Moldovan election observation - in London (2)

Four years ago, I posted an account of Moldovans voting in Moscow; earlier this year, this space saw a rundown of the voting at the Moldovan Embassy in London on April 5th. As I watch the privesc.eu videostream from Moldovan Central Electoral Commission headquarters and marvel at the things they permit themselves to discuss when they think the mics are off (e.g., should the country properly be called "Moldova" or "Moldavia"), here are a few pics of Moldovans turning out to vote in London today:

For some reason, a cop car showed up and an officer went inside to discuss things
(presumably crowd control) with Embassy officials. This was around 8pm or so.

Apparently some people turned out with protest-type signs. And one of the
observers told me that an English-speaker had shown up and made a scene,
shouting about "don't let [an unspecified] THEM tell you what to do!"


Some comic relief - a sign designating the London consulate as "Voting Precinct #313,"
with the word "Voting" misspelled ("Voatare" as opposed to the correct "Votare").

The happy result - a "Voted" stamp in the passport identical to the one Lorina
got in Moscow in 2005, with an extra stamp indicating the date of these elections.

Moldovan election observation - in London

The last time Moldova held national elections, in 2005, we were in Moscow and weren't yet fortunate enough to have a small child to take along to the voting. That year, I posted a photo report covering the voting by Moldovan citizens in Moscow and especially Lorina's experience in line. Interestingly, the Russian authorities' slant that year was against Voronin's Communist Party, which is the opposite of their preference this year.

This year, we're in London and decided on Sunday to make our way to the Moldovan Embassy in Chiswick so that she could fulfill her civic duty and vote. As it turns out, the Embassy here is not as centrally located as the one in Moscow. That was no trouble, though, as once we made it to the proper Tube stop and boarded the bus, we were practically surrounded by Moldovans on their way to vote, which made it easy to get off at the right stop.

There was a small but very slow-moving line at the Embassy when we arrived, and a lot of people were taking pictures - some of them, no doubt, have posted them online, although I'm not sure where to find them (suggestions posted in the comments section would be welcome).




There were also a number of observers, duly wearing nametags, who seemed to be doing a thorough job. Tonight, as emails were making the rounds of the Moldovan community in London to organize a protest at the Embassy in solidarity with the people in the streets in Chisinau, one of the observers pointed out that they hadn't noticed anything untoward in the way the voting was conducted here at the Embassy in London.



Indeed, the place for voting was clearly marked, and the line moved steadily - albeit slowly - forward. Inside, there was even (instant) coffee and tea as well as some cookies, which came in handy to placate our very own little Moldo-American, who was attending his first national election.


Once the line made its way inside, there was a room with a few tables, each of which had an election official verifying people's identities - Lorina thought it strange that they demanded both a Moldovan address and a local London address - and explaining how to use the ballot. The bottleneck of a line seemed to be created not only by people's excessively long conversations with the elections officials - like the one guy who tried to start an argument over why the ballot was available in Russian when Romanian is the state language - as well as the fact that there was only one voting booth.

But for patient citizens, it was not an excessive wait to exercise the sacred right to vote. In the event, Alexander proved to be an excellent helper for his mother - and got the ballot into the box on the very first try.




We can only hope that all of the ballots from London - and no extras - made their way back to Moldova. As we left, there was still a line of people waiting to vote.

Blizzard and blame

CIMG2112, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

From yesterday's thelondonpaper:

Up to 7 in (17.5cm [sic]) of snow was dumped on London last night after a blast of wintry weather from Russia hit the capital. [...]

The conditions were blamed on snowstorms from Russia and cold air sweeping in from the North Sea.

It's almost enough to make one take a closer listen to those folks who moan about a Russophobic conspiracy within the British media.

Ad gone wrong

I took this image from an online ad for AT&T. They are running a similar TV campaign advertising seamless worldwide service for people who straddle places like "Philawarapragacago." The TV spots were directed by Wes Anderson, are quite watchable and get a thumbs-up from Adweek.

But whoever designed the online image above needs to take another look at a globe (a real one, not one with the AT&T logo providing the latitude lines). As someone who has looked at many maps in my life and actually had to consider the relative merits of living in China (well, Hong Kong), London and Moscow, I found it disturbing that AT&T apparently thinks London is closer to China than to Moscow. Hey AT&T guys - London to Moscow is about a three-and-a-half-hour flight; flying on to China from Moscow will take you at least twice as long. Not to mention that anyone operating between London, Moscow and China would have to be crazy to use AT&T for mobile or other telephony.

Alisher Usmanov - Богатые тоже плачут

The world's 142nd-richest person is wounded by a blog.

[Image source]

Thanks to a web host's fear of the UK's plaintiff-friendly libel laws, Uzbek/Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov was able to temporarily suppress some interesting material posted about him at Craig Murray's website. Notably, Usmanov has not taken Murray to court, presumably because his lawyers don't think he would win, even with the UK libel laws which put the burden of proof on the defendant. Based on material available elsewhere on the internet (for example, see Anticompromat's extensive bio and other information on Usmanov), it looks like at least some of what Murray claims may be true. More on Usmanov, including his interests in Transnistria (a topic not discussed by Murray), below the cut.

Murray, of course, was the UK's Ambassador to Uzbekistan who was sacked, according to him for being an opponent of the West's policy of tolerating Uzbek President Islam Karimov's human rights abuses. Murray has now reposted the article that drew the letter from Usmanov's lawyers, which is titled "Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist," at a newly created Blogger blog - alisherusmanov.blogspot.com. The bit about Arsenal relates to Usmanov's ownership of a stake in the British football (soccer) club.

Usmanov may be learning a difficult lesson about using heavy-handed tactics to go after speech you don't like - often (at least in an open society), such tactics just get more people talking about the material you find offensive. Perhaps if Murray's blog was hosted in Russia, Usmanov would have had success getting his friends in the Kremlin (Usmanov, you'll recall, was the tycoon who recently pre-empted the auction of Rostropovich's art collection and declared his plans to donate the collection to the Russian state - he's identified by one study as belonging to the "liberal-technocratic" camp of Russian elites, as opposed to the siloviki - page 33 of this pdf) to deploy the new "anti-extremism" law against him. Another advantage he would have on his home-field media space is that he's the owner of the Kommersant publishing house.

But instead of anything resembling such a result, the case - well, actually, there's no legal case - the story has become a cause celebre for bloggers the world over, it appears. Nathan has an interesting post about the brouhaha at Registan, with interesting comments. The Moscow Times also had an article about the story yesterday, noting that part of the reason it's become such a big story is that the website of at least one other politician aside from Murray, hosted on the same server, was also shut down for "technical reasons." We'll see if Usmanov gets to be Arsenal Chairman, regardless of the size of his ownership stake. For the moment, it looks like he fought the blogs, and the blogs won.



Interestingly enough, I had been reading just a few days ago about Mr. Usmanov's ownership of a controlling stake in the crown jewel of Transdniester's industrial sector - Moldova Steel Works, better known as MMZ, which is the abbreviation its Russian name, Молдавский металлургический завод, at Rîbniţa (also spelled Râbniţa or Rybnitsa, or Рыбница in Russian):

The metallurgic production unit in Rabnita is by far one of the most important objectives in Transnistria. 4,000 people are employed in this factory and the whole Northern part of the separatist republic depends on this factory. At maximum capacity, the factory can produce up to one million tons of steel and one million tons of laminated products a year.

Several groups benefited of this production unit. First it was the Russian group Itera, which at the end of '98 bought 75% of the shares. Once the group fell into the disgrace of president Putin, Itera had to sell in 2004. The shares were bought by the companies from Liechtenstein , which at this moment control 90% of MMZ. The two companies are called Rumney Trust Reg and EIM Energy Investment & Management Corporation. Both companies used to belong to the Itera Group. The buyers hurried up to certify with documents the new property, while the only ones who admitted being part of the Itera group, were Youssouf Hares and Alisher Usmanov, a Syrian businessman also active in the Ukraine, and of Uzbek origin. [...] Hares declared to us that the factory cost 100 million dollars and that the exclusive manager of MMZ is Alisher Usmanov. [source]

Organizational chart compiled by the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism,
showing the ownership structure of the MMZ steel plant in Rybnitsa .
[image source]

According to a report published last year by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on various legal aspects of the situation in Transdniester (which the report refers to as "the TMR"), economic influence is one of the levers Russia uses to maintain its outsized role as a third party to the secessionist conflict between Moldova and the PMR authorities:

Besides direct economic assistance by Russia, the fortunes of Russian economic elites have become intertwined with a successful secession of the TMR. The TMR’s economy is highly reliant on Russia. “Just over 50% of [the TMR’s] officially registered exports are direct towards two key markets—Russia and Russian companies registered in North Cyprus.” To pick just one example, the ECHR found credible evidence that “from 1993 onwards Transdniestrian arms firms began to specialize in the production of high-tech weapons, using funds and orders from various Russian companies.”

More generally, though, the risk of the TMR’s privatizations—which were largely bought by Russian and Ukrainian companies—being unwound or otherwise jeopardized leads to a substantial interest on the part of some of Russia’s business elite. This is redoubled with the substantial interest that Gazprom now has in the proper transfer of shares in Moldova-Gas from the TMR to Gazprom as a valid means of paying off debt.

Or consider as another example the story of the Moldovan Metallurgical Plant (MMZ) in Ribnita. The Ribnita plant was built in 1984 using German technology and is widely considered to still be the most advanced steel works in the former Soviet Union. The Ribnita plant also generates between 40 percent and 66 percent of the TMR’s tax revenues. The TMR sold the Ribnita plant, despite the protests of the government of Moldova, to the Russian company Itera.

Then, in April 2004, Itera sold 75 percent of the plant to the Hares Group, an Austrian company, which purchased another 15 percent from other co-owners. Some have argued that the Hares Group is a “political buffer” which purchases assets in former Soviet republics and then re-sells them to the actual intended owners. In the summer of 2004, Hares allegedly sold 30 percent of the MMZ shares to Alisher Usmanov, one of the “metal tycoons” of Russia, who then announced a plan to consolidate MMZ with five other enterprises from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan making the new enterprise the fourth largest ore mining and processing company in the world. Such high economic stakes may well play a part in driving Russia’s political agenda, regardless of the requirements of international law.

[source: pp. 292-293 in this pdf (footnotes omitted)]

"Conditional recognition of privatizations" in Transdniester has been proposed as part of one potential settlement plan, but this doesn't seem to have made a critical difference in resolving the conflict just yet.



A few years ago, Usmanov seemed confident that there would be no unwinding of MMZ's privatization, or at least that he'd be able to "take steps" to avoid losing control of the enterprise:

Moscow 19 October 2004 14:56 Alisher Usmanov’s holdings in Moldovan Steel Works (MMZ) should not be jeopardised by the recent decision of the Moldovan parliament that cancelled all privatisation deals in the breakaway region of Transdniestr, the Russian businessman said last week. “I believe that the privatisation of MMZ was done under the legislation effective at that moment and that my subsequent participation in the acquisition of a share package in a company that owns MMZ stock was in good faith and should not be cancelled,” said Usmanov, who controls Urals Steel in Russia and holds a substantial minority stake in Corus Group. Usmanov said that he is planning no immediate action. “However, if [the recent developments] infringe the interests of the mill’s owners in any way, we will take steps aimed at the preservation of the mill’s uninterrupted operation, jobs and corporate ownership structure,” he added.

More recently, earlier this year there was speculation that Gazprom would give its right to receive Transdniester's extensive natural gas debts to Usmanov's holding company, Metalloinvest, which would then take payment of the debts from Transdniester in the form of the portion of MMZ shares that remained in control of the de facto state. However, all of the parties supposedly involved denied that a deal had taken place. Quite a tangled web, and I'm not sure of the situation as it stands today.

[Image source for all images of MMZ]

[Update - according to this multipart investigative report on the sale of Moldovan assets to Gazprom, what happened this March was the following:

“Gazprom” assigned Transnistria’s gas debts, in the amount of USD 1.3 billion, to the “Metalloinvest” Holding, which is also co-owner of Râbniţa Metallurgical Plant and Cement Factory. When informing the local media about the transaction, Anatolii Belitcenco, President of the Board of Administration of Râbniţa Metallurgical Plant specified that he did know the debt assignment conditions but that, thanks to them, Transnistria obtained a deferral for a few decades. Igor Smirnov, the leader of the self-proclaimed Transnistrian republic, responded to Belitcenco’s statement with as surprising as cynical a declaration: “Transnistria does not have legal gas debts because it did not sign any contracts with ‘Gazprom’. And so, Transnistria will not pay anything to “Metalloinvest”. Moldova must come to an agreement with Usmanov (Holding’s leader, who holds 30 percent of the shares of Râbniţa Metallurgical Plant), it is the one that has debts.”]

[Update Oct 10: IHT has an article about the brouhaha surrounding Murray's blogging about Usmanov, which is titled "Bloggers beware when you criticize the rich and powerful" and describes the initial shutting down of Murray's site as "the Internet equivalent of a smackdown." Via Registan.]

More fun with Yandex's Pulse of the Blogosphere

Even when his era had ended relatively recently, way back in 2001, Yeltsin was a less popular topic for Russian-language bloggers than Gorbachev:


Пульс блогосферы по запросам ельцын , путин и горбачев


A few of the Kremlin's less favorite people (any other recommendations to add to the list? I have a feeling I'm leaving someone out):


Пульс блогосферы по запросам литвиненко , политковская, закаев и пасько


Oligarchs - fallen and otherwise:


Пульс блогосферы по запросам гусинский, березовский, ходорковский и абрамович

It appears that MBKh is no longer a blogger cause celebre - after some impressive spikes in 2003 and 2005 (corresponding roughly to his arrest and trial), he's received less attention this year than Abramovich or Berezovsky.

Stalin in the Underground

Are London subway riders more intellectual than the Metro hordes in DC? That is one conclusion one might draw from some of the things advertised in the Tube here. In DC, I recall ads for defense contractors, HIV medication, living in Baltimore (!), health & auto insurance, fake-me-out college degree programs, and (to be fair) a number of other things, including books, albeit usually trashy romances or pulp thrillers. In London, I see ads for musicals and museums, along with, of course, ads for travel agents, movies, booze, insurance, plastic surgery & botox injections, etc. But what made me pose the question was seeing this series of ads a couple of times:

Stalin in the Underground, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

The product being advertised is Simon Sebag Montefiore's book Young Stalin (to be released in October in the US). The ads are attention-getting; my only beef with them is that they - like the posters for the Borat movie - use a Cyrillic "Д" in place of the Latin letter "A". I've griped about the same type of offense being committed in a similar context in the past, and I still don't understand why publishers / advertisers do this. Can someone who doesn't read Russian enlighten me? Does the appearance of an out-of-place Cyrillic letter that sort of resembles the Latin letter it's replacing instill an air of compelling exoticism in the product being advertised?

Cheating on Moscow

I arrived this morning in London to classically drizzly weather. I'll be here for the next six weeks - splitting the summer between here and Hong Kong this year, as opposed to last year and the previous four when I spent it in Moscow. But I haven't been able to avoid reminders of the city we called home for so long.

It seemed like some sort of omen when the sticker I'm supposed to put in my passport for Hong Kong arrived by DHL the same day that my Russian visa expired. Then, last night at Dulles, as I was schlepping my overweight baggage to check-in, I heard the PA system making the last boarding call for Aeroflot flight 318 to Moscow. This is a flight that has so much resonance for me that when I set up wi-fi in our apartment in DC in the fall of 2005, in a fit of "home"sickness, I named the network "SU 318."

As if that wasn't enough, I'm staying at a place just around the corner from streets called Moscow Road and St. Petersburgh Place, and the guy who checked me turned out to be from Kyrgyzstan. Londonistan, indeed.