A1+ TV COMPANY SUIT AGAINST ARMENIAN GOVERNMENT TO BE HEARD IN EUROPEAN
HUMAN RIGHTS COURT SOON
A1 Plus | 17:17:15 | 08-06-2004 | Social |
“The process has already started.Let’s see what will be”, Mesrop
Movsesyan, the head of A1+ TV Company that had been stripped of its
broadcasting license two years ago, said Tuesday speaking at a news
conference in the House of Journalists.
Mesrop Movsesyan and Tigran Ter-Yesayan, the Chair of the Lawyers
International Union, said at the news conference that European Human
Rights Court has already decided to start hearing A1+ suit filed in
2002 October against Armenian government.
“We are in advantageous position”, said Ter-Yesayan, who is also A1+
TV company’s attorney in the European Human Rights Court. The Court
has already notified the Armenian government about the necessity to
explain why the company’s suit is not due to be heard, he said.
It is hard to say whether Armenian government will manage to prove
that A1+’ s rights have not been infringed or not.
Ter-Yesayan said the plaintiff has spent one year to prepare a
1000-page complaint while the defendant is given time up to September
28, 2004, to submit objections to the Court and justify them.
If the government won’t respond to the Court letter till the deadline,
in any case the legal proceedings will continue.
Tigran Ter-Yesayan said it wasn’t ruled out that the Court to offer
both sides to settle the matter amicably by reaching compromise. In the
event if the accord is reached, no details of that will be revealed.
What A1+ expects in case of winning the case?
There is no demand of giving broadcasting frequency to the company in
the suit. We expect moral and financial compensation, Ter-Yesayan said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

International Herald Tribune, France
New York Times
June 7 2004
Kerkorian takes old path in bid for rival
Andrew Ross Sorkin NYT June 07, 2004
Kirk Kerkorian just can’t stay away from the tables.
Kerkorian, the 86-year-old financier who owns the MGM Mirage hotel
and casino empire, took another gamble late Friday night by making
an unsolicited $4.5 billion bid to buy a rival farther down the Las
Vegas Strip, the Mandalay Resort Group.
But Kerkorian’s seemingly surprise pubic bid was not exactly a surprise
to insiders: the two companies had been knee-deep in private merger
talks last week, executives involved in the discussions said Sunday.
Those talks were sent into chaos, they said, when Mandalay’s share
price jumped $5.65, or more than 10 percent, to $60.27, adding hundreds
of millions of dollars to Mandalay’s value, after the company reported
that its first-quarter earnings had nearly doubled.
So late Friday, Kerkorian made what may be an especially clever
negotiating play: he immediately made his offer of $68 a share for
Mandalay public in an effort to keep its shares from going even higher.
The maneuver comes straight out of Kerkorian’s playbook: he did the
same thing in 2000 when he acquired Mirage Resorts from Steve Wynn
in a prolonged battle that began much the same way.
The purchase would give MGM Mirage ownership stakes in several
well-known casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, including the Luxor, the
Excalibur and the Monte Carlo, as well as properties in Mississippi,
Michigan and Illinois. The company, which already owns the Bellagio,
the MGM Grand and the Mirage, among others, would assume about $2.8
billion in Mandalay debt.
Based on Mandalay’s closing price Friday, the offer represents about
a 13 percent premium; it would have been a 23 percent premium if the
offer had been made Thursday.
The New York Times

Kerkorian Strikes Again
Casino City Times, MA
June 7 2004
Most popular gaming on the internet? Visit the new
online.casinocity.com! by Richard N. Velotta
By Our Partners at the Las Vegas Sun
LAS VEGAS — MGM MIRAGE’s surprise bid to buy out Mandalay Resort
Group had the familiar signature of a legendary deal maker.
Who else but Kirk Kerkorian, majority owner of MGM MIRAGE shares,
could engineer such a stunning proposal to acquire one of the hottest
casino companies on the Strip?
It was only four years ago that Kerkorian, who has waged boardroom war
involving companies such as Chrysler Corp. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
stunned the gaming world with an audacious acquisition bid for Steve
Wynn’s Mirage Resorts Inc.
Observers were as stunned over the weekend as they were in 2000 when
Kerkorian engaged Wynn — a casino executive with a vastly different
style.
In the end, Kerkorian bought Mirage, although Wynn’s negotiating
resulted in the price for Mirage going up from $17 to $21 a share in
the $6.4 billion deal.
And, in a fairy-tale “all’s well that ends well” finish, Wynn wound
up taking his cut of the deal to buy the Desert Inn and turn the
site into what promises to be the next big must-see Strip resort,
Wynn Las Vegas, which will open next year.
Kerkorian and his company didn’t fare so badly either — they took
control of one of the prime Strip resorts Wynn built, Bellagio, and
the property credited with generating Las Vegas’ boom days, The Mirage,
as well as Treasure Island, the Golden Nugget (which recently changed
hands again), half of the Monte Carlo and one of Biloxi, Miss.’s best
properties, Beau Rivage.
“The game being played is one Kerkorian has played many times,” Bill
Thompson, chairman of the Department of Public Administration at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said at the time of the 2000 deal
for Mirage Resorts.
Thompson, contacted Sunday about the Mandalay Resort Group deal,
said he could almost say the same thing now.
“It’s clear that he’s found that the best opportunity for casino
gambling in the world is in Las Vegas,” Thompson said. “In one sense,
he’s voting on the Las Vegas Strip with this deal.”
But the fact that Kerkorian is making a play for Mandalay Resort Group
indicates to Thompson that maybe the 87-year-old financier doesn’t
see as much opportunity in international deals as some experts have
suggested.
“Maybe England is not opening up like he expected,” Thompson said in
reference to Great Britain’s deliberations on tax policies accompanying
the expansion and deregulation of gambling in that country.
MGM MIRAGE’s decision in May not to bid any higher than $555 million
to acquire Wembley Plc, a British operator of dog tracks in the United
Kingdom and Rhode Island, lends credence to that theory. MGM MIRAGE
bowed out of the bidding.
“He’s a great deal maker, but maybe there were a few things that didn’t
look right,” he said. “Maybe stuff was not working out as he expected
and he has some capital and he said, ‘What can I do with my money?’ ”
Whatever the answer is, it’s not likely to come from Kerkorian
himself. He shuns public attention, preferring to leave management
of his business operations to trusted executives such as MGM MIRAGE
Chairman and Chief Executive Terry Lanni.
Kerkorian has earned a reputation as a shrewd investor with some of
his most notorious deals occurring outside the gaming realm.
In 1965, Kerkorian, a former World War II pilot, sold Trans
International Airlines for a profit of more than $100 million after
building the airline from a couple of war surplus planes.
He used the profits to acquire the Flamingo in 1967 and to build
the International, now the Las Vegas Hilton, in 1969. At the time,
it was the largest hotel in the world.
Kerkorian sold both of those properties to Hilton Hotels Corp., in
1970, using the proceeds to buy the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio.
The name became the cornerstone for his MGM Grand hotel-casino, which
opened at the Strip and Flamingo Road in 1973. That hotel also was
the largest in the world when it opened.
He held the hotel and studio for several years, even enduring one of
Las Vegas’ worst disasters, a 1980 fire that killed 83 people. In
1985, Kerkorian sold the property to Bally Entertainment Corp.,
which turned the hotel into Bally’s hotel-casino.
Kerkorian picked up the Desert Inn in 1987 and the Sands in 1988. He
quickly sold the Sands to Sheldon Adelson, who eventually transformed
the site into the Venetian hotel-casino, and he sold the Desert Inn
to ITT-Sheraton in 1993.
Meanwhile, Kerkorian stripped away many of the MGM Studio’s assets
and sold them to Ted Turner in 1986, buying it back a few months
later after Turner had secured its film library. In 1990, Kerkorian
sold the studio again, this time to Giancarlo Parretti, an Italian
financier. Kerkorian acquired the studio for a third time in 1996
after accusations of financial misdealings threatened to close it.
Kerkorian’s various dealings in the early ’90s enabled him to build
the largest hotel in the world for the third time — the MGM Grand
at the Strip and Tropicana Avenue on the old Marina hotel-casino site.
Both Kerkorian and Wynn considered buying the parcel across the
street from the new MGM Grand and it was Kerkorian that emerged as
the owner. He and partner Gary Primm built the New York-New York
hotel-casino there, with Primm eventually selling his share of both
that property and his three resorts on the Nevada-California state
line to MGM Grand Inc.
Kerkorian has shown the same deal-making tenacity in his investments
in Chrysler Corp. Last month, he testified in a court case in U.S.
District Court in Delaware in which he has sued DaimlerChrysler AG,
claiming that company engineered a takeover of Chrysler but called
it a merger in order to avoid paying the acquisition fee.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Le Figaro
07 juin 2004
Las Vegas : nouvelle bataille des casinos;
JEUX OPA de MGM Mirage sur Mandalay Resort
Le milliardaire américain Kirk Kerkorian ne plaisante pas avec
les fêtes. A l’occasion de son 87 e anniversaire, le célèbre homme
d’affaires a décidé de s’offrir Mandalay Bay, l’un des plus prestigieux
casinos de Las Vegas, exception faite bien sûr de ceux qu’il possède
déjà, comme le MGM Grand et le Bellagio, fréquentés par des stars comme
Ben Affleck ou Jennifer Lopez. A la surprise générale, vendredi, son
groupe de casinos et d’hôtellerie MGM Mirage, numéro un américain,
a lancé une offre publique de rachat sur son rival Mandalay Resort
Group, quatrième casinotier américain. A travers cette opération,
Kirk Kerkorian a, à coup sûr, décidé de participer à la consolidation
en cours dans le secteur du jeu outre-Atlantique. En réalité, il
entend mettre la main sur la Mecque du jeu. En cas de succès de
son offre en effet, l’homme d’affaires prendra la tête du premier
groupe de jeux d’argent aux Etats-Unis, devançant ainsi les deux
poids lourds historiques de Las Vegas, Caesars Entertainment et
Harrah’s Entertainment ! Outre le Mandalay Bay, le groupe Mandalay
Resort contrôle notamment à Las Vegas le Luxor, un hôtel en forme
de pyramide égyptienne, et l’Excalibur. Un cadeau d’anniversaire qui
devrait pourtant lui coûter cher. Pour s’imposer roi des casinos, le
milliardaire met sur la table pas moins de 4,85 milliards de dollars,
auxquels il faut ajouter les dettes du Mandalay Resort, estimées
à quelque 2,8 milliards de dollars, qu’il propose généreusement
d’assumer.
Rafler la plupart des salles de jeux légendaires de Las Vegas lui
reviendrait donc au total à 7,65 milliards de dollars. L’offre
propose 68 dollars par action en numéraire, soit une prime de
près de 13% par rapport au cours de clôture de vendredi à 60,27
dollars. Elle intervient aussi au lendemain de la publication
de résultats trimestriels (clos fin avril) records pour le groupe
Mandalay Resort. Pourtant, celui-ci ne semble pas considérer l’offre
de l’homme d’affaires hostile, même si elle reste «non sollicitée»,
de source proche des négociations. Cette sollicitude ne devrait pas
être partagée par les grands casinotiers de la ville. Le groupe
Harrah’s pourrait ainsi s’inviter à cette partie. D’autant que
selon certaines rumeurs, il aurait déjà cherché à se rapprocher de
Mandalay ces dernières années. Mais le milliardaire américain, fils
d’une famille modeste d’Arméniens de Fresno (Californie), connaît bien
Las Vegas. Bien ancré dans le milieu depuis son achat en 2000 de MGM
Mirage pour 6 milliards de dollars, il a contribué à transformer la
ville du Nevada en capitale mondiale du jeu, d’abord en convoyant des
joueurs dans ses avions en 1947 puis en y construisant lui-même des
hôtels casinos géants. Fidèle à sa réputation d’entêté, Kirk Kerkorian
exige toujours de DaimlerChrysler, en tant qu’ancien actionnaire,
plusieurs milliards de dollars de dédommagement suite à la fusion
des deux constructeurs automobiles. En revanche, il s’apprêterait à
vendre à Sony ses studios de cinéma MGM pour 5 milliards de dollars,
ce qui pourrait l’aider à financer l’acquisition de Mandalay Resort.
D. D.

CLEMENCY MUST BE SHOWN TOWARD EDGAR
A1 Plus | 21:02:15 | 08-06-2004 | Politics |
On Tuesday, MP Grigor Harutyunyan, a member of Artarutyun
opposition bloc, commenting on court decision to extend the term
of General-Lieutenant Vagharshak Harutyunyan’s pretrial detention
for another two months, said, according to information obtained from
reliable sources, the political prisoner had been offered freedom for
dissuading the opposition from holding rallies. He rebuffed the offer,
said Grigor Harutyunyan.
It should be reminded that Vagharshak Harutyunyan is charged
with attempting a coup, making seditious calls and insulting the
authorities.
MP Emma Khudabashyan spoke on another political prisoner Edgar
Arakelyan, 24, who had been convicted of hitting a policeman with
empty plastic bottle and sentenced to one year and six months in
jail. She urged president Kocharyan and the ruling coalition to
display clemency toward Edgar and release him from detention.

EDGAR ARAKELYAN CASE SENT TO APPEAL COURT
A1 Plus | 22:00:27 | 08-06-2004 | Politics |
The lawyer of Edgar Arakelyan, who was sentenced to a year and six
months for hitting a policeman with an empty plastic bottle, filed
a motion to the Court of Appeal on Tuesday.
He is asking to reconsider the case and, taking into account his
client’s repentance, to replace the punishment with a not so severe
one: to fine him or give him a suspended sentence.

[Congressional Record: June 7, 2004 (Extensions)]
[
SENATE COMMITTEE MEETINGS
MEETINGS SCHEDULED
JUNE 16
2 p.m.
Foreign Relations
To hold hearings to examine the nominations of Charles P.
Ries, of the District of Columbia, to be Ambassador to
Greece, Tom C. Korologos, of the District of Columbia,
to be Ambassador to Belgium, and John Marshall Evans, of
the District of Columbia, to be Ambassador to the Republic
of Armenia.

Azerbaijan not to cede land to Nagorno-Karabakh – president
08.06.2004, 15.20
YEVLAKH (Azerbaijan), June 8 (Itar-Tass) – Azerbaijan will not cede
a sod of its land, President Ilham Aliyev said, addressing a meeting
in the city of Yevlakh devoted to the opening a street and a square
named after his father Geidar Aliyev on Tuesday.
He stressed that Azerbaijan would seek to solve the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict peacefully.
“But if this fails, we will free the occupied territories by any
means. We must be ready for such situation,” Aliyev said, referring
to chunks of land that remained in Azerbaijan’s breakaway Armenian
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after a six-year war.
Aliyev said he was optimistic about the future of his country that
has an important place in the region.
He stressed that the focus of the Azerbaijani leadership’s policy
was on “economic and social development, attention to people and care
for them”.
Aliyev said authorities must develop their regions, create new jobs,
favourable conditions for businesses, and attend to youth problems
and needs of people.
During his stay in Yevlakh, a city of 125,000 people, Aliyev inspected
the progress of the construction of a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline
and visited several social facilities.
He is expected to visit on Tuesday a nearby city of Mingechaur,
one of industrial centres of Azerbaijan

Armed incident happens on Azerbaijani-Armenian border
Itar Tass
08.06.2004, 19.32
BAKU, June 8 (Itar-Tass) — One serviceman was killed and another was
wounded in Armenian shooting at Azerbaijani positions in the Fizuli
district of Southwest Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry
reported on Tuesday.
The ministry said that Azerbaijani positions came under large-caliber
machinegun fire in the Kazakh district in the country’s west as
well. The shooting stopped only after Azerbaijani servicemen opened
fire, the ministry said.
The ministry bluntly denied Armenian claims of alleged movement of
Azerbaijani units in the conflict zone.
Meanwhile, press secretary of the Armenian defense minister Col. Seiran
Shakhsuvaryan told Itar-Tass that Azerbaijani units tried to take
more advantageous positions on the border near Berkaber village of
Armenia’s Tavush district in the small hours of Monday.
He said Armenian units tried to stop Azerbaijani soldiers from
moving towards a local pump station and the soldiers opened fire at
the village. “Armenian units had to suppress the Azerbaijani fire,”
he said. Shakhsuvaryan said that none of the Armenian servicemen was
killed or wounded.

The Asia Times
June 9, 2004
Middle East
SPEAKING FREELY
Northern Iraq – calm like a bomb
By W Joseph Stroupe
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested
in contributing.
As negotiations at the United Nations on a new resolution for Iraq
apparently near a close, developments with respect to the Kurds and
north Iraq, where there has been relative calm until now, are looking
more and more ominous. Recently, the People’s Congress of Kurdistan
(the former Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK), announced an abrupt
end to its five-year ceasefire with Turkish forces, warning that it
would soon resort to violent means to achieve its ends.
Within a few days of the announcement, Kurdish forces in
southern Turkey did attack Turkish forces, prompting a violent
response. Additionally, according to a recent Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty report, “Kamis Djabrailov, chairman of the International
Union of Kurdish Public Organizations that represents the Kurdish
minorities in Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and other CIS [Commonwealth
of Independent States], told Interfax on 31 May that his organization
approves the announcement three days earlier by the People’s Congress
of Kurdistan that it will end on 1 June its five-year ceasefire in
hostilities with the Turkish armed forces.”
Hence, the regional political, diplomatic and even military
mobilization of Kurdish forces, in an attempt to secure its own
interests as the June 30 date for the handover of sovereignty to
Iraq nears, appears to be under way. In verification of that fact,
on June 7, Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal
Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan threatened to pull out of
the interim government unless the new United Nations Security Council
resolution guarantees Kurdish autonomy and a veto over the direction of
the interim government as promised in the draft interim constitution,
which was very reluctantly signed by the Shi’ite representatives,
but which is something the Shi’ite majority refuses to accept under
any circumstances.
The Kurdish representatives also expressed their bitter disappointment
over the fact that no Kurd was chosen to fill the positions of
either prime minister or president. Hence, in the Kurdish view,
their interests are being severely slighted as the June 30 date
nears. Whether a political and diplomatic compromise can be reached
that satisfies all the parties is not at all assured. The Sunnis and
Shi’ites appear to be mostly content with the look of the new interim
council and with Iraq’s direction, but the Kurds are certainly not
content. They have been marginalized before, by the United States
itself, and intend to take care of their own interests, by violence
if need be. This is indeed ominous.
The pointed Kurdish demands threaten to disrupt the relative
contentment with the transition process, which now exists among the
Sunni and Shi’ite populations, among Iraq’s neighbors and within
the international community at large. In actuality, there is little
sympathy for the cause of the Kurds in Iraq and the surrounding region.
That is especially so in Turkey, Syria and Iran, where Kurdish
groups are viewed as nothing more than destabilizing terrorists,
threatening the national security of the three nations, which have
recently deepened their cooperation in the effort to subdue such
groups. And in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the last thing that is wanted
is for such Kurdish groups to push the region toward violence and
instability in the pursuit of Kurdish autonomy.
An independent Kurdistan is, therefore, anathema to all but the Kurds
themselves. It is the United States which has greatly exacerbated the
current situation by raising Kurdish hopes for an independent Kurdistan
in northern Iraq. Months ago, in the atmosphere of violent insurgency
in Iraq and the approaching handover of sovereignty, the US-drafted
interim constitution significantly raised such Kurdish hopes, giving
them a veto over the direction of any Iraqi interim government,
as well as over the final Iraqi government to be seated in 2005.
Fearful of the influence of Shi’ite religious fundamentalism as the
transition to sovereignty progressed, the administration of President
George W Bush evidently saw the Kurds as an entity it could use to
keep such Shi’ite influence in check, to limit its power in any new
Iraqi regime, so as to prevent the formation of an Iranian-style
theocracy in Iraq. However, as matters are turning out, the most
powerful positions being filled in the interim government are occupied
by mostly secular Sunnis and Shi’ites.
So, the United States now has little use for the Kurds, who see clearly
that once again they are being abandoned by the US. All the parties see
the Kurds, therefore, as possible spoilers of the solution currently
being put together under UN auspices. Hence, little sympathy exists
for them. Realizing this fact, the Kurds are already resorting to
threats and violence in an effort to get a satisfactory hearing. By
its short-sighted, ad hoc approach to Iraq’s complicated situation,
first using the Kurds and then casting them aside, the United States
may have sealed both its own and Iraq’s fate.
There appears little hope that the Kurdish demands can be sufficiently
taken into consideration without at the same time losing the already
cautious and tentative support of the Sunnis and Shi’ites. And
there also appears little hope that the Kurds will suddenly satisfy
themselves with what the other two factions are comfortable in giving
them. Hence, whether the Kurds might temporarily tone down their
demands for the time being, or whether they more likely will ratchet
up their demands as the UN negotiations proceed and the June 30 date
nears, one thing that appears certain is that they will hold a major
key to how events proceed in Iraq.
The United States has let loose a Kurdish “monster”, not only on
Iraq itself, but also on the region at large, a “monster” which
cannot easily be put back into the box. If a diplomatic solution
cannot be crafted that satisfies all of Iraq’s three factions, and
it is doubtful that one can, then a great deal of military muscle
will be needed in the entire region to keep the disenfranchised Kurds
“in check”. And that muscle will have to come increasingly into play
in northern Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
In the end, the handover of sovereignty on June 30 may not change
anything, except that it may well accelerate Iraq’s descent into
sectarian violence, with Turkey and Syria cooperating militarily
to secure their interests in northern Iraq by taking control of
that region, and the southern regions of Iraq moving significantly
closer into cooperation with Iran, with the US military caught in
the middle. The relative calmness of northern Iraq is very likely
to be much like the calmness of a large bomb – its calmness very
deceptively masks the huge explosion which is likely imminent.