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October 27, 2009
HEY RICO! HEY MICKY! HEY VOVA! WHADDYA SAY?
Dances with Bears
by John Helmer
Some very interesting stuff from the one-man Moscow news bureau, intertwining US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act prosecutions, prospective Atlantic Yards savior Mikhail Prokhorov, and term-limits overrider Mike Bloomberg. Really.
So here we are now in New York, where the mayor, a 5 foot-6 inch fellow named Michael Bloomberg, has spent $85 million to make sure noone has a chance of contesting the mayoral election against him on November 3; actually, by then he will have spent between $110 million and $140 million. With money like that, you might say the racket is already in power in New York City, and RICO is Mayor. So, you might also ask – how is it possible to file a lawsuit in a town whose mayor is Bloomberg against a Russian bad guy, whose legal exposure is that he conspired to make a lot of money, and got rid of any competition that stood in the way, mostly by paying for it to go away.
Hey Rico! Meet Micky Prokhorov – a man whose record for violating US-type stock manipulation and asset stripping regulations was allegedly so bad, an Englishman with an inherited title made the allegation in public. That man, Patrick Gillford (Lord Gillford, son and heir of the 7th Earl of Clanwilliam) made a lot of money himself working on projects which, according to Prokhorov, were paid for by Vladimir Potanin, Prokhorov’s original business partner in Moscow. Because Prokhorov was fighting Potanin for control of Polyus Gold, the listed goldmining company, whose stock they shared in roughly equal blocs, and because Gillford occupied a seat on the board as a purported independent, Prokhorov retorted in public that Gillford was toeing Potanin’s line, because he was being rewarded, and so wasn’t independent at all.
A man who works for Gillford in London named Locksley Ryan also busied himself in 2008, briefing institutional shareholders in the goldmining company. Ryan told them tales of how Prokhorov was threatening to steal the listed company’s assets, and urged them to vote against Prokhorov’s candidates for the board, and for Gillford.
A year on, and now that Mayor Bloomberg is backing Prokhorov to buy with some of his own, but mostly borrowed money, the Nets basketball franchise and a control stake in a Brooklyn real estate development, investigators from New York have been asking Gillford and Ryan to repeat what they said about Prokhorov’s business practices in 2008. But they refuse. Gillford is still sitting on the board of Polyus Gold; Potanin has cut his losses and sold out; and Prokhorov controls the company without challenge. Recently Ryan let slip: “In the end he didn’t have to steal the company’s assets, so what’s the point of repeating last year’s complaints that he might?”
NoLandGrab: We're not quite sure how to summarize, nor how to tie the threads together, so you may want to click thru and read the whole story.
Posted by eric at October 27, 2009 4:16 PM