Mikhail Khodorkovsky

omg pvt military?! pmc wagner?

https://www.nytimes.com/**2017**/06/04/business/vnesheconombank-veb-bank-russia-trump-kushner.html

no lnx

Bank at Center of U.S. Inquiry Projects Russian ‘Soft Power’

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Jared Kushner’s Meeting With a Russian Banker

Jared Kushner is now under congressional and F.B.I. scrutiny after his meeting with a close ally of Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Here’s how the Russian banker Sergey N. Gorkov could benefit from meeting President Trump’s senior adviser.

They met for a half-hour in December: Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser and Sergey Gorkov, a prominent Russian banker and close associate of Vladimir Putin. NATPOP: Vladimir V. Putin meeting with Gorkov [Rossiya 24. February 2017]: How is it going at the bank? - All Normal Who is this Russian banker and why is his meeting with Kushner now under Congressional and FBI’s scrutiny? TITLE: When a Putin’s Ally Meets Trump’s Advisor Sergey Gorkov is the chief of Vnesheconombank, the state-owned Russian bank that was deeply intertwined with Russian intelligence and that was hit with sanctions after the annexation of Crimea. SOT Rossiya 24, Dec 29 - Gorkov: “We are preparing to work under sanctions, pay our debt.” The White House said the meeting between the men was just a routine diplomatic encounter. But Gorkov has no known diplomatic role for Putin. The White House has also said there were no discussions of sanctions against Vneshekonombank during the Kushner-Gorkov meeting. But removing sanctions would greatly expand the ability of Gorkov’s bank to do business in the United States, and the issue was clearly on his mind. In this interview on Russian TV right around the time of the meeting, Gorkov had been expressing optimism that the sanctions would be lifted. SOT: Gorkov Rossiya 24, Dec 29: “Let’s hope hope that the situation with sanctions will change for the better next year.” Interviewer: “” That’s right, after the new administration takes over.” Gorkov: “Yes, that’s possible Putin personally appointed Gorkov to lead Vnesheconombank in 2016. Experts say it was in part because of his ties to Russia’s security services - he studied law at the university known to train spies. Here’s Gorkov reporting on Vneshekonombank successes to the Russian president. SOT Vladimir V. Putin [Moscow, Aug. 2016 - Channel One News on Youtube]: It seems that as a new head of the bank, you’re overcoming the challenges you encountered. Three months after the meeting with Kushner, Gorkov said it had been part of his bank strategy to discuss promising trends with influential businesses abroad. What remains unclear, and what investigators are looking into, is what exactly Mr. Kushner and Mr. Gorkov wanted from each other.

By Ben Protess, Andrew E. Kramer and Mike McIntire

June 4, 2017

It has offices in a sleek Manhattan skyscraper. Its bonds are accessible to millions of American investors. And it holds ties to some of New York’s biggest banks.

Despite this presence on Wall Street, detailed in previously unreported financial records, Vnesheconombank, or VEB, is no normal bank. It is wholly owned by the Russian state. It is intertwined with Russian intelligence. And the Russian prime minister is, by law, the chairman of its supervisory board.

Now VEB is at the center of an international firestorm that threatens the Trump presidency because the bank’s chief — a prominent graduate of Russia’s spy school — met with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, during the presidential transition. That meeting is a focus of a federal counterintelligence investigation about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Three years ago, in response to Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on VEB that have effectively kept it from taking on most new business in the United States. Since then, however, VEB has quietly kept up appearances on Wall Street in the event that sanctions would be lifted, according to interviews with American bankers and former government officials.

That moment appeared to be nearing with Mr. Trump’s victory. And so the bank’s chief, Sergey N. Gorkov, traveled to New York in December for what he described as a “roadshow” promoting the bank that was largely hinged on the prospect of improved diplomatic and business relationships between the United States and Russia.

During that trip, The New York Times has found, Mr. Gorkov met with bankers at JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and another, unidentified American financial institution. Goldman Sachs bankers also tried to arrange a meeting but ultimately had a scheduling conflict. The meetings, which are not prohibited by sanctions, were confirmed by three people briefed on the discussions but unauthorized to speak publicly about them.

None of the American banks were new to VEB. Citi and JPMorgan had long, established relationships clearing financial transactions for VEB in the United States, activities not affected by the sanctions. And before the sanctions, securities filings show, Goldman and others had helped the Russian bank issue bonds, activity that was blocked by the sanctions and that VEB was eager to resume.

After a few painful years, continuing Western borrowing had become a pressing priority for Moscow. The Russian Finance Ministry has spent about $10 billion to prop up the bank over the past three years, according to banking analysts.

On that same trip, Mr. Gorkov met with Mr. Kushner. The nature of the meeting, which remains in dispute, followed a session between Mr. Kushner and the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, about opening a communications channel with Russian officials during the presidential transition, according to current and former American officials.

The F.B.I. and congressional investigators are now scrutinizing whether Mr. Kushner may have met with Mr. Gorkov to help establish a direct line to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, or for other reasons not cited by the White House.

The White House and VEB have issued contradictory statements about the purpose of the Gorkov meeting.

The White House has said that Mr. Kislyak requested the meeting and that “Mr. Kushner was acting in his capacity as a transition official.” But VEB said Mr. Gorkov had met with Mr. Kushner, who was still running his family’s real estate company, to discuss business. The statement said VEB’s management had met with “a number of representatives of the largest banks and business circles of the U.S.,” a claim supported by the Times’s reporting about Mr. Gorkov’s meetings with banks in New York.

VEB has not disclosed specifics of the conversation with Mr. Kushner, which is of keen interest to investigators.

Mr. Kushner’s hunt for overseas investors for his company’s financially troubled Manhattan office tower on Fifth Avenue has been documented by The Times. While such an investment would not fit the profile of VEB’s past lending, it would have been possible for Mr. Gorkov to relay such information to other Russian banks. It is not known, however, whether the subject was raised in the meeting.

ImageVnesheconombank, or VEB, has offices on Third Avenue in New York. Sanctions have limited the bank’s United States activities.

Vnesheconombank, or VEB, has offices on Third Avenue in New York. Sanctions have limited the bank’s United States activities.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times]

The subject of sanctions was also freshly topical in December. The rolling back of sanctions was an essential part of Mr. Gorkov’s strategy in visiting New York, and was central to the health of his bank. The next month, during Mr. Trump’s first week in office, administration officials signaled they were considering lifting the sanctions that stemmed from the conflict in Ukraine.

Separately, Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, had several phone conversations late last year with Mr. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. In one, the two men discussed additional sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in response to the Russian government’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.

The meeting with Mr. Kushner was not VEB’s only connection to Mr. Trump’s campaign or associates.

A banker who pleaded guilty last year to spying for Russia out of VEB’s office in New York was part of an unsuccessful Russian scheme to recruit Carter Page, an American businessman who later became a Trump campaign adviser, as a spy. VEB also obtained shares in a Ukrainian steel smelter when it was sold by a business partner of Mr. Trump’s who built a Trump hotel in Toronto, according to previously undisclosed documents from the vast leak known as the Panama Papers. The VEB involvement in the smelter deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

These interactions have stirred concerns over whether the bank, which few Americans have heard of despite its ties to Wall Street and big companies like Boeing, has been spreading Russian influence along with its financial footprint.

A representative for the bank would not comment.

‘This Is Not a Bank’

VEB and Mr. Putin are inextricably linked.

The bank stepped up lending after 2008 when Mr. Putin, then prime minister, became chairman of the board. And during the oil boom, VEB was seen as embodying Russia’s new financial might.

Under a 2007 law, VEB’s mandate was to lend to important but underfinanced sectors of the Russian economy, including infrastructure and businesses that help diversify the economy beyond oil dependence.

There are other government-controlled banks in Russia, Sberbank and VTB, but they are primarily retail banks. VEB serves a very different role, lending mostly to large borrowers, many of them politically connected.

To that end, VEB over the last decade has lent freely in ways that dovetail with government priorities and make it a tool of Russian soft power. The purse strings opened for two influential groups in particular: oligarchs building Olympic sites in Sochi and companies in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.

“This is not a bank,” said Karen Vartapetov, a public finance analyst at Standard & Poor’s. “We should rather treat this bank as a government agency. It is used by the government as a tool to invest in politically and socially important but not always financially viable projects.”

VEB’s role as a projector of state influence was on display in 2010 with a deal that potentially affected a Trump hotel in Toronto.

At the time, Alex Shnaider, a Russian-Canadian businessman developing the hotel, was looking to sell a steel plant in Ukraine. His Midland Resources Holding Ltd., which owned the Zaporizhstal steel factory, sold at least half its stake to a collection offive offshore companies that received funding from VEB, according to documents in the trove of files from the law firmMossack Fonsecathat were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The documents show that one year after acquiring the Zaporizhstal stake, the five companies — based inCyprus and the British Virgin Islands — transferred it to Russian control.

In each case, the companies’ shares were “charged in favor of” VEB, meaning the bank effectively took ownership of them in exchange for financing the steel plant acquisition.

Court papers in Canada show that Mr. Shnaider’s deal to sell the steel plant coincided with his need to cover cost overruns in the Trump deal. His lawyer initially told The Wall Street Journal last month that about $15 million from the Ukraine sale went into the $500 million Toronto project, but he later backtracked.

Nothing in the Panama Papers linked VEB’s financing to the Trump project, which Mr. Trump did not own. Rather, the deal underscored VEB’s strategy to venture into Ukraine at the behest of the Russian government.

More broadly, the bank’s plan had been to tap capital markets in New York to help finance the Ukraine lending, but the plan collapsed with the imposition of sanctions in 2014.

The bank today, not unlike Mr. Putin’s government, expanded its sway abroad in a way that appears unsustainable. Weighed down by sanctions and the oil price collapse, the Russian economy has slipped to 12th in the world, below South Korea’s, according to a World Bank ranking.

At the time sanctions were imposed, the bank’s total debt ran about $20 billion. It has since been reduced to $17 billion, according to financial disclosures at the end of last year. But the Ukraine lending in particular is affecting the balance sheet, with outstanding Ukraine debt totaling $14.2 billion at the current exchange rate, banking analysts say.

Last week, the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti reported that about 40 percent of VEB’s loans were at risk of default.

Mr. Gorkov, who previously worked at the Yukos oil company and was a senior executive at Sberbank, became director of VEB in February 2016, partly with a mandate to find market solutions to the bank’s financial woes.

For Mr. Gorkov, fixing VEB would require a new focus, and that, according to the bank’s statement, became the reason for a meeting with Mr. Kushner.

The two met as Mr. Gorkov traveled to gather ideas for a new strategy for the bank, published a month after the meeting with Mr. Kushner in a document called “Strategy 2021.” It called for shifting some risks directly to the Russian budget, selling assets not considered central to the bank and trying to resume borrowing in places like the United States.

The document suggested that the bank was expecting some relief from sanctions. “The forecasts for the term of the strategy predict certain decrease of geopolitical risks and gradual weakening of the restricted access to global capital markets,” it said.

Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Gorkov’s former boss at Yukos, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, said it was essential that sanctions be lifted for the VEB turnaround to succeed.

“Putin doesn’t have to worry about what the voters think of him,” Mr. Amsterdam said. “Putin has to think about the top 100. And the top 100 are those who are sanctioned.”

American Ties

Long before VEB became saddled with sanctions, it had deep ties to Washington and Wall Street.

In 2010, Mr. Gorkov’s predecessor appeared at theU.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington to unveil a pact with the Export-Import Bank of the United States,the federal agency that supports American exports. Under the deal, the two institutions agreed “to cooperate in financing U.S. exports to Russia.”

The arrangement was followed by two little-noticed deals. In 2013, the Export-Import Bank guaranteed a loan of about $500 million so that, in effect, a VEB subsidiary could acquire a number of Boeing 777 aircraft — planes that VEB then leased to Aeroflot Russian Airlines. A year later, shortly before the sanctions hit, the American agency guaranteed another loan of about $700 million for a similar deal.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Export-Import Bank said, “These transactions all supported the sale of U.S. exports and thus supported American jobs.”

Since the sanctions took effect, the spokeswoman said, there have been no new VEB transactions, and deals involving any Russian entities have been placed on “administrative hold.”

The sanctions also limited VEB’s relationship with American banks. The sanctions prohibit United States banks and companies from “transacting in, providing financing for or otherwise dealing” in new long-term debt.

For years, issuing debt was a good business for both Wall Street and VEB. Between 2006 and 2013, Goldman, Citi and Morgan Stanley helped the Russian bank issue one bond deal after another, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Now, American banks can work for VEB only in more limited roles.

JPMorgan, Citi and BNY Mellon, for example, remain registered to clear VEB’s transactions through the United States, clearinghouse records show, though such transactions have waned since the sanctions were imposed. Many major American banks and investment firms also continue to include VEB debt in mutual funds, including those of Fidelity and Pimco, securities filings show.

It would not be out of the ordinary, then, for a VEB official to have brief courtesy meetings with New York bankers about continuing business, though they would not be allowed to discuss new bond deals, said Aaron Wolfson, a partner at Lewis Baach who previously worked at JPMorgan and prosecuted banks for skirting sanctions.

Still, Zachary K. Goldman, a former Treasury Department official who worked on financial sanctions issues, said the banks needed to be cautious.

“Just because limited interactions with VEB may be legally permissible doesn’t mean that there aren’t reputational and other kinds of risks involved,” said Mr. Goldman, now the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. “The concern for me with this particular entity would be its reported ties to the Russian security services.”

Spies in Suits

Mr. Gorkov, 48, graduated in 1994 from the university of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the K.G.B. — a school for spies. Like many in his generation of security agents in the early post-Soviet period, he ventured into banking and the oil business.

In fact, say businessmen who have worked in Russia, so many F.S.B. agents are in the upper management of state-owned companies that the roles of spy and executive blend almost seamlessly.

“In Putin’s Russia, they don’t draw a distinction,” said Mr. Amsterdam, the lawyer who represented Mr. Gorkov’s former employer.

Highly educated and often speaking foreign languages, former F.S.B. officers include Mr. Putin himself, senior officials throughout his government, and board members and top executives at state-run corporations.

Mr. Gorkov’s biography on VEB’s website does not suggest he ever served in the F.S.B. The bank did not respond to questions about whether he worked for the agency.

But the bank has been known to employ spies. In 2015, federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington announced charges against EvgenyBuryakov, an employee at VEB’s New York office, accusing him of acting as a covert agent of the S.V.R., the Russian foreign intelligence agency.

Mr. Buryakov, who was charged alongside two other Russian men accused of trying to recruit Mr. Page, later pleaded guilty, and VEB paid his legal bills.

At the time, the authorities suspected that some VEB managers were aware of Mr. Buryakov’s spy activities, according to a person briefed on the investigation. Federal authorities recorded a conversation between the two co-defendants discussing how an S.V.R. official told Mr. Buryakov’s supervisor at VEB that Mr. Buryakov was an “employee of the service.”

no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/books/review/blowout-rachel-maddow.html

Rachel Maddow Takes On the Oil Industry

By Fareed Zakaria

Oct. 30, 2019

BLOWOUT

Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

By Rachel Maddow

For those who have watched Rachel Maddow’s television show, the opening scene of her book will feel familiar in its eye for a compelling anecdote. She tells the 2003 story of a small new business in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that is about to be inaugurated by a head of state, in fact, “one of the most powerful men on the planet.” We’re intrigued. It turns out the business is a gas station. What’s going on? Four paragraphs later, we learn that the mystery man is Vladimir Putin, who is publicizing one of a string of American gas stations acquired by the Russian oil giant Lukoil. Having piqued your interest, Maddow now broadens her narrative and explains why this anecdote is an apt illustration of the book’s larger point — the centrality and influence of the oil and gas industry.

“Blowout” is a rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today. While she is clearly animated by a concern about climate change, Maddow mostly describes the political consequences of an industry that has empowered some of the strangest people in the United States and the most unsavory ones abroad. It is “essentially a big casino,” she writes, “that can produce both power and triumphant great gobs of cash, often with little regard for merit.”

How much cash? Maddow tells the incredible, depressing story of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of the long-serving dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a country that saw its oil revenues grow from $2.1 million in 1993 to a staggering $3.9 billion in 2007. Despite these billions pouring into state coffers, an NGO observed in 2009, “77 percent of the population lives in poverty, 35 percent die before the age of 40 and 57 percent lack access to safe water.”

But life at that time is good for Teodoro, who owns a $100 million house in Paris, a $30 million beach house in Malibu, a $7 million vacation home in South Africa, one of the world’s largest yachts and dozens of racecars. When his drivers take one of Teodoro’s many girlfriends shopping, they are given a shoe box filled with up to $80,000 in cash for a single outing. His bill for one spree at an auction house in 2010, Maddow notes, would have paid the entire annual wages of 3,300 of his countrymen, since three-quarters of them live on $2 a day. (Teodoro does now face international investigations and pressure on various fronts.)

While there are many colorful tales about villains, scoundrels and adventurers, the through-line of this book is the story of the rise of Vladimir Putin. The most important geopolitical consequence of the oil and gas boom of the last 20 years has been Russia’s development into a full-blown petrostate, Putin’s consolidation of power and his determination to use this capacity to protect himself and disrupt the West.

Maddow carefully takes us through the manner in which Putin asserted greater and greater control over Russia’s vast oil and gas resources. The key move was the takeover of what was then Russia’s largest oil company, Yukos, run by a brilliant entrepreneur, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. By 2003, Khodorkovsky had built Yukos into a $36 billion company, providing an estimated 5 percent of the total tax revenues of the Russian government, and was planning to acquire a competitor, Sibneft, which would make the conglomerate the world’s fourth largest oil producer.

This was not to be. By the end of 2003, Khodorkovsky had been jailed for tax evasion, fraud and embezzlement. The Russian government charged that Yukos owed $27.5 billion in taxes and penalties. In 2004, the company was sold in an auction that lasted six minutes. The winning bid — at the firesale price of $9.3 billion — was from an unknown company with an initial capitalization of $300. That company quickly sold Yukos to the state-owned oil giant, Rosneft, at cost. Putin now controlled some of Russia’s largest and most productive oil assets.

As oil prices rose, so did Putin’s ambitions,which reached a symbolic height with his decision to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, a Russian resort town with little snow and lousy facilities. No matter, that seemed part of the plan, because what ensued was an orgy of construction and corruption. In a detailed, thorough analysis of the project, the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov concluded that the Sochi Olympics had cost more than the previous 21 Winter Olympics combined, because Putin’s favored builders had lined their pockets with $25-$30 billion. A year later, Nemtsov was dead, assassinated just outside the Kremlin’s walls.

One of the book’s themes is the degree to which Western capitalists — bankers and oilmen — abetted Putin’s rise to power, cheered on his capture of resources and partnered with him no matter what he was doing to Russia’s democratic and capitalist experiment. Chief among them was Exxon’s C.E.O. Rex Tillerson (later the secretary of state), who was so cooperative that in 2013 Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship, one of the country’s highest honors bestowed on a foreigner. And Tillerson was a fast friend indeed. Maddow quotes from a 2016 conversation in which Tillerson explained that after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, he visited Russia and was surprised by his interactions with Putin and his aides. “The first question they asked me was … ‘Are you O.K.?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah, I’m fine. Why do you ask?’ They said, ‘Well, we just wondered whether your government was coming after you because you’ve been doing business with us.’” Tillerson marveled that “they were more worried about me.” What amazing concern and consideration! For him, Putin’s aggression seemed far less noteworthy than his empathy.

Ukraine features prominently in Maddow’s account because it has become the central struggle between Putin and the West, and America in particular.She describes how Putin was outraged by American support for theouster of the corrupt and pro-Russian Ukrainian leader, Viktor Yanukovych, which happened in the midst of his triumphant Sochi Olympics. Putin was already deeply hostile toward the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton in particular, for having given verbal support to pro—democracy protests in Moscow. For Putin, Western efforts at regime change could only be countered by his own attacks on Western democracies....

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/putin-chef-yevgeny-prigozhin-is-now-meddling-in-africa

libya?

Putin’s Notorious ‘Chef’ Is Now Meddling Across Africa

The man indicted in the U.S. for interfering in the 2016 election is spreading Russia’s reach across the continent.

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Businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as Putin’s “chef” because of his catering company and ties to the Kremlin, and Vladimir Putin.

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The secretive businessman known as Vladimir Putin’s “chef” for his Kremlin catering work is alleged to have helped Russia seize parts of Ukraine, turn the tide in the Syrian war and meddle in U.S. elections.Now he’s reaching deep into Africa with an army of mercenaries and spin doctors in tow to cash in on his newfound expertise.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur from Putin’s native St. Petersburg, has emerged as an unlikely point man in Russia’s belated push to bolster its geopolitical might by rekindling Cold War ties across a largely underdeveloped region laden with untapped mineral wealth. Lacking the financial muscle of its main rivals, the U.S., Europe and China, Russia is carving out aniche by shoring up strongmen in unstable but potentially rich states who have a taste for Russian weaponry.

Prigozhin and his hodgepodge of contract soldiers and political operatives are offering security, arms training and electioneering services in exchange for mining rights and other opportunities, two people familiar with the matter said. He’s already active in or moving into 10 countries that Russia’s military already has relationships with: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Libya, Madagascar, Angola, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic.

Presidents of Russia and Turkey meet for talks in St Petersburg]

This spurt of activity comes as Putin prepares to host more than 50 leaders for the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019. It’s an event that will cement “Russia’s active presence in the region,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said before a sweep through the continent earlier this year.

The low-profile nature of Prigozhin’s businesses ensures some deniability for the Kremlin. Putin, who gave Prigozhin an award for his service to the state in 2014, this year compared his old ally’s international work to that of George Soros, the American billionaire financier who’s long been accused by the Kremlin of subverting governments at Washington’s behest.

“The Russians want influence with governments, they want economic access and they’re much more flexible—that’s their advantage,” said Peter Pham, head of the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. “It doesn’t cost very much to send a couple of hundred guys to shore up a president.”

Prigozhin, 57, didn’t respond to email and phone requests for comment via his Concord Catering company, and officials in the countries he’s targeting had no comment on his activities.

Prigozhin and Concord were among the three Russian businesses and 13 people Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted in February for allegedly interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A U.S. judge on Nov. 15 rejected a bid to dismiss the charges by another of Prigozhin’s indicted companies.

Africa has been largely an afterthought for Putin, who came to power almost two decades ago focused on regaining Russia’s lost superpower status. After the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, Russia’s presence in Africa dwindled dramatically; now the region is a focus for Kremlin efforts to reassert its geopolitical prowess and open new markets for domestic companies hamstrung by Western sanctions.

Russian Influence

Moscow has been ramping up military and political ties with African nations

As relations with the West continue to plumb new lows, Putin is finally pursuing a comprehensive strategy for developing commercial and security ties with the continent as a whole, according to Polina Slyusarchuk, who runs Intexpertise, an Africa-focused research group in St. Petersburg.

Russia has suffered setbacks, particularly in South Africa. President Cyril Ramaphosa froze his predecessor’s multibillion-dollar nuclear power project with Russia after he took office in February. But Putin is increasingly putting money behind the courtships, writing off some $20 billion of debt held by African countries last year.

More recently, Egypt won a $25 billion Russian loan to build its first nuclear power plant. And Russia is in talks with Eritrea to establish its first logistics hub on the Red Sea, not far from the Pentagon’s only permanent base in Africa and China’s first military facility abroad, both in Djibouti.

In March, Lavrov, Putin’s long-serving foreign minister, made a five-nation swing through Africa that included a stop in Zimbabwe, where Russian companies are involved in a $3 billion platinum-mining venture, the country’s biggest investment project. Prigozhin wasn’t far behind.

Prigozhin’s political consultants advised Emmerson Mnangagwa on his disputed victory in the July election to succeed Robert Mugabe, who turned Zimbabwe into an international pariah during his four-decade rule, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Mnangagwa’s main opponent accused “Russians” of helping his rival manipulate the polls. The ruling Zanu-PF party has denied any Russian involvement in the election.

Putin gained a military toehold in the heart of the continent early this year, after the UN issued a waiver for Russia to arm and defend the government of the Central African Republic. The CAR, which is mired in civil conflict, appealed for help after France, its former colonial master, suddenly ended a three-year peacekeeping mission.

“Like any normal businessman, Prigozhin is looking for the most lucrative places to invest his money”

The work of Prigozhin’s mercenary venture, known loosely in the Russian media as Wagner, has already led to gold and diamond concessions in both the CAR and Sudan, according to Russian and French media reports.Three Russian journalists were murderedin the CAR in July. They were investigating Prigozhin’s activities, according to exiled tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was funding their trip.

Prigozhin is now expanding his reach across the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo, the largest country in Africaafter Algeria and one of the world’s richest in minerals, the people said. The former Belgian colony is about to elect a new leader for the first time since 2001, when Joseph Kabila succeeded his slain father.

Kabila recently named a trusted retired general as his ambassador to Russia, tasking him with negotiating arms supplies and assistance, according to a Western official who asked not to be identified. The DRC said through its embassy in Moscow that Russia hasn’t yet supplied any weapons. It also denied local media reports that Russians are actively involved in the election.

If Kabila’s EU-sanctioned protégé wins as expected, then the DRC’s military ties with Russia will intensify, which in turn will lead to more opportunities for Russian companies, according to Jean-Jacques Wondo, a Congolese security analyst based in Brussels. China has invested heavily in the DRC, but Beijing is reportedly growing increasingly frustrated with Kabila’s shifting demands.

“Kabila is desperate for outside help,” said Martin Fayulu, an opposition candidate in the Dec. 23 poll. “It’s not surprising Russia is moving into the Congo, given our vast mineral wealth.”

Madagascar, the world’s biggest producer of vanilla and a holder of major deposits of nickel, cobalt and uranium, is another chaotic country where Putin and Prigozhin share an interest. A Kremlin envoy flew to the island in March for talks with then-president Hery Rajaonarimampianina.

Russian election consultants affiliated with Prigozhin are in the country amid a tight race for the presidency between two other former leaders that will end next month, one of the people familiar with his activities said. Russia has backed several candidates, according to Jean-Claude de L’Estrac, a former Mauritius foreign minister and expert on Indian Ocean territories. The Madagascar Foreign Ministry declined to comment.

In Guinea, Russia is supporting a bid by President Alpha Conde to scrap term limits so he can seek to stay in power after his mandate ends in 2020, said the Western official with knowledge of Russia-Africa ties. The African state is the single largest supplier of bauxite for Russian aluminum giant United Co. Rusal. Guinea Foreign Minister Mamadi Toure and government spokesman Aboubacar Sylla didn’t answer calls seeking comment.

RUSSIA-GUINEA-DIPLOMACY

Alpha Conde and Vladimir Putin

Moving into North Africa, Prigozhin attended talks this month between Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar, who controls most of the eastern part of the oil-rich state. He’s providing military services to Haftar’s Libyan National Army in return for energy deals, two people familiar with the matter said. LNA spokesman Ahmed Mesmari didn’t answer repeated phone calls seeking comment.

Prigozhin’s private army, Wagner, which was sanctioned by the U.S. for its role in the 2014 Ukraine rebellion, drew international attention again in February, this time in Syria. As Bloomberg reported at the time, hundreds of its mercenaries were killed or wounded by U.S. forces as they advanced on a base held by Kurdish fighters. Wagner was trying to seize a nearby oil refinery for officials in Damascus who’d reportedly promised a share of future revenue.

“Like any normal businessman, Prigozhin is looking for the most lucrative places to invest his money,” said Irina Abramova, head of Russia’s state-funded Institute for African Studies in Moscow. “He thought, why shouldn’t I give it a go? And he should only be thanked for that if Africans benefit.”

— With assistance by Stepan Kravchenko, David Wainer, Samer Al-Atrush, Kamlesh Bhuckory, Godfrey Marawanyika, Samuel Gebre, Ougna Camara, Borges Nhamire, Alonso Soto, Pauline Bax, Candido Mendes, Paul Richardson, and Hayley Warren

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/russian-witness-thrown-from-a-window-after-his-name-was-exposed-by-trump-tower-lobbyist-emails

no lnx

Russian witness thrown from a window after his name was exposed by Trump Tower lobbyist: emails

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story October 4, 2019

According to a report from the Daily Beast, a witness who was taking part in a U.S. trial aimed at Russian corruption — and who fell from a window to his death — reportedly had his name exposed in emails connected to alleged pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign operative Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Emails uncovered by the Beast point the finger directly at Veselnitskaya, who met with Don Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in 2016 that became a major part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian involvement in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Noting the death of Nikolai Gorokhov, who was reportedly thrown from the window of a hotel in Moscow prior to appearing in a corruption trial, the Beast reports, “A cache of emails obtained by the Dossier Center, which is a Russian opposition organization based in London, exposes the depth of foreign asset entanglement in Trump’s America at the precise moment that the president’s dealings with Ukrainian officials threaten to pull the Department of Justice and State Department into an unseemly impeachment fight.”

The report goes on to state that “The cache of emails that detail Veselnitskaya’s legal campaign and lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., were shared with The Daily Beast by the Dossier Center, which is funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky,one of Putin’s most prominent exiled critics, ” before adding, “The emails cannot be independently verified by The Daily Beast via a digital signature but elements contained within them including cell phone numbers, bank details, planning, email addresses, and hearing dates can be confirmed by cross-checking with subsequent court papers, lobbyist filings and other reporting.”

“New emails from the same cache, which includes messages from and to Veselnitskya and her aide and translator Murat Glashev, shed light on Veselnitskaya’s lobbying and legal campaign against the Magnitsky Act and appear to suggest that it may have been carried out in breach of another U.S. law and court orders,” the report continues. “Some of the emails suggest the breaking of an order put in place by a New York court to protect the identity of Gorokhov, a Russian witness who testified in a sealed deposition. His evidence was hidden amid fears of reprisals back home.”

You can read more here.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/the-western-media-is-ignoring-a-powerful-uprising-where-citizens-are-resisting-tyranny-and-russian-interference/

AN 119

The story of the world today is the rise of right-wing populism, or so we are told. It’s the story of Donald Trump, of Brexit, of rising nationalism in continental Europe — especially in the east — as well as almost all of the former Soviet Union. But stories can change quickly. Whatever happened to “The End of History”? Or the War on Terror? The Great Recession? Or the Arab Spring? Who knows what the story will be next? Perhaps it’s already being written in Sudan, with echoes of so many other stories folded into it.

Almost eight years to the day after the Arab Spring began in Tunisia with the startling overthrow of the 23-year regime of President Ben Ali, the current Sudan uprising began in the city of Atbara, a railroad union stronghold. That was on Dec. 19, and protests quickly spread nationwide. A month later, Sudan’s 29-year ruler, President Omar al-Bashir — who has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court — is barely clinging to power, while American media, not to mention the U.S. government, has largely ignored the entire situation.

“All residents of Atbara are now on the streets,” one eyewitness, Adel Abdel-Latif, told Sudan Tribune last month as the uprising began. “He pointed out that the demonstrators chanted slogans such as ‘Peaceful, Peaceful against the Thieves,’ saying the police and army didn’t interfere to disperse or arrest the protestors,” the publication reported.

The story we’re missing is historic, according to Jonathan Hutson, who helped expose mass human rights violations in Sudan from 2010 to 2014 — documenting 46 village burnings and locating eight apparent mass graves — as the architect of George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project.

“What we have is the Western media largely misunderstanding or ignoring a revolution in a Putin-aligned African country, ruled by an Islamic theocracy, where the resistance is committed to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion,” Hutson told Salon. Reports of food riots vastly understate the seriousness of events, and Russian involvement with paramilitary troops (reportedly under the direction of Yevgeny Prigozhin, aka “Putin’s chef”) has failed to register as echoing the predatory pattern already seen in the Ukraine, Crimea and Syria.

“News reporting on Sudan has finally begun to highlight the ongoing economic collapse of the past seven years,” veteran Sudan observer Eric Reeves wrote on Dec. 24, but even so “there is remarkable superficiality and failure to look with any historical depth at how the present catastrophe began. … Priorities in the national budget have been wildly skewed for decades toward the military and security services, with only very small amounts devoted to health, education, and the crucial agricultural sector. Arable land has been sold or leased for decades in order to raise cash for a kleptocratic regime.” In short, al-Bashir’s political affinity to Putin’s Russia are profound.

As for the Sudanese people, it’s not that they’re imitating the Arab Spring — it’s really the other way around: Civil uprisings in Sudan have twice toppled dictatorships, first in 1964 and again in 1985. “The popular uprising has become one of the political norms that Sudanese resort to in redefining their social contract with the state,” noted Luka Kuol, a Sudanese professor of security studies.

Sudan escaped the first wave of Arab Spring uprisings in part because the government learned from those previous examples: It exploited regional, racial, ethnic and religious divisions, broke the power of professional unions and keeping the army dispersed outside Khartoum, the capital city, among other measures. But the government’s continued kleptocratic misrule has pushed Sudan past the breaking point, and al-Bashir’s old tricks no longer seem to work.

The Atbara demonstrations spread quickly despite a sometimes violent response. “The numbers of peaceful demonstrators in Atbara are increasing dramatically and the city is in full civil disobedience,” the opposition youth group Sudan Change Now tweeted on Dec. 19, along with a 57-second video of a loud but peaceful march. Sudan Tribune reported that eight people were killed on the second day of protests. Barely a month later, the al-Bashir regime appears doomed. The more demonstrators have been killed, injured or arrested, the more the movement has swelled, and al-Bashir’s attempts to divide it along racial and ethnic lines have failed.

In an inspiring and informative overview, “The Chants of the Sudan Uprising,” Wa’el Jubara writes about the regime’s “sick and naive divide-and-conquer attempt” to blame the protests “on one of the armed rebel movements in the West,” conflating them with “peaceful, unorganised (politically) citizens” from Darfur in the West, whom they arrested. “The next day, Sudanese people from all walks of life and origins went out again, calling out the regime on its poor racist tactics,” Jubara wrote. “They called out the failed conspiracy of Al Bashir and said, ‘يا عنصري مغرور كل البلد دارفور‘, loosely translated to ‘You [Al Bashir] are racist and arrogant, we are all Darfur.’”

“The current demonstrations are unprecedented, in terms of scale, persistence, intensity, and geographical reach,” Adil Babikir, a U.K.-based Sudanese translator, wrote in Sudan Tribune on Jan. 18. “The momentum is building up, with simultaneous rallies staged in many cities across the country. The revolutionary mood is at its peak. New patriotic songs are hitting the social media platforms every day. Some of these are originally folkloric wedding songs reworded with the themes of the revolution.”

In the midst of all this, on Dec. 31, Hutson posted a 33-tweet thread exposing the Russian presence in Sudan with photos and information provided by activists on the ground. This information on the “illegal” Russian incursion was information further developed and promoted by Sudan Change Now, as well as by the Russia-based Conflict Intelligence Team.

Russian forces in Sudan are apparently or probably there in the guise of Prigozhin’s paramilitary Wagner Group (aka PMC Wagner), which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2017 for its involvement in Ukraine. Prigozhin, the now-infamous Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg and two related firms he controls were also sanctioned in March 2018 for their role in 2016 election interference on behalf of Donald Trump.

“As police fired tear gas and live ammunition at peaceful demonstrators in Khartoum, wounding at least four people, Sudanese observers on the ground wondered about the significance of Russian military trucks spotted in the capital,” Hutson began.

Hutson initially stopped short of definitively identifying PMC Wagner. But the group’s presence in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa was already known, if not commonly discussed. In November, Bloomberg reported thatPrigozhin was “already active in or moving into 10 countries that Russia’s military already has relationships with: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Libya, Madagascar, Angola, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and the Central African Republic.”

Last summer,three Russian journalists were killed while investigating Wagner in the Central African Republic on behalf of exiled Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky. A week after Hutson’s tweet-storm, Sudan Times confirmed Wagner’s presence in the current conflict, citing a source within Sudan’s security force.

Hutson noted that Wagner “guards Sudanese gold, uranium, and diamond mines, as well as atomic energy facilities. Russian media have reported that Wagner trains Sudanese armed forces.” He identified Wagner’s typical vehicle as “a light-brown, Ural-4320, all-wheel-drive, two-door cab, 6×6 truck in troop transport mode, similar to trucks used by the Russian military, and by Russian private military contractors.” (In a later thread, he explained in detail how he identified the trucks.)

Hutson provided some background on Sudan’s Russia connection, noting that on Nov. 23, 2017, al-Bashir met with Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia. Reportedly “Bashir asked Putin to protect Sudan from ‘aggressive acts of the United States.’ In return, Bashir promised Putin that Sudan could serve as Russia’s ‘key to Africa.’”

Hutson also described some earlier activity in Sudan. “Radio Dabanga (@RadioDabanga) reported in March 2018 that about 500 Russian armed forces appeared in the Um Dafug area of South Darfur, which borders on the Central African Republic.” At the same time, “across the border in CAR, the Wagner Group was defending mining interests.”

Four months after that, the three Russian journalists working for Khodorkovsky were killed, amid disputed claims of who was responsible. Ten days after Hutson’s tweet, the Telegraph reported damning evidence that Wagner itself was responsible, based on findings from Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center, including cell phone records and other documents connecting the driver to Prigozhin. “The journalists were under the control of people from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s structures starting from the preparation stage,” according to the Dossier Center.

Hutson has speculated that “the relationships between Putin, Prigozhin, the Internet Research Agency, the Wagner Group and Trump” could help explain the U.S. government’s relative silence on the Sudan uprising.More recently, on Jan. 23, the State Department finally issued a three-paragraph statement of “concern,” stating that “A new, more positive relationship between the United States and Sudan requires meaningful political reform and clear, sustained progress on respect for human rights.”

In fairness, America’s hands-off attitude might not have much to do with Putin. Like al-Bashir and the Sudanese regime, the Russian president may simply be taking advantage of long-standing pernicious habits and attitudes. That’s the picture suggested by Justin Lynch at the Daily Beast, in a recent article asking“Why is Sudan’s Genocidal Regime a CIA Favorite?”:

Although Sudan has been listed as a state sponsor of terror since 1993 and the U.S. has accused al-Bashir more than once of genocide for his government’s actions in Darfur, cooperation between the two countries has been close on particular issues that Washington sees as a priority, particularly the fight against terrorist jihadis.

This remained true, Lynch reports, even after Sudan dramatically reduced its counterterrorism collaboration in 2015.

As one of the last acts of the Obama administration in January 2017, the United States began a five-track process to restore relations that depend on humanitarian access, stopping violence and counter-terrorism collaboration. That process has expanded under the Trump administration, and in late-October the United States entered a second re-engagement with Sudan.

A few weeks later, the Sudan uprising began. And America has watched from the sidelines.

For all the talk about how disruptive and anomalous Trump’s presidency is, and for all the justified concern about how compromised he might be by his Russian entanglements, the main impediment to America doing the right thing to support the people of Sudan may simply be short-sighted, sclerotic institutional continuity, just as it was during the Arab Spring.

We are right to worry about the future of democracy at home. But the Sudan uprising should remind us that we live in a larger world that we have often carelessly misshaped with our misguided actions and misplaced fears, even as we have also helped shape it with our ideals. In his famous 1967 address “Beyond Vietnam,” explaining his opposition to the war, Martin Luther King Jr. said that “our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.” The same could be said about the various threats facing us today — and that’s what the Sudan uprising is calling on us to do.

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary:{/2018/05/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:08/putins-proxies-helped-funnel-millions-gop-campaigns

no lnx infogragfix:

Blavatnik contributed a total of $3.5 million to a PAC associated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.Blavatnik contributed $1.5 million to the GOP Senate Leadership Fund PAC in the name of Access Industries and another $1 million in the name of AI-Altep Holdings during the 2015/2016 election season. And as of September 2017, he had contributed another $1 millionthis year through AI–Altep.

The Dallas Morning News

How Putin's oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns

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Editor's note May 8, 2018: This column originally published December 15, 2017. New allegations about $500k in payments from a Russian oligarch made to Trump attorney Michael Cohen have placed it back in the news.

As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team probes deeper into potential collusion between Trump officials and representatives of the Russian government, investigators are taking a closer look at political contributions made by U.S. citizens with close ties to Russia.

Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.

Oligarch steered cash to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's account, Avenatti says

An example isLen Blavatnik,a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.

Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik's campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.

In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik's political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund.

[Blavatnik contributed a total of $3.5 million to a PAC associated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.Blavatnik contributed $1.5 million to the GOP Senate Leadership Fund PAC in the name of Access Industries and another $1 million in the name of AI-Altep Holdings during the 2015/2016 election season. And as of September 2017, he had contributed another $1 millionthis year through AI–Altep.]

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So is this legal?

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democratic leader on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News in September: "Unless the contributions were directed by a foreigner, they would be legal, but could still be of interest to investigators examining allegations of Russian influence on the 2016 campaign. Obviously, if there were those that had associations with the Kremlin that were contributing, that would be of keen concern."

Under federal law, foreigner nationals are barred from contributing directly or indirectly to political campaigns in local, state and federal elections.

Should Blavatnik's contributions concern Mueller's team of investigators? Take a look at his long-time business associates in Russia.

GOP campaigns took $7.35 million from oligarch linked to Russia

The Oligarchs

Oleg Deripaska is said to be one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs, and he is founder and majority shareholder of Russia's Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world. Blavatnik holds a stake in Rusal with a business partner.

Further, nearly 4 percent of Deripaska's stake in Rusal is owned by Putin's state-controlled bank, VTB, which is currently under U.S. sanctions. VTB was exposed in the Panama Papers in 2016 for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Putin.

Earlier this year, The Associated Press reported that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, began collecting $10 million a year in 2006 from Deripaska to advance Putin's interests with Western governments. Deripaska's name turned up again in an email handed over to Mueller's team by Manafort's attorneys. According to The Washington Post, in the email dated July 7, 2016, just two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president, Manafort asked an overseas intermediary to pass a message on to Deripaska: "If he [Deripaska] needs private briefings, tell him we can accommodate."

Viktor Vekselbergis one of the 10 richest men in Russia. He and long-time business partner Blavatnik hold a 20.5 percent stake in Rusal. (They met while attending university in Russia.)

In 1990, Blavatnik and Vekselberg co-founded the Renova Group for large-scale investments in energy, infrastructure, aluminum and other metals. One of their earliest investments was in Tyumen Oil Co. (TNK), founded in 1995. TNK is best known for its contentious partnership with British Petroleum after the two entities formed a joint venture in 2003. That rocky relationship ended 10 years later when they sold out to the state-controlled energy giant, Rosneft, under pressure from the Russian government.

As for BP, that pressure took the form of growing harassment and intimidation from Russian authorities who at one point, according to Forbes, refused to renew visas for BP employees, forcing BP's joint venture chief Robert Dudley (who is now chief executive of BP) to flee Russia and manage TNK-BP from a foreign outpost in a secret location.

Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle. They are among several Americans who also merit Mueller's scrutiny.

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The Americans

Andrew Intrater, according to Mother Jones, is Vekselberg's cousin. He is also chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova's U.S. investment arm located in New York. (FEC records list his employer as Renova US Management LLC.)

Intrater had no significant history of political contributions prior to the 2016 elections. But in January 2017 he contributed $250,000 to Trump's Inaugural Committee. His six-figure gift bought him special access to a dinner billed as "an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees," according to a brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Alexander Shustorovich, chief executive of IMG Artists, attempted to give the Republican Party $250,000 in 2000 to support the George W. Bush presidential campaign, but his money was rejected because of his ties to the Russian government, according to Quartz. So why didn't the Trump team reject Shustorovich's $1 million check to Trump's Inaugural Committee?

Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. Redacted CIA documents released in 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act said "TNK president Kukes said that he bribed local officials." The CIA confirmed the authenticity of the reports to The Guardian newspaper but would not comment further. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund. He had no significant donor history before last year's election.

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There is no doubt that Kukes has close ties to the Putin government. When he left his job as CEO of TNK in June 2003, he joined the board of Yukos Oil, which at the time was the largest oil company in Russia owned by the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.Four months after Kukes joined the board, authorities arrested Khodorkovsky at gunpoint on his private plane in Siberia on trumped up charges of tax evasion and tapped Kukes to be CEO. This decision could only have been made at the highest levels in the Kremlin. The arrest of Khodorkovsky rattled the nerves of international investors and was the first tangible sign that Putin was not going to be the kind of leader that global executives and Western governments had expected him to be when he first took office in 2000.

Khodorkovksywas given a 13-year sentence in a Siberian prison and served 10 years before being released by Putin in December 2013, a month before the start of the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, as a sign of goodwill. As for the fate of Khodorkovksy's company, its largest oil subsidiary was sold in a sealed bid auction to Baikal Financial Group, a shell company with an unpublished list of officers. Baikal was registered at an address that turned out to be a mobile phone store in Tver, Russia. Three days after the auction, all of Baikal's assets were acquired for an undisclosed sum by Rosneft, the Russian oil giant that went on to buy TNK-BP in 2013.

In total, Blavatnik, Intrater, Shustorovich and Kukes made $10.4 million in political contributions from the start of the 2015-16 election cycle through September 2017, and 99 percent of their contributions went to Republicans. With the exception of Shustorovich, the common denominator that connects the men is their association with Vekselberg. Experts who follow the activities of Russian oligarchs told ABC News that they believe the contributions from Blavatnik, Intrater and Kukes warrant intense scrutiny because they have worked closely with Vekselberg.

Even if the donations by the four men associated with Russia ultimately pass muster with Mueller, one still has to wonder: Why did GOP PACs and other Trump-controlled funds take their money? Why didn't the PACs say, "Thanks, but no thanks," like the Republicans said to Shustorovich in 2000? Yes, it was legal to accept their donations, but it was incredibly poor judgment.

McConnell surely knew as a participant in high level intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, McConnell's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after former FBI Director James Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.

And consider Steve Mnuchin, Trump's campaign finance chairman. Could he have known that the Trump Victory Fund, jointly managed by the Republican National Committe and Trump's campaign, took contributions from Intrater and Kukes?Mnuchin owned Hollywood financing company RatPac-Dune with Blavatnik until he sold his stake to accept Trump's appointment as the Treasury secretary.

Which PAC officials are making the decisions to accept these donations?

The Supreme Court

The contributions are legal because the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling, Citizens United, and several subsequent decisions, allowed American corporations and citizens to give unlimited amounts of money to PACs and non-profit 501c4 organizations, regardless of how they make their money, where they make their money, or with whom they make their money. The only caveat is that PACs and non-profits cannot coordinate their activities with the political candidates they support.

The man who led the winning fight for Citizens United was David Bossie,president of the conservative non-profit since 2001. In 1996, Bossie was hired by Republican Rep. Dan Burton to lead an investigation into President Bill Clinton's campaign fundraising. Burton fired him 18 months later for manipulating recordings of conversations among law officials and Webb Hubbell, a Clinton confidant who resigned as associate attorney general and pleaded guilty to tax fraud during the Whitewater investigation. CNN reported at the time that Newt Gingrich, who was speaker of the House, called Bossie's tampering with the Hubbell recordings an embarrassment to the Republicans.

Bossie served as Trump's deputy campaign chairman.

The Super PAC, Make America Number 1, is primarily funded by Trump's largest donor, Robert Mercer. His Renaissance Technologies hedge fund donated $15.5 million to the PAC.

Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, assumed control of Make America Number 1 in September 2016 and is now tainted by her role in the communications between Wikileaks and Cambridge Analytica, the firm that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hired for $5.9 million to handle the digital portion of the Trump campaign.

Robert and Rebekah Mercer are major investors in Cambridge Analytica. According to The Wall Street Journal, Rebekah Mercer asked Cambridge chief executive Alexander Nix if the firm could compile stolen emails related to Hillary Clinton so that they could be more easily searched. (This suggestion came from someone she met at an event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz, according to The Hill. Cambridge Analytica had worked on digital marketing for Cruz before he dropped out of the Republican primary.)

Nix confirmed that he had asked Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to forward the Clinton-related emails. Assange said he declined the request.

Rebekah Mercer also heads the non-profit Making America Great, formed in March 2017. The non-profit ran a seven-figure ad campaign highlighting Trump's achievements. Bossie is the group's chief strategist.[russia in brezit w/ c anal?]

Erik Prince, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, contributed $150,000 to Mercer's Make America Number 1 PACand another $100,000 to the Trump Victory Fund. Prince has recently testified to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his trip to the remote Seychelles for a secret meeting in December 2016 with a close ally of Putin, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The purpose of the meeting was allegedly to setup a back channel of communication between then president-elect Donald Trump and the Russians, though Prince has denied this allegation. Before the 2015-16 elections, Prince's political contributions totaled a mere $31,800 as far back as 2007, according to FEC records.

The hybrid super-PAC, The Committee to Defend the President, was formed in 2013 under the name Stop Hillary PAC. It is managed byDan Backer, the lead attorney who won the McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission case in 2014. The Supreme Court decision eliminated the cap on how much wealthy individuals can donate to federal candidates, parties and PACs in a single, two-year election cycle.

Like Bossie, Dan Backer helped to open the floodgates to millions of dollars of influence brought to bear on incumbents and their political challengers who are now pressured to kowtow to their donors with the biggest bank accounts, even if their billions are earned in Russian rubles.

Backer was born in Russia and emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1978.

The changes to our campaign finance laws created an avenue for Russia to try to influence our elections. There are holes in our firewall and they aren't on the internet.

Cyprus is at the center of a circle of corruption surrounding Trump

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Ruth May is a business professor at the University of Dallas and an expert on the economies of Russia and Ukraine. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @ruthcmay

Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky (Russian: Михаи́л Бори́сович Ходорко́вский, IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈiɫ xədɐrˈkofskʲɪj]; born 26 June 1963) is an exiled Russian businessman, philanthropist and former oligarch,^[2] now resident in Switzerland.^[3]

In 2003, Khodorkovsky was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia (with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion) and was ranked 16th on *Forbes* list of billionaires.^[4]He had worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth through obtaining control of a series of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos,one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s (a scheme known as "Loans for Shares").

In October 2003, he was arrested and charged with fraud. The government under Russian president Vladimir Putin then froze shares of Yukos shortly thereafter on tax charges. Putin's government took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse of the company's share price and the evaporation of much of Khodorkovsky's wealth. In May 2005, he was found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison. In December 2010, while he was still serving his sentence, Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were further charged with and found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering; Khodorkovsky's prison sentence was extended to 2014. After Hans-Dietrich Genscher lobbied for his release, President Vladimir Putin pardoned Khodorkovsky, releasing him from jail on 20 December 2013.^[5]

There was widespread concern internationally that the trials and sentencing were politically motivated.^[6][7] The trial was criticized abroad for the lack of due process. Khodorkovsky lodged several applications with the European Court of Human Rights, seeking redress for alleged violations by Russia of his human rights. In response to his first application, which concerned events from 2003 to 2005, the court found that several violations were committed by the Russian authorities in their treatment of Khodorkovsky.^[8] Despite these findings, the court ultimately ruled that the trial was not politically motivated,^[9][10][11] but rather "that the charges against him were grounded in 'reasonable suspicion'".^[10] He was considered to be a prisoner of conscience by **Amnesty International**.^[7]

Upon being pardoned by Putin and released from prison at the end of 2013, Khodorkovsky immediately left Russia and was granted residency in Switzerland.^[5][12] At the end of 2013, his personal estate was believed to be worth, as a rough estimate, $100–250 million.^[13] At the end of 2014, he was said to be worth about $500 million.^[1] In December 2016, a court unfroze $100m of Khodorkovsky's assets that had been held in Ireland.^[14]

In 2014, Khodorkovsky re-launched Open Russia to promote several reforms to Russian civil society, including free and fair elections, political education, protection of journalists and activists, endorsing the rule of law, and ensuring media independence.^[15][16] He has been described by The Economist as "the Kremlin’s leading critic-in-exile".^[17]

Early years and entrepreneurship in Soviet Union

Early life and education

Khodorkovsky's parents, Boris and Marina Khodorkovsky, were engineers at a factory making measuring instruments in Moscow.^[citation ^needed] Khodorkovsky's father was Jewish, and his mother was Russian Orthodox Christian. They were both opponents of Communism, though they kept this from their son, who was born in 1963. Having experienced a rise in state anti-Semitism and the death of Stalin, the Khodorkovskys were part of a generation of well-educated Soviets who were silently supportive of dissidents.

The family were moderately well off, living in a two-room flat in a concrete block in the suburbs of Moscow. Masha Gessen wrote that they faced a dilemma raising Mikhail: “Speak your mind about the Soviet Union and risk making your child miserable, with the constant need for doublethink and doublespeak, or try to raise a contented conformist. They chose the second path, with results that far exceeded their expectations. Mikhail became a fervent Communist and Soviet patriot, a member of a species that had seemed all but extinct.”^[18]

The young Khodorkovsky was ambitious and received excellent grades. He became deputy head of Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) at his university, the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia, from which he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in 1986.^[19] The Mendeleev Chemistry and Technology Institute was a popular choice for ambitious students ineligible for Moscow State University due to their Jewish heritage.

While in college, Khodorkovsky married a fellow student, Yelena. They had a son, Pavel. In 1986, he met an 18-year-old, Inna, a student at the Mendeleev Institute who was a colleague of Khodorkovsky's at the Komsomol organization. He courted her and slept in his car until she took him in. They had a daughter and twin sons. He and his first wife remained on good terms, and she would later take an active part in the campaign for his release from prison.^[18]

First business activities

...