Word: duma
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...officials gathered for this Security Council meeting should leave. It's not quite the calm, authoritative image the Russian President likes to project, but these days Putin often seems rattled. In an appearance on Russian TV last week, he warned of "clan struggles" that could plague the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, after its crucial elections on Dec. 7. Putin's nervousness is strange, because his popularity has skyrocketed to 82% since the October arrest of oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky - the Russian public loves it when a billionaire gets his comeuppance. They are delighted...
...party saying: "I would not find it too hard to make myself love life in Britain." Who could blame him for wanting to try? Last week, Russian authorities announced a tax probe into Sibneft. Then a Moscow court agreed to hear a suit against the Yukos-Sibneft merger. The Duma passed new rules to grant the state free rein to raise oil export duties and to strike tax amnesty from the criminal code. Finally, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin pushed through a new bill to revoke regional tax breaks as of the New Year. Even though auditors later concluded that Sibneft...
...Commission isn't good enough. We need updated information on the state and location of the materials." But there are no plans for a new survey, funds are tight and neighboring countries accuse each other of not sharing information. The Ecology and Foreign Affairs committees of Russia's State Duma held joint hearings on weapons in April 2002, then recommended a program of evaluation, monitoring and forecasting. "We keep working on the issue," maintains Vladimir Mandrygin, chief of staff of the Ecology committee. "However, not all our Baltic neighbors are supportive; they would rather not talk about it. Russian scientists...
...prosecutor's office's "selective" approach to the law. Other respected figures, like former Economics Minister Yevgeny Yasin, warned that the clampdown was part of a slow erosion of political and economic freedoms. "The whole case is quite simply politically motivated," says Aleksey Melnikov, a liberal member of the Duma, the lower house of parliament, who has in the past strongly criticized Yukos. Despite the uproar, prosecutors show no sign of backing down. Last Friday they announced they were now investigating a total of seven separate criminal cases connected with Yukos; five of them involved "premeditated murder or attempted murder...
...Yukos dismisses as absurd the idea that Khodorkovsky was out to take over the Duma, but admits that he funds SPS and Yabloko as a private individual. The firm denies that Khodorkovsky has financed the Communist Party. The scheme, if it existed, was farfetched, given the modest showing of SPS and Yabloko in recent years and the Communists' tendency to self-destruct. But if the alleged plan had worked, Khodorkovsky would have become extremely powerful. Anyway, it came at a delicate time for Kremlin strategists: their party, Unity, is showing signs of coming apart at the seams. Khodorkovsky's apparent...