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President Vladimir Putin announced on Monday that Governor Vladimir Yakovlev is to be appointed as a deputy prime minister in the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov with responsibility for overseeing reforms to Russia's communal-services sector. The announcement, made at the two-day State Council congress that opened at the State Hermitage Museum on Monday, brought an end to months of speculation that a deal was in the works between Yakovlev and the Kremlin to provide him with a position in the federal government in exchange for his early exit from the governor's office. Earlier rumors had Yakovlev slated for the post of Russia's ambassador to China but, in his announcement on Monday, Putin stressed Yakovlev's experience as governor in suggesting him for the task of reforming the country's municipal services and utilities sector. |
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 Vladimir Yakovlev may soon be thinking that his old job as governor of St. Petersburg was a walk in the park compared with being deputy prime minister in charge of communal-services reform. |
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MOSCOW - State Duma deputies overwhelmingly approved a tax-relief package the government says is crucial to meeting a presidential challenge to double the size of the economy by 2010. In a vote last Wednesday observed by nearly every senior official in the Finance Ministry, deputies easily passed in the first of three readings amendments to the Tax Code that will end the controversial 5 percent sales tax and slice the value-added tax by 10 percent, beginning in January. |
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 MOSCOW - One of the two warring factions of the Liberal Russia political party elected Boris Berezovsky as one of its leaders Sunday at a two-day conference called to map out its strategy ahead of December's parliamentary elections. The rival faction, meanwhile, held a conference of its own Saturday and accused Liberal Russia co-founder Berezovsky and other oligarchs of trying to "privatize" political parties. |
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ROSTOV-NA-DONU, Southern Russia - The wife and sister of Colonel Yury Budanov, who is charged with murdering a Chechen woman, told a military court Monday how the war in Chechnya made Budanov broody and brutal. |
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MOSCOW - Police have arrested a suspect in the killing of Magadan region Governor Valentin Tsvetkov a deputy interior minister said Monday. Working jointly with Armenian police, Russian detectives and prosecutors arrested Artur Anisimov, a native of Yerevan, in March and charged him with complicity in the killing of Tsvetkov in April, First Deputy Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said. |
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MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov last week defended his social and economic record before an agitated State Duma ahead of a no-confidence vote in his government, scheduled for Wednesday. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - President Vladimir Putin visited the new Ladozhsky Station on Sunday and examined new railroad cars for regional and national services, Interfax
reported. Railways Minister Gennady Fadeyev, with Putin on his visit to his hometown, said that more than 150 modifications had been made to the new cars over the past 2 1/2 years and that, as a result, the cars are superior to similar foreign cars. |
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SEOUL, South Korea - South and North Korea opened their heavily militarized frontier briefly on Saturday for a symbolic reconnection of railroad links, a key project with significant ramifications for Russia that was agreed at an inter-Korean summit in 2000, but delayed by diplomatic friction. |
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MOSCOW - Nearly every major Western news outlet has run a story in recent months on the consumer-lending "boom" taking hold in Russia. But outside a handful of large cities, usury is still considered an alien activity tantamount to sin. |
 Yekaterina Trofimova, a ratings analyst specializing in the Russian banking sector for Standard & Poor's Paris office, visited St. Petersburg last week to participate in the International Banking Congress, giving talks on mortgages and Russia's transfer to international accounting standards. |
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Russia is halfway home to finishing an unprecedented fifth consecutive year of robust growth, fourth of budget surpluses and third of early debt payments to international creditors. |
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MOSCOW - Germany's largest bank, Deutsche Bank AG, is closing in on the purchase of a significant stake in United Financial Group, sources familiar with the talks said. Reports that Deutsche Bank is interested in buying at least a blocking stake in UFG have been circulating since last year, but over the past week the deal has been the talk of the market. |
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The liquidity and capitalization of Russia's banking system have improved over the last few years, and lending to the private sector is rising rapidly. |
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On Wednesday, the State Duma is scheduled to consider a motion of no confidence in the government of Mikhail Kasyanov. Raising such a question is entirely natural, and moreover, is a necessary step to preserve the political face of our parliamentary system. |
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"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" could be the rationale behind President Vladimir Putin's decision to give his arch-foe Vladimir Yakovlev a seat in the federal government in exchange for his resignation from the post of St. |
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Journalists are wont to call the billionnaire George Soros a financier and philanthropist. Soros was in Moscow over the past week to reflect on 15 years of philanthropic work in Russia as his foundation winds down its activities here. Soros, with whom I had occasion to talk quite a lot during his trip, is blessed with a kind of foresight in that he can see certain positive or negative trends in world development before they take shape. |
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Broken Light Although much of the mail this column receives comes in the form of frothing, barely literate invective from Bushist Homelanders, occasionally a more plaintive cry will slip over the transom. |
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Seniors Service CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) - An Australian brothel is offering pensioners a 5-percent discount in what it boasts is a world first. Neil Campbell, the owner of the Viper Room in the east coast city of Brisbane, said that men over 60 were among regular visitors to the brothel, but many complained it was a drain on their pensions. |
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VIENNA - The UN nuclear watchdog agency began a meeting Monday that will take up the sensitive issue of Iran amid fears that the global treaty that seeks to prevent the spread of atomic weapons is unraveling. |
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Issues Archive