the eXile - Other Shite

Issue #18/99, September 14 - 28, 2000

Other Shite

OLIGARCH LOGIC PUZZLE!

Volodya Putin has five very influential friends from his class in school whom he would like to liquidate and bury in salt mines. The only trouble is, he can’t liquidate them until he can find their assets—and his friends from school know how to hide what they steal!

Each of Volodya’s five friends-Misha, Tolya, Rem, Borya, and Vlad—runs his own energy company. Volodya knows all five companies: the three oil firms Sidanko, Yukos, and Sibneft, the power company UES, and the natural gas conglomerate Gazprom. But knowing the companies isn’t enough— he doesn’t know who runs what!

Each of his friends also has his own favorite offshore banking zone. Two use banks in the Carribean, in Antigua and Barbados. But the others use banks in New York, the Channel islands, and Switzerland. If only Volodya knew who was banking where!

Each of his friends also carries with him his own personal adjective which is frequently attached to his name in news reports from the Moscow Times. If Volodya could remember who was “enigmatic”, who was “high-profile”, who was a “fabled oligarch”, who was “relaxed and jokey”, and who was “irrepressible”, he might also be able to remember the names of his friends’ businesses and banks.

Sadly, however, Volodya has a bad memory. Even with the help of his detailed FSB files, he can only recall certain facts about each of the five friends he has been spying on for years. When he sat down one day to compile his recollections, they resulted in the list shown below.

Help Volodya out by sorting through his recollections, and helping match his friends to their businesses, their banking havens, and their media reputations. If you don’t, he may never get to throw his friends down that salt mine!

VOLODYA’S RECOLLECTIONS

Borya was once caught siphoning funds from Aeroflot to accounts in Switzerland.
Misha has hair but no foreskin, and is not high-profile.
The enigmatic, fabled and high-profile friends all trade in the same commodity.
Neither Rem nor Misha ever served in the Russian government.
None of Volodya’s Jewish friends bank in New York or the Channel islands, and none of the gentiles bank in the Carribean.
Neither of the former Deputy Prime Ministers bank in Switzerland.
The former Deputy Secretary of the Security Council is a bald Jew who is not “jokey”.
The two friends who held the same job both have hair and are neither fabled, enigmatic, nor relaxed.
Volodya’s friend who banks in Barbados frequently turns off Rem’s electricity.
Only one oilman banks on an island.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
Volodya once saw Rem’s shriveled, uncircumcised member while they were at the banya together, and he was relaxed then, too.
Borya may have a very hairy back, but he’s hardly irrepressible.
Because Volodya is so short, everyone to him seems high-profile. But the head of Sidanko always seemed to him to have the highest profile of all.
Misha has been trying in vain for years to find out where Volodya’s enigmatic friend gets his suits tailored.
The head of Sibneft thinks the fabled oligarch’s success is just that... a fable! A real man doesn’t set up internet banks in the Carribean, not when you can still make money the old-fashioned way-by killing people.

HOW TO USE THIS CHART

To solve the puzzle, you’ll probably need to use the chart at left. Here’s how to use it.

With each deduction that you make, mark the information on the chart with check marks and X’s.

When you match one property to another, find the box where the two meet on the chart and mark it with an check. For instance, if you should conclude that the owner of Sidanko is the person who was described in the Moscow Times as “Relaxed and Jokey”, simply look at the “Relaxed and Jokey” entrance on the vertical column of the graph, and move your pen to the right until you reach the column which matches “Sidanko” on the horizontal axis. Mark that box with a check.

Once a box is checked, you can mark with an X all of the boxes which do not correspond. In the above example, you would X out “Sidanko-High Profile”, “Sidanko-Enigmatic”, and so on. Conversely, any time you rule out anything by deduction you mark that box with an X.

As more and more deductions are made, you will be left with fewer and fewer unmarked boxes. Try as best you can to fill in each one. When all of the boxes have been filled— meaning you have either confirmed or ruled out each proposition— you have solved the puzzle.

To give you a head start, we marked the box “Borya—Switzerland” , the deduction made from clue number 1.