Last Friday, Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev met with the Presidential Plenipotentiary Representative in the Northwestern Federal District, Ilya Klebanov. One of the issues that the officials discussed concerned the work of retail companies with suppliers, the Interfax agency reported. “The country needs a law that would regulate the work of retail chains and help limit their negative monopoly influence on producers,” Interfax quotes Gordeyev as saying.

The leader of the Rodina faction, Dmitry Rogozin, has invented a new way to combat corruption. He proposed introducing annual mandatory certification of federal officials with a lie detector test. Moreover, the deputy intends to connect “first and foremost members of the government” to the polygraph.

Koizumi and Jintao met on Sunday in Santiago de Chile as part of the Asia-Pacific Cooperation Forum. The two countries have plenty of reasons for mutual discontent. The Japanese leadership insists on annual visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine - as the Chinese believe, to honor the memory of Japanese soldiers who committed war crimes in China in the 1930s and 1940s.

An auction to sell 76.8% of Yuganskneftegaz shares is scheduled for December 19. The starting price is $8.6 billion. To participate in the auction, applicants must transfer a deposit of 49.4 billion rubles to the RFBR account. China's CNPC appears to be ready to shell out this money to compete for such a lucrative asset.

The decision to reward members of the board of directors of RAO UES was approved by the company's shareholders two years ago. The formula for calculating the reward is described in one of the internal documents. For each in-person meeting of the board, its members are entitled to $400, for each absentee meeting - $200. In addition, they are entitled to 0.05% of the company's net profit for the year and 0.05% of the annual increase in its capitalization.

The decision by entrepreneurs Alisher Usmanov and Boris Ivanishvili to merge their metallurgical assets became known at the end of October, when the businessmen signed a preliminary agreement. It is assumed that as a result of this deal, Unicor will sell 47% of the shares of Mikhailovsky GOK to Usmanov’s structures, and Usmanov himself will sell 50% of the shares of Ural Steel to Mikhailovsky GOK.

Allianz is set to sell its group investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW). According to sources close to the group, Allianz is looking for a strategic investor, not just a source of financing. Germany's largest insurer has rejected several offers to buy DrKW in recent months, as the bidders have offered nothing more than capital investment. “We don’t need investment as such, it’s not about capital,” one of the sources said.

The draft law “On the conservation of sturgeon fish and the rational use of their stocks” was developed by the Federation Council Committee on Agrarian and Food Policy. As RIA Novosti reports, the document may be submitted to the government commission for consideration as early as December, and submitted to the State Duma in the spring.

An audio clip with the text “Whoever drank something else, drank something else. NLVZ products are what you need” was broadcast on the Novokuznetsk regional radio station “Apex-Region” from July 19 to August 6. Since 40% of the plant’s output consists of alcoholic beverages with a strength of over 40 degrees, the FAS commission decided that the enterprise had violated the law, Valery Zhilkov, head of the FAS department for the Kemerovo region, told Vedomosti.

“My government intends to pursue a strong dollar policy.” US President George Bush (Interfax) Bush did not explain the logic behind this policy, but a weak dollar is beneficial to American exporters and consumers. “In my opinion, territorial claims are generally inappropriate in the world today.” Sakhalin Region Governor Ivan Malakhov (Interfax) Malakhov does not want Japan to receive even one island in the Kuril chain before signing a peace treaty with Russia.

“Pas de Deux” is three – the number of syllables in the title – one-act plays, provided with the subtitle “Little plays for a good-natured theater.” In terms of the addressee, “School of Modern Play” is chosen quite accurately: the epithet “good-natured” can be applied to the theater of Iosif Raikhelgauz.

To keep Senator Richard Lugar, George Bush's personal representative in the Ukrainian elections, from getting bored, the Kremlin dispatched a third person in the Russian state to observe Viktor Yanukovych's victory. The third person became the first and, as of 8 p.m. Moscow time, the only official of a foreign state to recognize Yanukovych as the winner. Vladimir Putin joined Gryzlov shortly after eight.

S. Nikolaev “This is not even a delay in reform, but rather looks like its failure,” says Andrey Zubkov, an analyst at the investment bank Trust. The energy reform initiated by Anatoly Chubais assumes, first of all, the separation of energy production, transmission, sales, etc. from RAO UES into separate structures. The Federal Grid Company and the System Operator have been operating for a long time. The first wholesale and territorial generating companies are already being created.

According to Viktor Nesterov, head of the shareholder relations department at Lenenergo, the share of the company's shares converted into ADRs fell more than 10-fold by the end of the third quarter. According to him, 7 ,5% of shares under the unsponsored (initiated by minority shareholders) program and 0.074% under the sponsored (supported by Lenenergo itself). But after three months, the share of converted shares was only 0.7%, while the share of sponsored ADRs remained the same.

The main thing is that common sense prevails in Ukraine. The new president does not need political excesses at all, because he will have to deal with the economy. Rapid economic growth will not just be a way for him to catch up and overtake someone, but a vital necessity. This is the only way to work off the costs of the past elections. It's all about the commitments that the Ukrainian budget assumed on the eve of the elections.