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MOSCOW - Yukos is on the brink of insolvency after a group of its foreign creditors said it was in default on a $1 billion loan, the company said Monday as tension mounted over expected asset seizures this week to collect a crippling $3.4 billion tax bill. |
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A former KGB officer in President Vladimir Putin's inner circle has been named the St. Petersburg's vice governor in charge of security. Governor Valentina Matviyenko on Friday named Valery Tikhonov, a former deputy head of the Federal Guard Service, to fill the vacant position. |
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The precious original manuscript of Alexander Pushkin's famous poem "On the hills of Georgia" has been returned to Russia through the generous and unsolicited efforts of state-owned bank Vneshtorgbank. The sheet of paper, a page from Countess Caroline Sobanskaya's diary on which Russia's national poet wrote the poem, was purchased for $300,000, avoiding a scheduled appearance at Paris auction house Douot. The success of private negotiations between Vneshtorgbank's president Alexander Kostin and the French collectors, brothers Andrei and Vladimir Goffman, enabled President Vladimir Putin to personally present the manuscript to Pushkin House in St. |
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All photos from issue.
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One of the six suspects being tried for involvement in the assassination of State Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova in 1998 unexpectedly gave evidence on his role on Thursday. Anatoly Voronin told the St. Petersburg city court that in October 1998 he was assigned by another accused, Yury Kolchin, to install eavesdropping devices, which Voronin installed in a telephone box located on the staircase at 91 Kanal Griboyedova, the apartment building where Starovoitova lived. |
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The first man to climb to the highest point on Earth came to the country that sent the first man into space on Sunday and was treated like a hero. New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, of Nepal, were the first to climb Mount Everest in 1953, when it was not known if the human body could survive the altitude. |
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Scientists Study Sound ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - An international congress dedicated to the influence of sound on a human life opened in St. Petersburg on Monday. More than 500 scientists from all over the world take part in the congress, Interfax said. |
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MOSCOW - As dozens of protesters clashed with police outside the State Duma, deputies staged a sweeping "social coup" Friday to discard Soviet-era state guarantees for nonindexed cash payments on services like health and transportation. |
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DUBAI - Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, in a rare television statement broadcast Friday, said his separatist rebels would not target Russian officials abroad and insisted their battle was solely against the Moscow government. Al-Jazeera Arabic television aired a tape it said it had obtained showing the bearded Basayev speaking to a camera. |
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MOSCOW - Amid a mysterious power outage, a Communist Party congress on Saturday unanimously re-elected embattled leader Gennady Zyuganov - while across town in a closed-door meeting, a breakaway faction was ditching Zyuganov in favor of its own alternative leader. |
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MOSCOW - Yabloko re-elected Grigory Yavlinsky as party chairman at a weekend congress and pledged to take part in the next State Duma elections in a new democratic coalition that could include left-leaning politicians. "Yabloko is ready to cooperate with those who affiliate themselves with the left wing of the political spectrum," Yavlinksy told the congress Saturday in the village of Moskovsky, south of Moscow. |
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MOSCOW - If you're thinking about hopping aboard a nuclear-powered icebreaker and heading to the North Pole, environmentalists are urging you to reconsider, as is the Russian government, albeit for different reasons. |
 MOSCOW - A new statue of a winged horse dedicated "to the Russian intelligentsia" has attracted puzzled reactions, with one of its sculptors saying the statue depicts intellectuals as "spongers." Alfa Bank and the Union of Right Forces sponsored the erection of the monument, a copper Pegasus flying over bent iron and wounded by arrows, which was unveiled June 29 outside the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Social Center. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin accepted contributions from 26 corporate sponsors in his re-election campaign, including Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's wife, Yelena Baturina, and the Rot Front chocolate factory. |
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MOSCOW - Olga Darfi was fresh out of film school when she got what she thought was her big break - an offer from a famous producer to direct a new action movie. Shortly after she graduated from Russia's premier film school, VGIK, in 2001, a friend introduced her to Maxim Fedoseyev, a producer at the Novy Vek studio who said he was looking for a young and talented director to shoot a movie about bowling. |
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MOSCOW - Even as the market waited with bated breath to see whether the government would destroy investors' former darling Yukos this week, the Energy Ministry held out hope Monday for significant foreign investment in the oil sector. ChevronTexaco is considering investing $5 billion to $10 billion in the sector,the ministry said in a statement issued as Yukos announced default on a $1 billion syndicated loan. The statement was issued following Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko's meeting with ChevronTexaco CEO David O'Reilly on Friday. "David O'Reilly told Khristenko that his company was currently considering the possibility of investing $5 to $10 billion in the Russian energy sector," the statement said. |
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 Italian Ernesto Preatoni's construction company has got another chance to complete a building renovation project. In its last session held Tuesday, the Tender and Investment Committee gave Dom na Moike, a company which is part of Ernesto Preatoni Group, until the end of the week to collect all the necessary documentation in order to continue the reconstruction of a building at Bolshaya Morskaya, 54. |
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$61M Insulation Plant ST. PETERSBURG (Prime-Tass) - Denmark's Rockwool International is to invest more than 50 million eu-
ros ($60.8 million) in the construction of a factory to produce non-inflammable insulation materials in Vyborg, Leningrad region's administration said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - A bureaucratic foul-up has caused the government to fall behind the business community in the drive to adopt international accounting standards. |
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The Russian information technology industry saw rapid growth last year and Russia is well positioned to become a global leader in IT, industry leaders say. "The market experienced very rapid growth last year with over 50 percent growth in some segments," said Anatoly Karachinksy, president and CEO of industry leader Information Business Systems Group (IBS). |
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MOSCOW - In the late '90s, Oleg Babakov lost millions of rubles by making poor Internet trading deals on behalf of Surgutsky Proyekt, where he served as president. |
 Foreign businessmen looking to succeed in Russia need to have a healthy dose of "patience and impatience," says James Beatty, a partner at accounting and consulting firm EMG. "Patience is needed to realize there are things you can't change. Impatience - to constantly push things and fight back," Beatty, a 33-year-old American, said. |
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The draft law on replacing social welfare benefits with cash payments was considered by the State Duma in a first reading on Friday. The government wants to ensure that the bill is approved in its second and third readings at the beginning of August and, in order to do this, deputies will postpone their vacations this year. |
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Russia is bracing itself for the privatization of its forests. The decisive step of this process will be the new Forestry Code, a draft of which is to be considered by the State Duma in the near future. |
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President Vladimir Putin's meeting with the oligarchs in the Kremlin last week was a real blast from the past. Closed Soviet political culture with its conspiratorial stances, meaningless words and meaningful gestures, that seemed to have perished some 13 years ago, was clearly discernable in the TV footage of the Kremlin meeting. |
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Half a year since the new administration took over and with a Legislative Assembly elected at the tail end of the era of governor Vladimir Yakovlev, all evidence points to the depressing fact that the city parliament has had virtually no influence on the lives of the citizens. |
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Beggar's Banquet And so it's come to this. The American people - proud heirs of a bold revolutionary spirit now marking the 228th anniversary of its fiery eruption into the world - have been reduced to thanking the robed Olympians on the Supreme Court for preserving a few crumbs of the nation's once-vast ancient liberties. |
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Al-Qaida Warning CAIRO (AP) - A statement issued in the name of the al-Qaida terror group has warned European states they have only two weeks to withdraw troops from Iraq or face the consequences, a pan-Arab newspaper reported Friday. Asharq al-Awsat said it had received a statement from the "Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri [al-Qaida]," the group which claimed responsibility for Madrid train bombings on March 11. |
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