We keep focusing on White Tiger Gold and Maxim Finskiy but in the end the guy who's really pulling the strings is the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who owns Onexim (www.onexim.ru), one of Russia's largest private investment firms, which in turn owns Polyus Gold, UC Rusal (aluminium producer) and MMC Intergeo (which is the mother company of White Tiger Gold). Maxim Finskiy, after he left OAO Norilsk Nickel, became the top guy at the newly established MMC Intergeo, but in the end a lot of the big bucks must come from Prokhorov, who has the aim to become the world's top three player in copper, nickel and titanium.

In order to achieve this, Prokhorov stated that he would invest 10 billion dollars into MMC Intergeo in the coming years. Quite frankly, I do not see what CMM adds in terms of those three metals. It does however seem likely that Polyus Gold would be in some way linked to the merger in my opinion, because it wouldn't make sense to have two gold producing companies fighting eachother in the same group when you want to make Intergeo one of the world's biggest miners.

Anyway, as usual in Russia, it's all one big old boys network. But at least the guys who are pulling the strings are not just some randoms crooks. They seem to have a lot of experience in mining.