In 2011, the Americans emailed to say that it was proving tricky to sell Deripaska's stake because of "market conditions".
It is proving tricky.In August Nicolas Sarkozy, the hard-talking interior minister and the centre-right's leading presidential candidate for next year's elections, ordered police to enforce a court order evicting 508 people from a squat in a disused university building in Cachan, outside Paris.
But it is proving tricky and dangerous to restart the Mislah and Sarir oilfields, damaged by the colonel's forces in April, and repair a booster station along the pipeline that connects the fields to the port of Marsa el-Hariga, next to Tobruk.
But in a country where over 40% of the population are hill-tribesmen, many of them dependent on opium as a cash-crop and for medicine, it is proving tricky.International NGOs are worried about the humanitarian cost of the war on drugs, which has already caused the displacement of some 25,000 Hmong, Akha, and other tribes from their traditional homes in the mountains to the valleys.
As an artist in his own right, he's proved trickier to pin down, shifting musical styles in a way that's suggestive less of eclecticism than of fitful restlessness.
"We've learned from our missteps, we've listened to consumers," was the message repeated to me by several Samsung executives - though getting them to explain exactly what those "missteps" were proved tricky.
I don't think that has changed, but it's proved pretty tricky to sort out the distractions from the important declarations.
But the lucrative incentive has become so entrenched that efforts to roll it back are proving tricky, even risky.
Although leaders in the region and beyond agree on the urgent need for a protection force, defining its mandate is proving tricky: the initiative must be a robust, African-led intervention force that is also funded and authorised by the UN.
But before it can be installed the device has to download it – and that seems to have been proving tricky.
