Dear Yuri,
How are you doing after your holidays? Is everything ok in Moscow? What about your new (interim) president? We had a quite adventurous december with many people who got influenza (my whole familiy was in bed) and then the big storm which unroofed part of our house... Now, everything is again in order and life continues as usual.

Mariano sent me your and Mr. Gould's calculations. I know, it's not easy to understand the world's finance system and it's I wonder always where all the "virtual" money goes to which is won and lost during bank transfers and exchanges. Let me try to explain you the things.

The most important, and the base of everything is that the exchange rates are not at all constant as you know very well for the rate between Dollar and Rubel. It is also not constant between Dollar and Euro either. And there you had bad luck:
1) When INTAS sent you the money to Brussels, 1E=1.064$ (INTAS sent 70,000 E, you got 74,502.89$ on your bank account.
2) Unfortunately, when you sent back the money to Brussels, the Euro had gone up and about reached it's maximum value with respect to the Dollar which it ever had. Then it was 1E=1.143$, about 8% more. These 8% are lost for you and for INTAS. Who got them??? No idea. The only thing which counts for INTAS is, how much they sent you (in EUROS!!!) and how much they got back (in EUROS!!!). In this respect, Mr. Gould did also a certain calculation mistake, saying that 16,625E stayed in Moscow. This is not right, since no Euro at all stayed there but 13,502.89$, whose value in Euros changes all the time. But this does not affect at all the calculation. This change of the exchange rate makes that we lost 3,938.12E (57,313.12E of your calculation - 53,375E of Gould's calculation). They are simply lost, vanished in the infinity of the cosmos - by the way, this is the main reason why the European Union decided to create the common currency.
3) Unfortunately, when INTAS payed the instruments to ROY, the Euro was again less worth. Now the exchange rate became 1.093$/E, which made the instruments a bit more expensive than if it had been payed a few weeks earlier, but it made them still cheaper than in your calculation. Therefore, INTAS payed 50,100.5E and not, as you calculated, 51,465.39E, a difference of 1364.89E. In total, the difference between your calculations is then 3,938.12 - 1364.89 = 2573.23 E which is just the difference between the 8774.5 E Gould is prepared to pay and the 11,347.82 E you are claiming. Unfortunately, these 2573 E are really lost, nobody can say where, who has them now. They have become virtual money. If by chance the Euro would have continued to climb after your transfer and INTAS would have payed the instruments at a rate of say 1.2$/E (another 8% more), then you would have won 2000 real Euro and Gould would pay you about 13000E instead of 8700 and we would know where the exchange virtual money went - onto your bank account. Sorry to say it, but that's life and it has always been like this, even before money and capitalism was invented. You could exchange meat against crops, if suddenly a big heard of antilopes came into your area, people had more than enough meat and the meat you bought was worth only half of what you payed. But I really think that we can be lucky that we got still something out of INTAS. The letter you sent was still nearly 9000E worth, isn't it? I know that especially for you 2500E is an enormous amount of money. But it is really not INTAS who is trying to cheat you now, it is (or at least was) the chaotic situation in Russia at that time which made these troubles. And what is certainly much worse is loosing the 14k$ due to a bank-rupt (literally).

Yuri, I hope you understand and accept these explanations - we had simply bad luck.
All the best, hope to see you soon somewhere
Hermann
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* *    Hermann Zeyen,   Departement des Sciences de la Terre      **
* *     Universite de Paris-Sud, Bat. 504                                              **
* *     F-91405 Orsay, France                                                                 **
* *     Tel: +33-(0)1 69 15 49 09, Fax: +33-(0)1 69 15 49 11                  **
* *     E-mail: zeyen@geol.u-psud.fr                                                    **
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