Sunday, April 13, 2008

Russia breaks Swiss banks

I launched another bot on Friday morning, and a trifling matter of the day distracted me from following up on the bot's findings. I remembered it just now, on Sunday evening, and, instead of another harvest of secret information on Russia's communication and naval matters, the raw text returned contained the names of Alexey Kudrin, Sergey Ignatiev, Alexey Ulyukaev, Dmitri Pankin, Alexander Gorban and Nadezhda Ivanova (Алексей Кудрин, Сергей Игнатьев, Алексей Улюкаев, Дмитрий Панкин, Александр Горбань и Надежда Иванова).

The reason the bot found these names was that the text originated in a Russian Government's interoffice memo discussing the forthcoming visit of these Russian financial official to Washington, DC. The team , it seems, is to participate in the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. This all seems to be innocuously Russian, or even nouveau-Russian. Except there appears a sprinkling of neo-Russian words that my acquaintances from Moscow have identified as egotistically pompous proclamation of money withdrawals. Except the withdrawals were from such easily identifiable insittutions as UBS and Credit Suisse, and among the destination were Nekrasovian pseudonyms for Gazprom, and LUKoil(!!!???)

It comes as no suprise that the news now is percolating through the printed media, and, firstly, of course, through the blogosphere (as confirmed by Huffington Post) that the UBS and Credit Suisse and about to writedowns (or writeoffs) of loss, the first in five years, as a result of unprecedented market conditions. It appears that, concerted or not, Switzerland became too small for the Russian Bear's wallet, and might be assigned the status of a quaint and picturesque winter resort.