Communist Tax Lawyer

By Edith Balazs

Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) — Hungarian Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai said countries in central and eastern Europe should join together and create a “triangle” of supply points for natural gas to reduce dependence on fuel from Russia.

“I’m proposing that countries in the region set up a gas supply triangle to boost the diversity and security,” Bajnai said at an energy summit in Budapest today, which was attended by heads of government from countries in the region. “We need to increase the number of independent suppliers.” Read the rest of this entry »

McDonald’s opened its first outlet in Russia 20 years ago this past Sunday, on January 31, 1990, while thousands of Moscoviets braved the cold in Pushkin Square.

To celebrate the milestone, as well as a 23 percent year on year profit increase last quarter, McDonalds’ CEO Jim Skinner announced that they would be expanding their business in Russia by 45 outlets in 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Demanding tax cuts and job creation, protests against Russia’s current administration were once again staged across the country over the weekend.

In Moscow yesterday, police detained as many as 100 protesters at an unauthorized anti-Kremlin demonstration in downtown Triumfalnaya Square.

Among those arrested were several prominent opposition leaders, including Eduard Limonov, leader of The Other Russia; Boris Newtsov, former Russian deputy prime minister; and Oleg Orlov, head of the Memorial human rights group. Read the rest of this entry »

In a controversial move, Russia’s state-run arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, said yesterday that there were no international agreements preventing the sale of arms to Iran.

This news comes as Russia continues to expand their role as one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers and exporters. That’s all nice, but what peeves some other players on the world stage (namely the U.S. and Israel) is their willingness to deal with so-called ‘pariah regimes.’ i.e. countries that the U.S. doesn’t have under their heel.

Russia lists China, India, Syria, Venezuela, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria among their foreign clientele. So, in short, business is booming. Read the rest of this entry »

A great write up on the recent gas dispute between Russia and Belarus, from TIME:

It is becoming a New Year’s tradition in Europe to wake up on January 1 with a big Russian headache. At the beginning of 2006 and 2009, Russia cut off energy supplies to Ukraine after a disagreement over natural gas prices, which subsequently caused fuel shortages in the European Union in the dead of winter. This January, all eyes are trained on Belarus, which has been having its own quarrel with Moscow over oil prices, threatening European energy supplies once again. But three weeks into the current standoff, there’s been a twist: Kazakhstan, another ex-Soviet republic, stepped in last week to offer Belarus its own oil. Now the Kremlin’s most reliable tool for controlling its neighbors — energy blackmail — is at risk of blowing up in its face. Read the rest of this entry »

Russia and the United States are “95 percent” agreed on the terms of a disarmament treaty that would see the two largest nuclear powers each reduce their stockpile of nuclear warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675. The treaty would also reduce the number of vehicles capable of carrying these warheads to between 500 and 1,100.

“Everything in negotiations is going fine, 95 percent of the new deal’s issues have been agreed upon,” said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, according to Russian news agencies on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich is close to realizing a political comeback after his controversial loss to Viktor Yushchenko in the 2004 presidential election, which was marred with charges of corruption and fraud.

Riding a wave of widespread discontent with the Orange Revolution, recent polls show Yanukovich leading in the presidential polls ahead of current Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko going into the first round of voting this Sunday.

“Together, we have suffered through this Orange nightmare,” Mr. Yanukovich said at a recent rally in Dneprodzerzhinsk. “Let us consign this history to the black pages of our lives.”

Recent opinion polls have Mr. Yanukovich between 25 to 33 percent, Ms. Tymoshenko between 15 to 18 percent, and incumbent President Viktor Yushchenko at a mere three percent.

Yanukovich, whose image as a Kremlin lackey cost him votes in 2006, hopes to repair relations with Russia if elected, which have been strained of late as a result of President Yushchenko’s attempt to gain NATO membership.

“We do not want to join any military bloc,” Mr. Yanukovich has said regarding NATO membership.

“Relations should be natural, as they are between the Ukrainian people and the Russian people. They must be friendly, they must be pragmatic, they must be strategic.”

The Nevsky Express, an express train en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg, was derailed Friday night near the town of Bologoye by what is believed to be a homemade bomb.

As of Monday morning, there have been 26 confirmed deaths and more than 50 people are still hospitalized.

The explosion, which is reported to have been roughly the equivalent of 7kg of TNT, is currently under investigation by Russian officials as a terrorist attack.

Even as the Russia military is flexing its growing muscles, the economy continues to shrink. It what may seem like a return to the heydays of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy contracted in the last quarter as rising unemployment sapped consumer demand, bank lending stalled and the government was slow to respond with support measures.

Bloomberg reported that gross domestic product contracted an annual 10.9 percent in the second quarter, the Federal Statistics Service said in an e- mailed statement today, citing preliminary data. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of seven economists was for output to shrink 10.2 percent. GDP expanded 7.5 percent from the previous quarter. The service’s data go as far back as 1995.

China, India  and Russia are increasingly calling for a rethink of how global currency reserves are composed and managed, underlining a power shift to emerging markets from the developed nations that spawned the financial crisis.

“There should be a system to maintain the stability of the major reserve currencies,” Bloomberg reported former Chinese Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan as saying in a speech in Beijing.

Leaders from China and India are preparing to join their counterparts from the Group of Eight industrialized nations – the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia – at a summit in Italy next week. In addition to China and India, Brazil will also send representatives to the summit.

Emerging markets continue to remain dependent on the U.S. dollar, thanks in part to the United States’ status as the world’s largest economy and a US$2.5 trillion export market. Shares of dollars in global foreign- exchange reserves increased to 65 percent in the first three months of this year, the highest since 2007 according to the IMF.