The Russia Blog
When I heard the news earlier today that Russia is about to loan Iceland $5.4 billion (the equivalent of 1/3 of Iceland’s GDP) to bail out the financially crippled country’s ailing banks, I thought to myself:
“Hmm, when I get home tonight I think I’ll write a tongue in cheek post wondering how long it
It looks like Baltika Beer are expanding into the British market in a big way, and it looks like conquering London is just the first phase of Baltika’s ambitious plans.
Not only did I see big, bold Baltika adverts in each of the free London papers earlier this week, but they’ve taken to… Read the rest
The Russian Duma has today voted in favour of allowing Gazprom to form its own private army. Reuters reports:
A law backed by 341 lawmakers in the 450-seat State Duma lower house of parliament gave Gazprom, and oil pipeline monopoly Transneft, special exemption from strict limits on private businesses wielding arms.
The two state-controlled
The Russian government has finally bitten the bullet, decided it wants to be in the World Trade Organisation more than it wants to be seen as a haven of music piracy, and closed Allofmp3.com.
The site, Allofmp3.com, was quietly closed as the Kremlin sought to end criticism from the United States that Russia
Update, April 2009: After an almost two year break, Mosnews has returned from the dead.
Last month I reported that the Mosnews website was no longer being updated with new stories.
Sadly, it looks as though Mosnews has now finally gone to the great newsroom in the sky, as their website –… Read the rest
The money will go primarily on expanding Ozon’s logistical infrastructure, by allowing them to establish new distribution centres. In a country as big as Russia, you can see why this kind of investment is… Read the rest
In a surprise move, Aeroflot have made a bid for the Italian flag carrier Alitalia:
Aeroflot joined with the largest Italian bank, UniCredit, on Monday to bid for most of the 49 percent stake in Alitalia held by the Italian Finance Ministry, which is selling its shares in hopes that a private owner will
The Moscow offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the largest of the Big Four global accounting firms, were searched by Russian tax police yesterday.
PwC are accused of failing to pay 243 million rubles (about $9.3 million) in back taxes:
Russian tax authorities are accusing PwC’s Moscow branch of deliberately underestimating profit tax on sums it allegedly paid
Despite being founded by a Russian, Google is only the eighth largets search engine in Russia:
Leading the pack was Yandex, a privately held Russian search engine that was visited by 64 percent of Internet users; Mail.ru, an e-mail service, came in second at 56 percent, and Rambler was third at 53 percent.
But
If you live in the UK, you might want to check out Russian Godfathers, which will air on BBC2 this Thursday. Basically it looks like it will be a 50 minute roundup of who’s who in Russia, who is on the up, and who has recently come crashing down to earth.
Putin, able to
Have you ever wondered why small-medium sized businesses don’t seem all that keen on investing in Russia? The same reason that smaller domestic businesses generally don’t flourish in Russia – bureaucracy. The endless number of forms to be filled in and hoops to be jumped through costs money – and quite a lot of it.… Read the rest
A couple of bloggers write about their negative experiences – mostly with scams – in Moscow:
Aaron, at 110 Lines of Longitude encountered the "wad of bills" scam first hand:
Then the really bad thing happened. After taking the subway into central Moscow and wandering around Red Square and the surrounding
Via Laurence Jarvik I found this article by Sam Vaknin. He wants Russia to abandon the cyrillic alphabet and switch to a latin one because, he argues, holding on to an archaic and over-complicated alphabet is holding back companies from investing in Russia:
According to the Russian headquarters of
Buy to let is a craze that has swept the United Kingdom over the last few years, as the economy has boomed. Buy a house or flat (apartment), let it out at enough to cover the interest only mortgage, then after a few years flog it on to take advantage of obscene increases in… Read the rest
Despite making the reform of corrupt business and attracting foreign investment central to his public policy pronouncements, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko must be more than a little worried by the economy’s latest growth figures:
Growth in the first six months of this year was 4%, compared with almost 13% in the
Intel Dump has a post about US basing strategy which, as part of its argument repeats a claim that the US base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan, contributes so heavily to the local economy that it is worth around 5% of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP – a number that seems suspiciously high to me.
The original article –
Tim Worstall, who runs a company that trades extensively in Russia, has a few observations on the Russian business climate, from the perspective of the smaller business owner:
The annual global market for one material we deal with (and we have a majority of that market) is around $3 million a
In a bid to reduce the number of vodka related deaths in Russia, President Putin has suggested re-nationalising the vodka production industry. This is in contrast to his ministers, who until recently, were trying to sell off the state vodka company.
It’s obvious that the existing system doesn’t work. It’s ineffective,"
Now that the Russian government has secured a majority stake in Gazprom it has fully opened up the company to foreign investors.
While in a strictly legal sense, this means that a foreign company could buy all of Russia’s energy giant, the Russian government now owns more than 50% of the company, and is… Read the rest
You may have heard of the Economist’s Big Mac Index. It looks at the cost of a Big Mac in capital cities of the world, compares it with the cost of a Big Mac in the United States and, through the principle of Purchasing Power Parity, works out whether a local currency is over-… Read the rest
