Turquoise Hill announces second quarter 2018 production and completion of Shaft 5 www.gogo.mn

Turquoise Hill Resources today announced second quarter 2018 production for Oyu Tolgoi as well as the completion of Shaft 5.

Development of bill on civil servant code of conduct finalized www.gogo.mn

Chief of the Cabinet Secretariat G. Zandanshatar announced that the development of a bill on codes of conduct for civil servants has been completed.

Crude oil exports generated 94.3 billion www.gogo.mn

It is projected that Mongolia will export a total of 8.1 million barrels (1.1 million tons) of crude oil in 2018.

Mongolian President summons irregular parliamentary session www.news.mn

President of Mongolia Kh.Battulga sent an official letter to Chairman of the State Great Khural M.Enkhbold about calling an irregular Parliamentary session.

Jeff Bezos is now worth more than Bill Gates and Larry Page combined www.cnn.com

Amazon investors, including CEO Jeff Bezos, should be in a festive mood, too. (Although there were some tech glitches.)

Apartment complex for young families under construction in Erdenet www.montsame.mn

Orkhon /MONTSAME/ ‘BB Park’ apartment complex is under construction in Orkhon aimag with 100 percent investment of the Republic of Korea. Curreltly, the construction runs with 40 percent performance. The appartments are expected to be low-cost as designated for youths and young families.

NUM graduates invited to work for Toshiba Corporation www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ Toshiba Corporation of Japan has invited 13 graduates of Electronic Engineering Program of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences of the National University of Mongolia (NUM).

Russia & United States can compete & work together in energy market - Putin www.rt.com

Russia and US are competitors in oil and gas exports, but there is room for cooperation in regulating the energy market, said Russian President Vladimir Putin during the Helsinki press conference with US President Donald Trump.
"I believe that we, as the largest oil and gas powers, could work constructively to regulate international markets, because we are not interested in acute prices drops, because producers will suffer from this, including shale oil and gas projects in the United States,” said President Putin in response to a reporter's question regarding the future of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Tesla Is Getting a China Factory. This $4 Billion Startup Will Be Waiting www.bloombergtv.mn

Henry Xia jumps into the burnt toast-colored electric car he helped build as co-founder of Xpeng Motors Technology Ltd. and commands it to play Green Day’s “21 Guns.” He asks the car about traffic conditions and starts driving. The 35-year-old is the most senior car executive at a Chinese automaker that hasn’t delivered a single vehicle, doesn’t own a factory and hasn’t obtained a production license from the government. At least, not yet.

What the four-year-old startup has is backing from tech giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Foxconn Technology Group and Xiaomi Corp. founder Lei Jun. Xpeng expects to raise more than $600 million this month from investors that include Alibaba, valuing it close to $4 billion, according to a person familiar with the fundraising.

In a test drive of Xpeng’s first crossover around a drab cement office park in Guangzhou, the roomy SUV drives smoothly, with a Tesla-like panoramic windshield and sleek exterior. But it’s the voice controls, streaming music, live video, driver-tracking maps and other software that reveal the auto ambitions of the company’s Chinese tech backers. Xpeng is making the equivalent of a smartphone with a steering wheel.

Xia explains why the company nicknamed this car David: “We’re going up against Goliath,” he says, referring to the hundreds of automakers churning out electric vehicles in China, where half of the world’s EVs are sold. “It’s not about the physical car anymore, which anyone can now manufacture,” Xia says, “but about building a robot on wheels.”

Xpeng is primed to capitalize on a trade tussle that is already jacking up car prices. As China hits back against the U.S. with retaliatory tariffs, import duties on American-made cars have increased to 40 percent. But perhaps the bigger opportunity comes from Tesla Inc.’s still-diminutive presence in China, creating an opening for local startups to hawk cheaper, technology-centric electric vehicles.

Tesla reached a preliminary agreement last week with the Shanghai government to build China’s first car-production facility wholly owned by a foreign automaker. Tesla expects car production to start within two years of starting construction and to churn out 500,000 cars per year in China two to three years after that.

It won’t be easy: Tesla’s made lofty promises before, only to delay plans. It will also have to clear hard-to-navigate government approvals and obtain permits. With just $2.7 billion in cash, Tesla must absorb what Bloomberg Intelligence estimates to be a $10 billion cost to build the plant and hasn’t specified where it will get the money.

“Tesla is running out of time,” says John Zeng, managing director of LMC Automotive Shanghai. He estimates that the American automaker sold fewer than 15,000 cars in China last year, claiming just 3 percent of the battery-powered market. In total, 25 million cars were sold in China last year.

Finding capital is less of a concern for the local startups trying to outrun Elon Musk. China’s government is offering financial and political support for electric-vehicle companies as it attempts to lead the world in the field, fueling the rise of Xpeng and hundreds of other rivals. President Xi Jinping pledges to open markets and curtail protectionism, even as he lavishes assistance on domestic makers of electric cars, artificial intelligence and semiconductors. China’s electric-car buyers get price subsidies of as much as $10,000 per vehicle, for example, and can also dodge license plate restrictions that impede sales of gasoline-powered cars.

That support, combined with ample cash from China’s tech leaders and the comparative ease of building EVs instead of traditional cars, has seeded a crop of startups competing with such established automakers as BYD Co., Beijing Automotive Group Co. and Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co.

How mining tycoons are trying to foil a big UK bribery probe www.mining.com

(Bloomberg) — It’s a faint echo of the defense being floated by targets of the Mueller probe in the U.S.—an unaccountable circle of bureaucrats manipulating the system to their own ends.

But in London, it’s the last ditch effort by a trio of Kazakh oligarchs to derail the U.K.’s biggest bribery investigation.

The mining tycoons behind Eurasian Natural Resources Corp., the former FTSE 100 company suspected of paying bribes to buy mines in Kazakhstan and Africa, say their own lawyer conspired with Britain’s top cop to incriminate them so he could fleece them for millions of pounds.

Even if they can’t convince a court of this hypothesis, the case will undoubtedly frustrate attempts to bring criminal charges against them and drag out proceedings for months, if not years.

“It’ll complicate the decision about what evidence is usable,” said Michael Levi, a criminal law professor at Cardiff University. “That might be the benefit of muddying the water. Anyone can do this if they have enough money. You need to have enough money, is the key.”"Anyone can do this if they have enough money. You need to have enough money, is the key.”

Since the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office started investigating ENRC in 2013, Alexander Machkevitch, Alijan Ibragimov, and Patokh Chodiev—often dubbed the Trio—have gone to great lengths to unwind ties to the City of London. Within months, the oligarchs from the former Soviet Union had delisted ENRC’s stock after suggestions of widespread corruption sent it crashing out of the FTSE 100.

“Ultimately, it should lead to the closure of the case. It’s really scandalous”

The Trio blame Neil Gerrard, a white collar London crime lawyer for Dechert LLP, for arousing the SFO’s suspicions. They’d hired him to conduct a private investigation into allegations made by a whistleblower and, according to court documents last month, say he blew it out of proportion, even plotting with the SFO to leak details to The Times newspaper so the watchdog would have an excuse to start its probe. Gerrard denies this ever happened.

“If you have senior figures at the SFO colluding with our own lawyers, this is a fundamental issue which goes to the heart of the legitimacy of the investigation,” ENRC’s general counsel Dmitry Egorov said in an interview in London. “Ultimately, it should lead to the closure of the case. It’s really scandalous.”

The charges are reminiscent of attempts by Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, to undermine U.S. Special Council Robert Mueller’s case against him by pointing to media leaks his lawyers say have prejudiced his chances at a fair trial.

In its lawsuit, ENRC says Gerrard frequently flaunted his relationship with the SFO, which was considering him for its top job in 2011. The fraud investigator declined to comment on the lawsuit or status of its probe.

The miner’s lawyers are demanding the SFO disclose notebooks, emails, calendar entries and phone records. If they prove there was collusion, it could hypothetically pave the way for a judicial review to stop the watchdog’s probe on technical grounds.

While it seems like a stretch, it’s not entirely unprecedented. British-Iranian property tycoons Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz won compensation and an apology from the SFO in 2012, after the body admitted it didn’t have a valid warrant when it raided the fraud suspects’ Mayfair residence. ENRC’s lawyers refer to the Tchenguiz case in their argument.

In another probe, oil-services company Unaoil Monaco SAM had proceedings delayed by challenging the legal basis for an SFO raid on its premises. A judge dismissed the claim last year.

“ENRC’s real complaint is that the defendants were too successful uncovering wrongdoing”“ENRC’s real complaint is that the defendants were too successful uncovering wrongdoing”

In a defense claim revealed last month, Gerrard and Dechert insist they didn’t betray their client. They say the SFO had plenty of ammunition without them, including 13 suspicious activity reports detailing possible corruption and sanctions breaches involving ENRC. The U.S. Justice Department was investigating an ENRC deal, too.

According to its claim, the law firm’s own digging uncovered “serious criminality” related to copper mines purchased in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. The court papers say ENRC paid Dan Gertler, a friend of Congo’s president, $40 million in cash, which a U.S. case later connected to corruption. Dechert also says it has proof the Trio pocketed $300 million from the sale of a Zambian copper mine to ENRC for more than it was worth. ENRC refute these allegations.

When Gerrard tried to convince ENRC managers, including former CEO Felix Vulis, to cooperate with the SFO, court papers say they lied, destroyed and hid evidence, and intimidated cooperators. “ENRC’s real complaint is that the defendants were too successful uncovering wrongdoing,” they said.

Proof of fraud isn’t necessarily relevant to the ENRC claim. It says Gerrard was hired in good faith in 2010 to independently investigate an anonymous tip that one of its businesses based in Kazakhstan had misused corporate property and given a local police chief’s son a $38,000 scholarship. But it wasn’t long before Gerrard was alleged to have put undue pressure on ENRC executives to expand his probe to Africa, “ballooning of the investigations beyond all proportion.”

According to his accusers, Gerrard became aggressive, pushing ENRC to take his findings to the SFO even though it wasn’t in their best interest. He then plotted with the SFO covertly to leak information that the watchdog could use to initiate its probe. ENRC claims it has a witness statement from the man who delivered a package to The Times on Gerrard’s behalf.

At about the time of the newspaper leak, Gerrard, they allege, told two security consultants over coffee at a brasserie on London’s Sloane Square he wanted to “screw” his Kazakh mining clients for millions of pounds. He denies uttering those words.

By the time the Trio fired Dechert in the spring of 2013, ENRC had paid 16 million pounds ($21 million) in legal fees—a sum ENRC is now suing to recover. It says Gerrard demonstrated “reckless disregard for his duties in order to grossly inflate the bills which Dechert charged ENRC.”

The Trio may well buy time with this case, but that doesn’t mean the SFO will walk away from more than five years of work, according to Polly Sprenger, a London-based lawyer with Katten Muchin Rosenman. Just last week U.K. prosecutors issued a warrant for the arrest of Benedikt Sobotka, the CEO of related company Eurasian Resources Group, after he failed to appear for questioning, although he isn’t a suspect.

“I would be troubled by the suggestion that the SFO would be intimidated by any attempt to shame it into backing off an investigation,” said Sprenger, a former SFO investigator. The watchdog “is aware of these things and is sufficiently protected against this.”

(By Franz Wild)