ROTTERDAM, July 28 -- The arbitration court in The Hague has ordered Russia to pay shareholders of Yukos $50bn in compensation over its seizure of the one-time oil giant, according to the main shareholder GML Ltd.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled on July 18 that Russia pay the claimants "in excess of $50bn" after finding it had forced Yukos into bankruptcy and sold its assets to state-owned businesses for political purposes, the claimant's lawyer Emmanuel Gaillard said. Tim Osborne, director of the GML group of shareholders, which made the claim, said it was the largest arbitration award ever. "The majority shareholders of Yukos Oil were left without compensation for the loss of their investment when Russia illegally expropriated Yukos," he said in a statement. "It is a major step forward for the majority shareholders, who have been battling for over 10 years for this decision." Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former chief executive, had built Yukos into Russia's largest investor-owned oil company after the unravelling of the Soviet Union. Khodorkovsky spent ten years in prison before he was pardoned by Putin in December last year. Khodorkovsky has said he is not party to the case and is not interested in its outcome. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, commenting earlier Monday, said Russia will be appealing the ruling. "Authorities who are representing Russia in this trial will use all possible legal means to defend their position," Lavrov said. Treaty violation Dmitry Babich, a political analyst at the Voice of Russia radio station, told Al Jazeera that he thinks Russia would not be paying the compensation. He said that Yukos shareholders included convicted criminals. "So even for the Russian public opinion, to give $50bn to these characters who made their money in the post-Soviet years, this is out of the question even from the political point of view, even for President Putin and the Russian state." Leonid Nevzlin, the biggest ultimate beneficial owner expressed satisfaction with the court's decision. "I am very pleased the international tribunal in the Hague decided that Russia violated international laws and illegally expropriated Yukos," said Nevzlin. GML sought relief from the international court under the Energy Charter Treaty, which creates the legal basis for an open international energy market. The holding company claimed that Russia violated the treaty, which requires swift and fair compensation if assets are expropriated. GML says that even before Russia filed its tax claim against Yukos, the company had paid $15bn in taxes for the period on total income of $29bn. According to GML, the government claimed the company owed an additional $27 billion, bringing Yukos' total tax liability for the period to $42 billion, which was more than the company's gross income. Source: Associated Press
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ROTTERDAM, July 28 -- North Korea refute recent reports and findings linking them to two Islamist militant groups.North Korea on Monday refuted claims that Pyongyang negotiated an arms deal with Hamas and denied responsibility for supporting a Hezbollah rocket attack on Israel in 2006.
An unnamed spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry refuted the veracity of a recent report published in the Telegraph, which said “western security sources” had claimed North Korea was negotiating an arms deal with Hamas. The Telegraph’s ’security sources’ believed Hamas may have already made an initial down payment to procure weapons and communications equipment on a deal claimed to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. “This is utterly baseless sophism and sheer fiction let loose by the U.S. to isolate the DPRK internationally,” the spokesman said in an article published on the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA). The spokesman also slammed a recent judgement in the case of Kaplan vs. Central Bank of Iran in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which found North Korea guilty of supporting a Hezbollah attack on Israel in 2006 that left a number of civilians seriously injured. On July 23 Judge Royce Lamberth found “clear and convincing evidence that Hezbollah carried out the rocket attacks that caused plaintiffs’ injuries and that North Korea provided material support.” “This material support included professional military and intelligence training and assistance in building a massive network of underground military installations, tunnels, bunkers, depots and storage facilities in southern Lebanon,” the courts memorandum of opinion read. The Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the findings and reports were being fabricated to link North Korea with terrorist organizations and to shift the focus from the U.S. and Israel to North Korea amid the recent Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. “Lurking behind this propaganda is a sinister intention of the U.S. to justify its criminal acts of backing Israel driven into a tight corner by its recent unethical killings in the Gaza Strip of Palestine,” the spokesman said. ROTTERDAM, July 28 -- The Israeli military has denied its forces were responsible for an attack on a hospital and a nearby park in the Gaza Strip. It says rockets misfired by Palestinian militants were to blame.
A Palestinian health official says at least 10 people, including children, were killed in Monday's strikes. The Israeli military says that both Gaza's main hospital, Shifa, and a nearby park "were struck by failed rocket attacks" launched by Gaza militants. Earlier, the Palestinian health official Ayman Sahabani and the Gaza police operations room said separate airstrikes hit the park and the hospital. ROTTERDAM, July 28 -- Philippine military officials say at least 16 people were killed Monday in an insurgent attack on civilians in the country’s southwest. A military spokeswoman said about 50 members of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) ambushed residents of a neighborhood in Talipao town. The residents were on their way to a celebration marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Captain Rowena Muyuela said men and women were killed and at least 13 children were among the injured. She said the civilians were family members of the B-PAT or Barangay Peacekeeping Action Team, a neighborhood volunteer police group. Muyuela said insurgents retaliated against the volunteer group because they, along with the military and national police, have been carrying out operations against the Abu Sayyaf. The Armed Forces of the Philippines called the attack a “heinous atrocity.” In a statement from general headquarters, it said the act “cannot be justified by any ideology and shows the Abu Sayyaf’s terroristic nature.” The statement said those responsible would be brought to justice. Primer on insurgency The Abu Sayyaf is based in the island province of Sulu, where Talipao is located. It started out as an insurgent group calling for a separate Muslim state and in the 1990s received seed money from al-Qaida. But funding dwindled as authorities cracked down on international backers of terrorist activities. And its ranks diminished as international operations against terror groups intensified following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2002, the United States started rotating visiting forces to the southern Philippines to train the local military in counterterrorism operations. But the U.S. said in June it would scale back its presence in the south. Some 320 U.S. troops are there now. U.S. government officials say the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines was “successful at drastically reducing the capabilities of domestic and trans-national terrorist groups.” They point out that the Abu Sayyaf has devolved into a criminal group focused more on kidnappings for ransom and other crimes. Officials say the U.S.-backed program will “cease to exist” in the first half of 2015. The Abu Sayyaf and several other smaller insurgent groups are on the fringes of a recently signed peace pact between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the country’s largest Muslim rebel group. ROTTERDAM, July 28 -- Personal data including text messages, contact lists and photos can be extracted from iPhones through previously unpublicized techniques by Apple Inc employees, the company acknowledged this week. The same techniques to circumvent backup encryption could be used by law enforcement or others with access to the "trusted" computers to which the devices have been connected, according to the security expert who prompted Apple's admission. In a conference presentation this week, researcher Jonathan Zdziarski showed how the services take a surprising amount of data for what Apple now says are diagnostic services meant to help engineers. Users are not notified that the services are running and cannot disable them, Zdziarski said. There is no way for iPhone users to know what computers have previously been granted trusted status via the backup process or block future connections. “There’s no way to `unpair' except to wipe your phone,” he said in a video demonstration he posted Friday showing what he could extract from an unlocked phone through a trusted computer. As word spread about Zdziarski’s initial presentation at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, some cited it as evidence of Apple collaboration with the National Security Agency. Apple denied creating any “back doors” for intelligence agencies “We have designed iOS so that its diagnostic functions do not compromise user privacy and security, but still provides needed information to enterprise IT departments, developers and Apple for troubleshooting technical issues,” Apple said. “A user must have unlocked their device and agreed to trust another computer before that computer is able to access this limited diagnostic data.” But Apple also posted its first descriptions of the tools on its own website, and Zdziarski and others who spoke with the company said they expected it to make at least some changes to the programs in the future. Zdziarski said he did not believe that the services were aimed at spies. But he said that they extracted much more information than was needed, with too little disclosure. Security industry analyst Rich Mogull said Zdziarski’s work was overhyped but technically accurate. “They are collecting more than they should be, and the only way to get it is to compromise security,” said Mogull, chief executive officer of Securosis. Mogull also agreed with Zdziarski that since the tools exist, law enforcement will use them in cases where the desktop computers of targeted individuals can be confiscated, hacked or reached via their employers. “They’ll take advantage of every legal tool that they have and maybe more,” Mogull said of government investigators. Asked if Apple had used the tools to fulfill law enforcement requests, Apple did not immediately respond. For all the attention to the previously unknown tools and other occasional bugs, Apple’s phones are widely considered more secure than those using Google Inc's rival Android operating system, in part because Google does not have the power to send software fixes directly to those devices. ROTTERDAM, July 28 -- Chinese locals have made a big discovery in the realm of teeny, tiny creepy crawlers earlier this week. While the insect may look like something out of someone's nightmares, locals found the yet-to-be-named insect in the mountains of Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province, according to Scientific America.
New information is still coming through but what is known about the bug is that it comes from the order Megaloptera, a classification including 300 alderflies, dobsonflies and fishflies. It's freaking huge. The insect's wingspan stretches around 21 cm — enough to wrap around a human's face. But it's not all bad news as the Mashable video above points out. Aside from its terrifying appearance, the discovery of the insect usually means clean water is nearby since dobsonflies and similar insects need unpolluted water to breed. Source: The Huffington Post ROTTERDAM, JULY 28 -- Customs officials have arrested a Chinese woman and a Vietnamese man at Suvarnabhumi Airport after they allegedly tried to smuggle out elephant tusks and ivory products worth about Bt9 million.
The man was identified as Luong Tien Phong, 62 and the woman as Chen Zhiyu, 23. Eighteen pieces of tusk and 587 ivory products, worth in total about Bt9 million were found in their suitcases. Deputy Customs director general Paisarn Chuenjit said the arrest was the result of his department's strengthening of preventive measures to block the ivory trade in line with CITES. The arrest was made on July 26 at about 6pm at the Suvarnabhumi Airport. The suspects claimed that they were paid by an Asian to smuggle the items from the Ivory Coast to Cambodia's Siem Reap province via Bangkok. The Chinese was paid US$500 while the Vietnamese US$300. Speaking at the same press conference, Thunya Netithammakul, deputy director general of the National Parks Department said that the Thai authorities place importance on racking down on this trade, even though Thailand is just a transit point for the smugglers. Many international organisations including CITES, are also giving priority to the issue. ROTTERDAM, July 28 -- More death and violence were reported in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, as some investigators stood ready but were unable to go to the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, downed more than a week ago.
At least 13 people, including two children, were killed in fighting on Sunday between pro-Russian rebels and Ukraine government forces in and near the Ukrainian city of Horlivka, according to the Donetsk Regional Authority, citing preliminary information from the local health care department. Ukraine separatists are using Grad rockets on residential areas of Horlivka, according to Ukraine's Counter-Terrorist Operations Press Center in a statement. |
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