August 16, 1991

The largest Soviet-American business venture ever, a Chevron Corporation plan to develop huge oilfields in Kazakhstan, has become enmeshed in this nation's traditional fear of capitalism and the new muckraking of its free press, leaving President Mikhail S. Gorbachev pressing to get the deal back on track to reassure skeptical foreign investors. The proposed 25-year, multibillion-dollar venture between Chevron and its Soviet partners in the rich Tengiz oilfields is being restudied and renegotiated at the highest levels of the Gorbachev Government after a series of critical newspaper articles that warn of capitalist greed exploiting Soviet resources under the guise of perestroika, Mr. Gorbachev's program of economic restructuring.

A pious woman, Evelia Cintron believed that a local church should be a place of healing, and more, that it should reach out to those in the neighborhood who wanted a safe haven from the ever-encroaching madness of drugs and crime. As a deacon of a Pentecostal church called House of God, she helped plan a rally for last night with neighbors in the East New York section of Brooklyn invited to join in prayer and hand-holding as a tonic against the senseless killings that seem to have been growing around them.

A former stockbroker in the New York office of the Nikko Securities Company, one of Japan's largest brokerage houses, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a $120 million scheme to defraud her company and a Swiss investment bank, the United States Attorney's office in Manhattan said yesterday. During 1987 and 1988, according to a complaint filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the former stockbroker, Mona Sun, created a fictitious company called the Chinese International Growth Fund. She obtained the signature of Nikko's president, Kiichi Suzuki, on an unrelated document and attached the signature to a series of documents she used to sell investments in the fund.

Junk-bond buyers love American Medical Holdings Inc., the hospital company. But stock buyers seem much less enthusiastic. The highly leveraged company yesterday issued the lowest-rated junk bonds to be sold since the collapse of that market last year. The issue, with a coupon of 13.5 percent, was a success and immediately traded at a premium.

Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. gave the state some new budget and income tax proposals today that were almost immediately dismissed by lawmakers as unpassable. The plan broke a record for having the shortest lifespan yet -- about half a day -- among the dozens put forward over the last six months. And the fiscal pace shows every sign of quickening. Legislative leaders said late in the day after a meeting in the Governor's office that Mr. Weicker had promised to veto any further attempts to keep the state running temporarily. Connecticut, now the only state without a budget in place, has been meeting its obligations since the July 1 start of the fiscal year by passing two-week resolutions while lawmakers struggled to reach a compromise over Mr. Weicker's effort to create an income tax. 3 Budgets, 3 Vetoes The leaders said that the threatened veto, which the General Assembly could probably not override, would force a vote on a full-year budget as early as Monday, though no one was at all sure what kind of budget lawmakers might be called to vote upon and whether forcing a vote would actually end the crisis. The current extension expires at 12:01 A.M. Monday, but Mr. Weicker has said he will keep the government running that day.