Year: 2008

June 25, 2008

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – June 25, 2008

TODAY: Medvedev interviewed by Reuters; Moscow court fines businessman over blog entry; Chavez thanks Putin; new report focuses on Russia’s “passion investments”. In an interview with Reuters, reportedly his first with the Western media since taki...
June 25, 2008

Chubais Talks about Fear of a Gazprom Planet

We used to seeing advocates of many different stripes mounting vigorous defenses of Gazprom’s activities in Europe – even their partners in E.ON and EdF have joined in to bash the European Commission’s unbundling proposal for its...
June 24, 2008

Russia’s Move on Mongolia

There’s a very interesting op/ed in the Wall Street Journal today entitled “Genghis Putin” by Michael Auslin of AEI, focusing on the raft of business deals the Russian government is stapling down in Mongolia. Auslin’s conce...
June 24, 2008

Freedom House Pulls No Punches on Russia

The international human rights NGO Freedom House makes no attempt to hide the fact that about 80% of the funding comes from the U.S. government (as stated in each of their annual reports), something that causes many foreign governments to recoil i...
June 24, 2008

The Case for Direct Elections

Konstantin Sonin, who also has written some great material on resource nationalism, has a column in the Moscow Times making the case for Russia to reinstate the direct election of regional governors (after Beslan, Putin issued an authoritarian dec...
June 24, 2008

Russia Will Allow PWC to Appeal Yukos Tax Case

Accounting group PricewaterhouseCoopers won a small decision in the Russian courts yesterday which will allow them appeal the egregious back tax ruling which they face as a result of having been involved with Yukos, “a case that several fore...
June 24, 2008

Energy Blast – June 24, 2008

OPEC president Chakib Khelil has warned that oil prices “will not come down”. Lukoil will spend €1.35 billion euros ($2.1 billion) on a joint venture with Italy’s ERG that is expected to expand sales in Europe. Eni has made a new on-shore gas disc...
June 24, 2008

Today in Russian Business – June 24, 2008

The Russian unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers has won the right to appeal a ruling that it illegally helped former oil company Yukos evade taxes. Oleg Deripaska is “clashing” with Czech Peter Kellner over insurer Ingosstrakh. A subsidiary of the Alor...
June 24, 2008

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – June 24, 2008

TODAY: Amendments to pretrial detention could see prisoners released; “financial attacks” on successful companies; pastor’s sentence suspended; EU summit this week to focus on Georgia; Russian army to be cut to 1 million by 2013. Vedomosti has rep...
June 23, 2008

Shocking but True Stories from Russia

Many of you have likely already had the opportunity to read Yulia Latynina’s powerful article from Sunday’s Washington Post, but I am going to repost below to make sure it is always in this blog’s archives. Back when I was regula...