |
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St. Petersburg’s language schools are evidence of this observation. Most of them say they have not noticed any large-scale outflow of students during the global recession. However, the crisis has brought some changes and new trends to the city’s foreign languages market. |
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Although women perform the same jobs as men and number among the students of business schools, statistics show gender-differentiated trends. According to research conducted by the Begin Group several years ago, of the students enrolled on MBA courses in Russia, 65 percent were men and 35 percent women. |
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Issues Archive