RADA conducts due diligence and business intelligence investigations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

President Vladimir Putin has replaced the education and health ministers, formed two new offices and split one ministry in his new Cabinet.

The head of the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys, Dmitry Livanov, was appointed the new Education and Science Minister in place of Andrei Fursenko.

The Health and Social Development Ministry, headed by Tatiana Golikova, was split into the Health Ministry and the Labor and Social Welfare Ministry, which will now be headed by Former Deputy Health and Social Development Minister Veronika Skvortsova and Maxim Topilin, respectively. Topilin was in charge of the Federal Labor and Employment Service in 2004-2008.

New additions to the Cabinet, which now has 21 instead of 19 ministers, include the Far East Development Minister, a job that went to Viktor Ishayev, who was also made Putin’s envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District.

Another new member is Mikhail Abyzov, who is now Open Government Contacts Minister. The open government initiative, also known as the big government initiative, is a semi-formal project by ex-President and current Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev aimed at uniting experts and analysts and providing the real government with better feedback from the populace.

In the economic sector, Andrei Belousov became the new head of the Economic Development Ministry; former Chuvashia Governor Nikolai Fyodorov became Agriculture Minister; Alexander Novak was appointed head of the Energy Ministry; Maxim Sokolov was made Transportation Minister; Nikolai Nikiforov was made head of the Communications and Press Ministry; Oleg Govorun will head the Regional Development Ministry, Denis Manturov will head the Industry and Trade Ministry, and Sergei Donskoi – the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry.

Other appointees include Vladimir Puchkov as the new Emergency Situations Minister and Vladimir Medinsky as the Culture Minister. Alexander Konovalov and Vitaly Mutko retained their respective jobs as Justice and Sports, Tourism and Youth Policy Ministers, though Mutko’s office was renamed Sports Ministry and handed over tourism and youth policy functions to other ministries.

Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia in the May 4, 2012 election.

February 20, 2012:It was an Ice Age squirrel’s treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species.

The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds.

The experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers, who published their findings in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” of the United States.

“We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth’s surface,” the scientists said in the article.

Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows.

Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy Of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in northeastern Siberia.

“It’s a very viable plant, and it adapts really well,” she said in a telephone interview from the Russian town of Pushchino where her lab is located.

She voiced hope the team could continue its work and regenerate more plant species.

The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, the sediments dating back 30,000-32,000 years.

The sediments were firmly cemented together and often totally filled with ice, making any water infiltration impossible — creating a natural freezing chamber fully isolated from the surface.

“The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,” said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. “It’s a natural cryobank.”

The burrows were located 125 feet (38 meters) below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer.

Gubin said the study has demonstrated that tissue can survive ice conservation for tens of thousands of years, opening the way to the possible resurrection of Ice Age mammals.

“If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue,” said Gubin. “And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth.”

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RADA conducts due diligence and business intelligence investigations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

February 13, 2012: Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, stated that an Arab League proposal for a joint peacekeeping mission in Syria with the United Nations would be studied, while China refused to give a clear position on the proposal.

Lavrov said Monday that a cease-fire would have to be declared before any such mission could be deployed.

“We should first have peace, which would be supported,” Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow with United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

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RADA conducts due diligence and business intelligence investigations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Moscow, January 5 2012: A Russian team has succeeded in drilling through four kilometres (2.5 miles) of ice to the surface of a mythical subglacial Antarctic lake which could hold as yet unknown life forms.

Lake Vostok is the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica and scientists want to study its eco-system which has been isolated for hundreds of thousands of years under the ice in the hope of finding previously unknown microbiological life forms.

Sergei Lesenkov, spokesman for the Arctic and Antarctic Scientific Research Institute, told AFP in Moscow that there was the possibility of a “fundamental scientific development”.

Lesenkov said that analysis of the composition of gas bubbles discovered in the ice above the lake could help climate change research.

“Because the lower layer was formed 400,000 years ago, from the composition of the gas it is possible to judge the gas composition in the atmosphere 400,000 years ago and during the time that has passed since the formation of the lake,” he said.

“From there, it is possible to identify and forecast certain climatic changes in the future. This is very important.”

No official announcement of the breakthrough has been made, although sources said that this was expected to come from the government.

“If it is true and it’s successful, it’s a milestone that’s been completed. This is a major achievement for the Russians because they’ve been working on it for years,” Professor Martin Siegert, head of the school of geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, told AFP.

He said that exploring environments such as Lake Vostok would allow scientists to discover what life forms can exist in the most extreme conditions and thus whether life could exist on some other bodies in the solar system.

There has long been excitement among some scientists that life theoretically could exist on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and the Jupiter moon Europa as they are believed to have oceans, or large lakes, beneath their icy shells.

Valerie Massson-Delmotte of the climate and environment laboratory at the French Atomic Energy Commission, said Lake Vostok was of particular interest as it had been formed over the course of 400,000 years.

“There is also a strong interest from biologists to study the forms of life that could exist in these extreme conditions which have been separated from the rest of the world environment for several million years,” she said.

The possibility that the lake existed had first been suggested by a Soviet scientist in 1957. Scientific research drilling in the area started in 1989 and the lake’s existence was confirmed only in 1996.

But efforts to reach its surface were suspended two years later amid fears that the process could contaminate the waters.

After developing new techniques in an attempt to ease environmental concerns, attempts to drill down through the deep ice sheet to the lake’s surface resumed.

The Russian researchers intend to start drilling again and obtain water samples from the lake for analysis in December after a ten-month break due to harsh weather conditions.

The hidden lakes of the Antarctic are seen as one of the final frontiers in exploring the Earth and several teams from other nations are also engaged in similar projects.

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RADA conducts due diligence and business intelligence investigations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

January 21, 2012: The Russian Energy Ministry expects crude oil production to edge up by 1 percent this year to a new record as a decline in output at traditional fields will be offset by a rise in new deposits, a deputy minister said today.

Last year, oil output in Russia, the world’s top crude producer, edged up 1.2 percent to reach a new post-Soviet high of 10.27 million barrels per day (bpd), or 511 million tonnes.

“Taking into consideration companies plans, this would be around 1 percent. We will add some 5 million tonnes,” said Sergey Kudryashov. The growth would slow further from 2.2 percent in 2010.

 

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RADA conducts due diligence and business intelligence investigations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

RADA was approached to perform due diligence on a technology company based in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

A preliminary check of Russian corporate records showed that the company was, in fact, registered at the address given on their website.

A call to the phone number listed on the website, however, did not connect to the company in question, but rather to a credit company. The people at the credit company were very helpful, they advised that they had had the phone number for several years, and that they had never heard of the other company.

Various search engines showed that the number was, in fact, connected to the credit company; the only site with linking the number to the technology company was the technology company’s own site.

Several other companies seemed to be located at the address used by the technology company on their website. Several of them were contacted by telephone. None seemed to know about the technology company, and one provided contact information for the leasing agent. The leasing agent advised that they had been managing the property for several years, and that they had never heard of the technology company.

RADA’s client decided not to pursue business with the technology company, as it could not be located with any degree of reliability.

RADA conducts due diligence and business intelligence investigations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has wished Russians a happy New Year and voiced certainty that 2012 will prove successful economy-wise.

Russia has remained an “island of stability” amid the raging sea of the world economy.

We have generally coped with the aftermath of the crisis, our economic development is picking up the pace, and this instills hope, the Prime Minister has said.

On the political situation in the country, he said that Russia is in the middle of a cycle, with the Duma elections over, while the presidential election race is just getting under way. He wished all Russians, irrespective of their political preferences, well-being and prosperity.

Russian natural-gas giant OAO Gazprom’s net profit in 2011 will probably rise 25% to $40 billion, Chief Financial Officer Andrei Kruglov said in an interview with Gazprom’s corporate magazine.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization are expected to rise more than 30% to $60 billion, Kruglov said in the interview.

“The favorable external environment and a strict control of operations will bring the company increased profitability,” Kruglov said.

Gazprom expects higher prices for its gas sales in Europe, as well as higher export volumes, he said.

“Despite the increased tax burden on the gas industry, the company’s finances will continue to improve,” Kruglov said.