Ann: CEO Presentation , page-6

china and russia just signed a $400 billion dollar gas deal, and whats not being said is that unlike all other resource deals, the $US is not being used for the payment of the gas, they will trade in local currencies! russia ia also doing this with Iran in their oil deals, and moving away from the US dollar as much as it can

Russia also unloaded 20% of its US treasuries in march alone! and is buying gold bigtime.

these sanctions are interesting and also disturbing to me, but if TIG can secure a deal with china, then perhaps they can also look at payment from china in local currencies thus prohibiting any Julie bishop sanctions from stopping my investment in TIG from going belly up

this is on the Gas deal..... and some comment on how useless sanctions really are... russia is looking away from europe and to china now!!

China just signed a 30-year, $400 billion natural gas deal with Russia, handing a big win to Russian energy companies desperate to find new export markets. But the pact may have delivered Russian President Vladimir Putin an equally important win in his ongoing standoff with the Obama administration and its European allies over the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Put simply, the deal may deal a death blow to the foundering Western efforts to punish Putin for his meddling in Ukraine and annexation of the country's Crimean peninsula.

The new pact strengthens an emerging Moscow-Beijing economic alliance that's out of the reach of Western influence -- and financial pressure. The deal, which capped years of tense negotiations, was inked in Shanghai on the sidelines of an Asian economic and security conference that included 40 countries, including Iran and Kazakhstan. Though it will be years before the gas starts flowing to China, the deal raises doubts about how effectively Western countries will be able to use sanctions as a weapon against Putin's Russia.

Former Treasury Department sanctions official Elizabeth Rosenberg, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the deal was Russia's "attempt to build up commercial opportunities outside of Europe where it's vulnerable and losing friends."

Sanctions -- Western leaders' weapon of choice in the battle over Ukraine - may have less bite now that Russia has proved it can find other foreign customers for its main export, natural gas. U.S. and European leaders have threatened broad sanctions against whole swaths of the Russian economy, including its finance or energy sectors, if Moscow meddles in Ukraine's presidential election this weekend. But the China deal gives those threats less teeth in the years to come because Russia would have Beijing's gas contract to fall back on, if the West decided to go after the country's crucial energy sector.

"I don't think this inhibits the ability of the U.S. and its partners to impose sanctions in the short term, but I do think it could affect the ultimate price those sanctions would exact in the medium term," said Zachary Goldman, a former Treasury Department sanctions official who now heads the Center on Law and Security at the New York University.

Though Europe still accounts for roughly 75 percent of Russia's gas export market, developing countries could make up a larger proportion over time. The gas going to China wouldn't take away from Europe's portion immediately because the gas is being extracted from different fields, but by increasing the number of buyers, Russia would be less dependent on the European market.