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MOSCOW - Russia is putting its border guards on alert as Taleban forces advance within kilometers of the Tajik-Afghan border, but the battle for control of Afghanistan is not expected to spill over into Tajikistan, military officers said Monday. Taleban troops, led by Afghani stan's largest ethnic group the Pashtuns, have advanced over the past few days to seize the Kunduz province and the port of Sher Khan Bandar on the Pyandzh River, separating Afghanistan from Tajikistan. |
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Vadim Shishov wouldn't be caught dead in an Italian designer suit. The middle-aged manager of MVO Holding, a chain of automobile service centers, only buys Russian. |
 MOSCOW - In the Soviet era, children grew up wanting to be cosmonauts or diplomats - two professions that were high on adventure and prestige. Now that big business is the name of the game, however, Russia's younger generations have a new and decidedly different ambition: to join the tax police. In a quiet courtyard in southeast Moscow, a crowd of boys and girls ranging in age from 10 to 15 gathers sleepily for morning roll call and exercises. |
All photos from issue.
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Tikhonov Released n MOSCOW (SPT) - Former Olympic biathlon champion Alexander Tikhonov, arrested in connection with a plot to kill Kemerovo region Gov. Aman Tuleyev, was released from a prison hospital in Novosibirsk on Sunday on condition he not leave the city until the end of the investigation, media reports said. |
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MOSCOW - The Russia-Belarus Union inched closer toward reality last week when the State Duma passed in first reading a bill on elections to the union's parliament. |
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ALMATY, Kazakstan - Dozens of corrupt traffic police and customs officials across Kazakstan demanded bribes from the wrong man - their boss. Interior Minister Kairbek Suleymenov traveled incognito by truck across the Kazak steppes to find out for himself the level of corruption that motorists have to deal with. |
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MOSCOW - Bailiffs began freezing shares Friday in Media-MOST, the latest shot in a battle to recoup debts of hundreds of millions of dollars from the media holding. |
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STRASBOURG, France- The situation in Chechnya does not justify lifting sanctions taken against Russia by the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly, the assembly's president said on Monday. Lord Russell-Johnston told reporters that abuses committed by Russian troops during their year-old offensive in the breakaway Caucasus territory must be fully investigated and the culprits must be brought to trial. |
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MOSCOW - Gunmen surrendered to police Friday after a daylong hostage drama near the Black Sea resort of Sochi, but officials said the entire incident may have been staged. |
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WASHINGTON - The 19th-century poet Alexander Pushkin has made a pilgrimage he never made in life to the New World, where Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov declared him a goodwill ambassador and symbol of a stronger relationship. Ivanov and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a key architect of President Bill Clinton's Russia policy, unveiled on Wednesday a towering bronze statue of Pushkin whose works condemned him to years of internal exile. |
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NEW YORK - Wall Street's failure to forecast the impact of a tumbling euro and surging oil prices on U.S. corporate profits has fueled concern among traders and investors that analysts are too often behind the curve. A string of companies including razor maker Gillette Co., aluminum giant Alcoa Inc. and Goodyear Tire & Rubber warned last week that the double whammy from currency and energy markets meant they would not meet financial expectations. The reaction? Well, that's just it. The market was surprised and analysts reacted, cutting targets in accordance with new guidance. Stocks dropped, pulling major U.S. indexes lower and indicating the announcements were really news to many people. |
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 The statistics are impressive. In September, total foreign investment in St. Petersburg surpassed the $700 million mark for the year, topping the total of $659. |
 As far as small business goes, it was a big week for the snacks industry in Russia. Last Wednesday, nine domestic firms announced the formation of the Russian Association of Snack Producers. And local company Vitek - one of the association's founder members - celebrated the opening of its new potato chips production line. |
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KRASNOYARSK, Western Siberia - At an extended management meeting on Saturday, Yukos, the nation's No. 2 oil company, officially announced that it had purchased a block of shares in the Eastern Siberian Oil and Gas company, or VSNK. |
 PRAGUE, Czech Republic - The Kremlin vowed on Monday to stand by its 1.2 trillion ruble ($43.2 billion) draft budget for 2001 despite calls from the opposition for more ambitious spending plans, to be funded by rising oil revenues. Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said he was even less inclined to change economic forecasts to allow for more spending after speaking with International Monetary Fund officials at the Fund's annual meeting in Prague. |
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 Ask any foreigner about doing business in Russia, and you may well be treated to a 10-minute-long litany of inconsistencies in legislation, strange procedures and annoying bureaucracy. |
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MOSCOW - It may not be the resounding victory for corporate governance that investors in Russia's cellular companies were hoping for, but the Communications Ministry gave signs Monday of retreating from a government decision to commandeer frequencies from Moscow operators Vimpelcom and Mobile TeleSystems. |
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There are no savings to be realized by registering a company yourself. Huge amounts of time will be lost and it is likely that mistakes will be made that will cost more than a professional's registration fee. |
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"Business takes so much time and energy that one of my female business acquaintances ended up contracting tuberculosis," says Irina Lvova, who runs the small business Lianis, a housekeeping and baby-sitting employment service. "She worked 24 hours and could barely find the time to eat. |
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Most foreign-owned businesses in Russia consist of more than one company, for example a Russian company and a foreign company that work together to achieve a desired tax result for the business as a whole. |
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NEW YORK - Online exchange Aluminium.com said Thursday it signed an exclusive joint agreement with Israel-based Metals-Russia.com, creating a $1 billion Internet gateway to Russia's vast aluminum, copper and steel exports. In the deal, Aluminium.com's registered users gain access to local metals in a move to speed up the site's existing aluminum business and its trading debut in copper, according to a company statement. |
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BUDAPEST, Hungary - Gazprom said Friday it planned to build a "pan-European" ethylene pipeline and had purchased its stake in Hungarian chemicals BorsodChem through an Irish holding company partly for that purpose. |
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After nearly two years of conflict over control of the Leningrad Metal Factory (LMZ), Russia's largest maker of power-station turbines -- a conflict which has seen brutal OMON police raids and competing factions simultaneously appointing their own general directors -- the end seems near. |
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MOSCOW - The market gave the thumbs up to Norilsk Nickel's share swap plan Monday, rising 17.5 percent to $7.45 from Friday's close of $6.30 after the metals giant detailed the plan that had dragged Norilsk stock down all last week. |
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Alutec Inc., a Washington DC-based management consulting company, is negotiating with Leningrad Oblast to build an estimated $650 million aluminum smelter in the town of Sosnovy Bor, not far from the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station (LAES). The new plant, to be located close to the Gulf of Finland, would make shipping aluminum to Western Europe more efficient and faster, officials said. |
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MOSCOW - A compromise may be made on the draft 2001 budget in its second and third reading, the Agency for Financial Information reported Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin as saying Friday. |
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MOSCOW - U.S. oil major ExxonMobil has refused to participate in a project to build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, the Interfax news agency reported Monday. ExxonMobil, which Interfax said has stakes in five existent projects in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian Sea, was unavailable for comment. |
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MOSCOW - With the government's consideration of controversial plans to restructure national power grid Unified Energy Systems put on hold until December, UES head Anatoly Chubais has decided to brush up on his management skills, UES announced Monday. |
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MOSCOW - Business leaders aiming to stamp out corruption will drag the nation into the information age, adopting e-commerce and all the trappings, the head of the nation's largest computer and technology services firm said Friday. Businesses will use the Internet to become more transparent, reaping a reward from investors for their openness, the head of Information Business Systems said in an interview. |
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Hairpin Curve Britain was brought to a standstill last week when an apparently ad hoc group of allegedly apolitical truckers and farmers blockaded the refinery depots of the nation's mysteriously acquiescent oil companies, demanding a reduction in the government's petrol tax. |
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THE recent killings of three aid workers on the island of Timor underscore the United Nations' ideals and limitations. The men hacked to death by pro-Jakarta, Indonesia, militia groups had come to the politically divided island to feed refugees held hostage in West Timor, an Indonesian province. |
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 While the local government's efforts to promote St. Petersburg to foreign investors are still sporadic, the signs are that it has learned from earlier failures and is starting to see the value of marketing the city abroad. "The St. Petersburg administration used to take the position that the world would beat a path to its door looking for investment opportunities," said Douglas Boyce, the general director of the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory. |
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WASHINGTON - Six weeks before the U.S. presidential election, polls Sunday showed Republican George W. Bush has erased Democrat Al Gore's lead and the race is tied once again. |
 The fuel crisis in St. Petersburg and Russia, including the price rises which started last week, could be eased or avoided if contracts on fuel supplies were signed on the commodity exchange, accordng to Svetlana Snegir, director of the Kupol business information center. |
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Anti-Foreigner Law GENEVA (AP) - Swiss voters on Sunday rejected a plan to cut the proportion of foreigners in the country to 18 percent of the population and fix it there by law. |
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Changes to income and social taxes that are due to come into effect on Jan. 1, 2001, are likely to be welcomed by foreign businesses operating in Russia, but are being treated with great suspicion by many domestic firms, who say that in fact the government just wants to get a look at the real salaries people earn before hiking taxes up once more. The new laws significantly lessen the tax burden on higher salaries, which has led some businessmen to speculate that the whole scheme is all just a gambit designed to get companies to declare employees' full salaries, rather than the "official" figures which are presented to the tax inspector. Specifically, according to legislation passed by the State Duma in July this year, the array of social taxes which employers used to pay in the past - to the Pension Fund, the Social Insurance Fund, the Employment Fund (which has since been abolished) and the Medical Insurance Fund - is turned into a unified social tax. |
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 What do they really put into the sausages we buy at our corner store, and who is responsible for making them? It's a question that many St. Petersburg consumers have been longing to ask. |
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Tatyana Bogonina used to teach a subject called informatika. The secondary-school course was aimed at teaching basic computer programming skills and learning software languages - quite impressive for 1985. The only thing lacking was ... computers. There were few of them in the Siberian city of Khanti-Mansiisk, and not even one in 10 of its schools. |
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MBA students who are unwilling or unable to attend regular classes are able to turn to the Internet for management education, but not all participants and experts say they are 100 percent happy without the personal touch. |
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Over the last two years, the MBA degree has become fashionable among Russian managers. After the 1998 crisis, the job market was overflowing with educated and experienced specialists, and having an MBA became an important additional merit for job-seekers. |
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With administrative assistants in private companies now earning a great deal more than many state-employed doctors and professors, it's not surprising that some of the highly educated are thinking about jumping the income gap. |
 If conflicts of approach are generational, then it may well be just a question of waiting until MBA holders rise to the top of their companies and dominate how they are managed. One man who decided not to wait that long is Yury Rysev, who set up his own company after completing a nine-month business course at IMISP in May 1999. Rysev's company, a plumbing equipment and installation firm called Akvalink, employs four people, and is tucked away in a large building not far from Elektrosila metro station. |
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 In Russia, what begin as large-scale restructuring projects seem either to get bogged down in battles with minority shareholders or shift toward the more blatantly economic issues of costs and prices. |
 CHEJU, South Korea - Defense ministers from North and South Korea agreed on Monday to work toward building links and easing military tension on the divided peninsula. The talks between South Korea's Defense Minister Cho Seong-tae and the North's Kim Il-chol, were the first between defense chiefs of the two Koreas in half a century. |
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JOLO, Philippines - More than 100 Muslim rebels have been killed in a Philippine military assault on guerrillas holding hostages on a remote southern island, the officer commanding the operation said on Monday. |
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When people aspiring to middle- and top-level posts in both Russian companies and multinationals cast around for the qualifications to give them an edge in the employment market, all eyes are increasingly turning to the growing number of business education programs. But can a spell in school really take the place of a life of hard knocks in the real working world? Barnaby Thompson investigates. |
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Issues Archive