Iran Sanctions Will Not be Brought Up Until June

Moscow Times: Spanish Arrests Expose a New Kind of Mafia

By Nikolaus von Twickel

When Spanish police announced the arrest of about 80 reputed mobsters across Europe last week, many media reports trumpeted the development as the latest crackdown on the Russian mafia.

But soon the reporting shifted and introduced a hitherto little-noticed phenomenon in the West: the Georgian mafia.

The leader of the organized crime group's Spanish operations was identified as Khaber, or Kakhaber, Shushanashvili, and the gang was said to be in contact with convicted Georgian crime boss Zakhar Kalashov, who has been imprisoned in Spain since 2006.

Austria reported the biggest number of arrests — 25, including prominent reputed Georgian mobster Zaal Makharoblidze. The gang, made up mostly of asylum seekers, was responsible for 30 percent of a recent spate in burglaries in Vienna, said Franz Lang, director of Austria's Federal Criminal Investigation Office.

 Russian media were quick to notice the change.

"The Russian mafia turned out to be Georgian," read a headline in the Trud mass-circulation daily.

Russia Today, the state-controlled English-language television channel, suggested a lapse in Western reporting.

"Initial reports suggested that those detained belonged to the so-called Russian mafia, as people of former Soviet states are often mistakenly referred to as Russian in the West," a presenter said in a March 15 news broadcast.

 Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow's outspoken representative to NATO, said the reports reflected a deep bias. "Apparently for the Western media Georgia is always a good thing and Russia is always a bad thing," he wrote in his Twitter blog.

 The Russian-Georgian divide has been especially bitter since the two countries fought over South Ossetia in 2008, a war in which Russian officials accused Western reporters of siding with Georgia.

But the mafia stereotyping is also deplored by some Western journalists. "I think there is a lot of prejudice and a great deal of inappropriate use" of the term "Russian mafia," said Pilar Bonet, Moscow bureau chief of the El Pais daily. "I really recommend that the Russian ambassador to Spain protests and even goes to court when this happens."

Russian officials have long criticized Western crime reports about Russians. Timur Lakhonin, head of the Interior Ministry's Interpol section, said in December that the whole concept of a Russian mafia was nothing but a myth. "There is no data showing any existing organized crime structures that consist of former Russian citizens," he told reporters.

Yet Georgian officials also frown at the notion of putting blame on their country.

Georgi Kandelaki, deputy head of the Georgian parliament's international affairs committee, said the whole dispute was pointless.

"The fact that they caught Georgian criminals operating abroad shows that the [criminals] have no way of operating in Georgia," he told The Moscow Times on Sunday.

Kandelaki added that organized crime from his country is the most vibrant in Russia. "Look at the Georgian thieves-in-law — their number in Georgia is close to zero and most of them are in Moscow," he said.

So-called thieves-in-law are a fraternity of criminals that maintains its own code of behavior, laws, courts, leaders and initiation rites and that disdains any institution other than its own.

In fact, captured Georgian thieves-in-law have surfaced in national media reports recently. On Friday, Interfax reported that the Moscow police had arrested Merab Gogia, a 56-year-old suspected mobster, on suspicion of selling illegal drugs.

Speculation has also been mounting that Moscow might extradite Tariel Oniani, an ethnic Georgian believed to be one of Russia's most powerful mobsters, to Spanish authorities. Oniani was arrested during a dramatic helicopter raid outside Moscow in July 2008 as dozens of reputed crime bosses gathered on a yacht to settle a rift.

Spain has reportedly requested Oniani's extradition, along with three other suspects, Leon Lann, Konstantin Manukyan and Vladimir Tyurin.

A Spanish Embassy spokesman said Friday that he would not comment on extradition issues.

Yevgeny Vyshenkov, a former police detective and organized crime expert at the St. Petersburg-based Agency of Journalistic Investigations, said issues like ethnicity and citizenship matter little in a global problem like organized crime. What is important is where mobsters decide to operate, he said.

"Most of them live in Russia, mainly in Moscow, and have their have assets in the capital," Vyshenkov said.

Bne: Russia to spend more on education than defence

http://www.businessneweurope.eu/dispatch_text11379

bne
March 22, 2010

bne: I am a bit shocked that this story has got almost no play in the press at all - not even the Moscow Times picked it up, which, given the amount of money the Kremlin says it is going to spend, is a major omission. Furthermore, this is extremely good news. As bne has been reporting there was a huge flaw in Medvedev's plans to modernise Russia - nothing was being done to fix the education system.

This is an extremely serious problem as the Soviet-trained professors are mostly about to retire and there is no one to replace them. The upshot would have been the destruction of Russia's education system -- one of the very few achievements of socialism. If the system is allowed to collapse then it will take decades to rebuild.

We ran a piece recently on the number of scientists Russia has per capita and the number of patents it files: the result was Russia has about ten times more scientists than its peers, but files half as many patents. The whole nanotech/modernisation effort will fail unless a huge amount of money is poured into academia. And here it is. I really thought they were going to fluff this (although there is still time for that).

Still, final comment is that 4.4% of GDP, while a lot of money, is still less than the Asian Tigers spent at the start of their fast growth. Nevertheless it is still a big step in the right direction as these sorts of investments are game-changers in the long run. END

Russia's government says it will start to invest more into the education of its population than it currently spends on defence, reports Interfax.

"In 2010, 4.4% of the GDP will be allocated from the consolidated budget to ensure the education system's compliance with the demands of the innovative economy and to maintain all systemic changes," Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said

Ivanov's comments were followed by an announcement by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev that the government would build a high tech development centre, dubbed "Russia's Silicon Valley" next to the privately run (but Kremlin-backed) Skolkovo business school.

The hub will be a centre of excellence for science and technology to develop and commercialize new technology, Medvedev told winners of school and university contests last week.

The ultra-modern centre for developing and commercializing new technology will focus on five areas, including energy, IT, telecommunications, biomedical technology and nuclear technology, he said.

Belarus and China have both had a lot of success with these sort of centres. As bne recently reported, the high tech park in Minsk has spawned a highly successful software development industry and the government there are currently planning a second centre.

Paul Goble

Moscow has long been proud of the sale of Russian arms abroad, but increasingly it is buying military equipment from foreign firms, a shift that is contributing to wage arrears and even unemployment in that Russia’s own military industry and quite possibly creating a potentially serious political problem for the Russian powers that be.

Russian purchases of four ships from France and its attempt to purchase pilotless drones from Israel have attracted a great deal of media attention in both Moscow and the West, but efforts by the Russian defense ministry to purchase 1,000 IVECO M65 armored vehicles have sparked real outrage in Russia.

The reason for that, Igor Dmitriyev argues, is that while many assume that senior Russian officials are corruptly benefiting from the other purchases abroad, the Italian deal represents an immediate threat to Russian workers who produce a similar and perhaps even better piece of equipment(versia.ru/articles/2010/mar/17/inostrannaya_voennaya_tehnika_v_rossiyskoy_armii).

If the Italian deal goes through, the “Versiya” military commentator says the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia has concluded, more workers at the Arzamas machine-building complex, one of Russia’s hard-hit company towns, will see their wage arrears increase or even see their jobs disappear entirely.

The proposed Italian deal, Dmitriyev says, is especially “scandalous.” The vehicles that the Arzamas plant produces and that the Italian purchases would displace are equally good in the opinion of Russian military experts such as Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the Moscow Center for the Analysis of Strategy and Technology, and one-third to one-half less expensive.

Moreover, these experts say, the Russian model can be upgraded and modernized in ways that the Italian one cannot, meaning that initial savings to the military budget will be multiplied in the out years. And at the same time, because the Italian models won’t include all the equipment required for operation, the real cost of the deal is greater than Moscow says.

Investigative journalists at “Vzglyad,” Dmitriyev continues, may have found the explanation for this strange deal. It turns out, they say, the Italian company which would sell the armored vehicles to Russia is “a shadow partner of another Russian firm, KamAZ, “whose director in turn is friendly with the leadership of the defense ministry.”

The Arzamas factory, on the other hand, is part of a different military-industrial structure. Thus, KamAZ “is lobbying the interests of a [foreign] partner” against the interests of other Russian firms, and “it is completely possible to assume that as a result, particular functionaries of the ministry will receive some profit” from this “multi-million-dollar contract.”

But the interests of the workers at Arzamas will be ignored. That represents an economic and social tragedy. As of January 2010, wage arrears in Russian firms had reached, according to official figures, 4.1 billion rubles (135 million US dollars), including unpaid back wages in the region where Arzamas is located of 152 million rubles (5 million US dollars).

Moreover, Russian unemployment, which already stands at between eight and nine million, may now increase, Aleksandr Shershukov, the secretary of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions says, if the Italian deal goes through and there is no work for the employees of the Arzamas plant.

Russian arms purchases abroad may seem to be either a small problem or even from some perspectives a positive development, especially compared to Russian arms sales abroad. But these purchases have the potential to create a very serious political problem for the Russian powers that be because they bring together three different sets of concerns and political groups.

First, such purchases represent yet another attack on Russian pride. As Svetlana Savitskaya (KPRF), deputy head of the Duma Defense Committee, puts it, she “won’t be surprises if several years from now, they will tell us” that we have to put more Russians out of work and purchase even more military equipment abroad.

Second, such purchases represent a threat to Russia’s defense industry and its allies in the defense ministry, an alliance that may be further strengthened and prompted to go into action by these purchases which many members of these two groups will view not only as unsettling and insulting but a direct threat to their own futures.

And third, the linkage of such purchases and the unemployment they cause to corruption in the upper reaches of the powers that be is likely to bring together class and nationalist outrage, something that Russian opposition leaders may seek to exploit and that the Russian government will ignore at its peril.