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The Northwestern Prosecutor's Office said on Monday that it was investigating 27 St. Petersburg-based companies for possible value-added-tax fraud on a significant part of 10 billion rubles, or $345 million, that was refunded last year. Tax Inspectorate officials said that prosecutors of the Transport Prosecutors's Office and customs officials could be involved. RTR television's news program Vesti reported on Tuesday that a number of prosecutors within the Transport Prosecutors' Office were about to be charged with the embezzlement of VAT- a tax charged to an export distributor selling goods produced, in this case, by Russian firms. One hundred percent of the VAT is then reimbursed to the Russian distributor. |
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 Every day, Rufin Yefremov is surrounded by dismembered limbs, gaping wounds, skeletons and skulls, and contorted, lifeless human torsos. At age 72, this has been his work for over four decades, for Yefremov is chief artist and sculptor at Medius, the only place in the country to provide models and mannequins for medical students, hospitals and even the Emergency Situations Ministry. |
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GROZNY - The human rights group Memorial says it knows where there are at least three more suspected mass graves in the Chechen capital but is wary of making the information public. They fear the sites will meet the same fate as a suspected mass grave in the Oktyabrsky district near a police station manned by federal Interior Ministry troops. |
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YESSENTUKI, South Russia - Two bombs exploded on Monday in a cemetery in a southern Russian town, the second such incident there in a month, killing a woman and injuring at least four other people, officials said. |
All photos from issue.
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MADRID - Spain's High Court on Monday lifted all travel restrictions on Russian media magnate Vladimir Gu sin sky, following the collapse last week of Moscow's attempts to extradite him, officials said. "All the measures have been lifted which means Mr. |
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MOSCOW - A Moscow court sentenced a Russian man to seven years in jail after he was caught spying for Britain and Estonia, the FSB said on Monday. Ex-intelligence officer Valery Ojamae was convicted of high treason by a Moscow court in a trial that ended on Friday, the security police said. |
 The MV Greenpeace - one of environmental group Greenpeace's international ships - has been through many polluted waters. Boats like it in the Green peace fleet have stood up to whaling ships ten times their size and won. The MV Greenpeace is itself no stranger to danger - in 1991 it examined pollution following the war in the Persian Gulf and a year ago carried out pollution readings on the Russian Arctic Island of Novyaya Zemlya, leading to the arrest by the Federal Security Service of all its crew members. |
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 The "Kukly" puppet show set out Sunday to test the new NTV management's promise not to censor one of the country's most popular political satirical programs. |
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Slain journalist Georgy Gongadze, whose killing has sparked a political crisis in Ukraine, was one of two reporters named Saturday as the winners of an annual $20,000 journalism prize. The other winner of the Prize for Journalism and Democracy was Spanish newspaper columnist Jose Luis Lopez de Lacalle, believed to have been killed last year by the armed separatist group ETA. The prize is given annually by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly to reporters or organizations that have helped develop principles of human rights and democracy. Gongadze died "after a long distinguished career in investigative journalism, uncovering critical circumstances in a secretive political environment," the parliamentarians said in a statement. |
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 ANKARA, Turkey - A Turkish militant of Chechen origin emerged as the apparent leader of a hostage-taking protest at a top Istanbul hotel, five years after playing a leading role in hijacking a Russian ferry in Turkey. |
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MOSCOW - Prosecutors lashed out Friday at a planned revamp of the country's Criminal Procedural Code that would strip them of the right to issue arrest warrants and appeal acquittals to higher courts, saying Russia is unready for such changes. The State Duma is scheduled to hold a second reading this week for the overhauled code, new legislation meant to bring the judiciary system in line with both the Constitution and Western procedures. |
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Nuclear-Fleet Overhaul MOSCOW (AP) - The Transport Ministry has begun an overhaul of the country's nuclear icebreaker fleet, and plans to begin construction on a new generation of the massive, powerful craft by 2010, Interfax reported on Sunday. |
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After a week of emergency news broadcasts on Channel 11, NTV-St. Petersburg resumed working with Moscow-based NTV and began airing its local news slots on that channel on Monday. "The loss of [the old NTV] is the audience's loss, but we have kept our team here together, and that's the only thing we were trying to do," said Andrei Radin, NTV-St. |
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WTO Entry 'Difficult' BERLIN (Reuters) - The World Trade Organization's director general said Monday said that Russia had to make a lot of hard decisions before joining the WTO. The principle issues for Russia involve restructuring agriculture and the economy, WTO Director General Mike Moore said. |
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MOSCOW - Russia laid out on Monday long-awaited short- and mid-term plans to bring about a liberalization in the economy and speed land and tax reform as it strives to tame inflation and improve a gloomy investment climate. |
 MOSCOW - Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko's railroad tariff commission decided this week to cancel the Railways Ministry's international tariff of on all deliveries exported from seaports. As a result, there will be a single tariff for domestic and export shipping operations that will be 20 percent higher than the present domestic rate, Khristenko said. |
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Norlisk Nickel may have to swallow its pride, but the metals giant may still get the disputed St. Petersburg-based copper maker Krasny Vyborzhets. "We will take over Krasny Vyborzhets by the end of April," Oleg Dyachenko, the head of Technology and Investments company, said in an interview Friday. |
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LONDON - Economic growth in Russia will be cut by more than half in 2001 as oil prices decline and the ruble strengthens, hitting growth in the rest of the former Soviet Union, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said Sunday. The EBRD, the development bank for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, said in the latest annual update to its transition report that growth in Russia would decline this year to 3.4 percent from 7.7 percent in 2000. It said a key risk for Russia and the rest of the Commonwealth of Independent States was the impact of a weaker global economy on commodity prices and exports. The challenge for Russia and other oil-rich CIS states would be to keep fiscal policy tight and to allow currencies to adjust to changes in the terms of trade. |
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 In October, Mikhail Moshiashvili left a high-powered job in Moscow as head of corporate finance for Yukos Oil Co., Russia's second largest oil producer, to work for ZAO Ilim Pulp Enterprise, a privately-owned St. |
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The Ministry of Defense will finance a $2 million parade boat to be built at St. Petersburg's Severnaya Verf, a shipyard in the city's southwest. It was announced last week that it had been contracted by the Defense Ministry to build a $2 million dollar parade boat to be used by the navy for official ceremonies. |
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Lingo Apartheid LONDON (Reuters) - Pressure groups from around Eastern Europe on Monday accused the bank set up to help the region adapt to the market economy of practicing a sort of "language apartheid" by issuing its documents in English. |
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The whole event was pretty low key, with many of the participants spending a lot of their time socializing with each other in the bars and restaurants, but this didn't mean that about 500 representatives of Russia's advertising sector didn't have serious things to discuss. The Days of Russian Advertising 2001 conference, was held for the sixth consecutive year over the weekend at the Baltiyets hotel in the St. Petersburg suburb of Repino. It was established by the city's IMA-press ads agency and the St. Petersburg Advertizing. What started as an event bringing together 87 participants from St. Petersburg and Moscow has grown to its present size, gathering together advertizing representatives from 31 regions of the country to contribute to the conference's exhibition hall, to pick winners for the best advertisement in each of four categories, and to hold round tables to discuss a number of issues within the sector. |
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 As the world turns away from European beef, Russians have been diving into their plates of meat as heartily as ever before. But should they? Outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in European livestock are wreaking havoc on EU rural economies already shaken by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad-cow disease. |
 The Leningrad Oblast has enjoyed marked success in attracting foreign investors to do business in the region, as well as plaudits from various businesses set up and working there. But, while the oblast administration is happy with the results it has so far achieved, Sergei Naryshkin, who chairs the Leningrad Oblast International Relations and External Economic Relations Committee, told staff writer Andrey Musatov that it is not yet ready to rest on its laurels. |
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JAKARTA, Indonesia - The IMF on Monday warned Indonesia its economic recovery was at risk, pressing the troubled country to urgently introduce measures to keep its ballooning budget deficit under control. |
 MOSCOW - Forget oil and gas, there's another natural resource that's making this country big bucks - creativity. Russia's offshore software development industry is growing at an estimated rate of 50 percent a year. And while the industry leaders may not yet be powerful enough to run regional governments like their oil and gas colleagues, they are very bullish on the future. |
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IN recent weeks, The St. Petersburg Times has printed two opinion pieces by Americans urging the further expansion of NATO to include the former Soviet republics in the Baltic region. The authors would have us believe that such expansion is inevitable, that it is somehow in Russia's greater interests, and that Russia should cease its hopeless efforts to block it. |
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FOUR years ago, doctors in Kenya noticed something unusual about a group of prostitutes in a Nairobi slum. Unlike many other Kenyan prostitutes, they were not contracting AIDS. |
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THE Cuban Missile Crisis - the moment the world came closest to all-out nuclear war - happened in 1962, but it still seems to be a story worth telling. Last week, a group of veterans from both sides of the crisis gathered in Moscow for a special screening of Kevin Costner's film about the incident, "Thirteen Days. |
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EVERYONE has their own jubilee dates, and I am no exception. Exactly ten years ago, in late April 1991, Moskovskie No vosti - then a newspaper on the front line of perestroika - published my feature story called "The Time Bomb: A Political Portrait of the KGB. |
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THE decline of media freedom in Russia - symbolized by the takeover of NTV and the assaults on Segodnya and Itogi - will have damaging consequences for Russia both at home and abroad. Domestically, it will damage Russia's ability to govern itself, to oversee its leaders and restrain itself from blunders small and great. |
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FINALLY, after the business community has been pounding on Itera's doors for years clamoring for hard information about its owners and structure, the company has responded with a significant but far from satisfactory gesture toward transparency. |
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 Foreigners in St. Petersburg frustrated with the dual-pricing system will be happy to know that there are some transactions in which state law treats foreigners just like Russians - for example, in the purchase of real estate. |
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As any TV watcher will already be aware, there is now no NTV as we used to know it - and may stone-hearted cynics and inveterate optimists forgive me: I'm shedding my personal tear here. Indeed, putting the issue of press freedom aside, the NTV crackdown and resulting reshuffle of TV presenters and their shows have led to many a sad consequence - perhaps the least painful being that viewers must now watch TV all day if they actually want to see their favorite presenters, as the programming schedule is a complete mess. First of all, you will surely have noticed that NTV's news service has considerably worsened since Gazprom appointees took over the channel and most of the journalists quit. |
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 After a promising and early rise to her career at the Mariinsky Theater, ballerina Anastasia Voloch ko va suddenly disappeared from the starting lineup after the theater's artistic director - the same man who had plucked her from dance school to perform a principal role in "Swan Lake" when she was only 18 - was ousted from his post. |
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I was sitting alone in my room - pathetically staring at a copy of Nabokov's "Lolita" in Russian, which had finally convinced me to declare the language unlearnable - when I felt the first revolutionary sparks of self-realization within me. Continuing my train of thought, I turned to the cheap reproduction of Matisse's "Vase of Irises" on my wall, a piece from the Hermitage collection. |
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Empress Elizabeth anticipated Napo leon at her coronation on April 25, 1742. The daughter of Peter the Great placed the crown of the Russian Empire on her own head, something that was traditionally done by the metropolitain. |
 In the words of its founder Vladimir Gu sinsky, "NTV does not exist anymore." Gusinsky made this somber announcement from exile in Spain after Gazprom-Media's takeover of the station earlier this month and the subsequent exodus of leading journalists. |
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Dhaka Bomb Blasts DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) - Nine small bombs exploded in Dhaka on Monday as the opposition began a three-day, nationwide strike aimed at forcing the resignation of Bang la desh's prime minister, police and witnesses said. |
 NEW YORK - A pair of home runs in the bottom of the 10th inning led the New York Yankees to a crushing 4-3 win over the Boston Red Sox on Sunday. Paul O'Neill and David Justice both homered into the right-field seats as the Yankees overcame two homers by Manny Ramirez earlier in the game and a go-ahead run by the Red Sox in the top of the 10th. |
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BRAKPAN, South Africa - Little-known American Hasim Rahman caused one of the biggest upsets in boxing history when he knocked out Lennox Lewis in the fifth round of their world heavyweight title clash in South Africa on Sunday. |
 GLASGOW, Scotland - Substitute Lubomir Moravcik added sparkle to Celtic's league-title celebration with the goal that sealed a 1-0 victory over Hearts on Sunday. Moravcik, who had been on the pitch for just five minutes, scored in the 68th minute to ensure the party for the 60,000 fans at Parkhead did not turn flat on the day Celtic received the Scottish Premier League trophy. |
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NEW YORK - Michael Jordan has given another strong hint that he could be back playing in the National Basketball Association next season. The 38-year-old said in an interview on NBC television during Saturday's playoff coverage that he still feels the competitive urge. |
 SACRAMENTO, California - The Los Angeles Lakers enjoyed a first-game victory in the other Western Conference encounter, overcoming the Portland Trail Blazers 106-93. The Phoenix Suns silenced the home fans Sunday as they took the opening game of their NBA first-round playoff series 86-83 over the Sacramento Kings. |
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RALEIGH, North Carolina - The New Jersey Devils finally eliminated the Carolina Hurricanes from the Stanley Cup as Randy McKay scored twice and Bobby Holik got three assists in a 5-1 victory on Sunday. |
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