Streetwise Professor

OK. The Moscow story.

In the mid-2010s I taught in the commodity trading program at the Hochschule Luzern (with the class held in Lugano). One of my students was a Russian working for Rusal’s trading arm in Zug. His managers (a New Zealander and a Canadian) wanted to expose Rusal’s marketing people to western business concepts, and had created a set of classes in Moscow to do so. The student recommended that they hire me to give one of the lectures. I agreed to do one on pricing. Very basic stuff, focused on elasticity of demand and its determinants, and how that information could inform their pricing decisions.

So off I go to Moscow. It was a close thing because Hurricane Harvey had hit several days before my scheduled departure, and Intercontinental Airport only opened on that day. I was on one of the first flights out.

Going back to December 2016, I had been helping a reporter for one of the last independent Russian news organizations, RBC, on a story on the supposed sale of a 10 percent stake in Rosneft to the Qatar Investment Authority and notably Glencore. Putin and Sechin had been touting the participation of Glencore in particular as evidence of western acceptance of Russia as an investment opportunity. It was a big deal to them.

Digging into the details, I determined that the deal was a sham. Glencore was basically a straw buyer, and retained no risk. The reporter ran several stories quoting me on this, that is, basically me calling Putin and Sechin liars.

When I was in Moscow for the Rusal class in early-September 2017, the Qatar/Glencore/Rosneft deal blew up, to be replaced by a sale of a stake in the Russian oil company to the heretofore virtually unknown Chinese company CEFC. The reporter messaged me for comment, and again I was quoted, basically calling bullshit on that deal too. (Here’s my blog post on that deal).

(Interestingly, Hunter Biden was mixed up with CEFC, and the head of the company was eventually jailed by the CCP).

That story came out on the morning I was leaving Moscow. I was admittedly a little nervous while waiting in the border control line, but made it through no problem and then grabbed a copy of RBC while heading to the gate.

Here’s the paper:

The reporter had told me that Putin (a) gets all his news from newspapers, and (b) RBC is always at the top of his pile because it’s the only non-propaganda outlet in Russia. So I had this vision of Putin at breakfast reading the front page article and saying to one of his flunkies: “Кто этот Пирронг?” (“Who is this Pirrong?”). I shared that vision with the reporter via WhatsApp.

His reply: “Oh, he knows who you are.”