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Sunday, 05/13/2018 12:58:50 AM

Sunday, May 13, 2018 12:58:50 AM

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Viktor Vekselberg, Russian Billionaire, Was Questioned by Mueller’s Investigators


Federal agents working with the special counsel stopped a billionaire Russian businessman, Viktor Vekselberg, at a New York-area airport this year.

When the United States sought to punish Russia last month for its election interference and other aggressions, it targeted some of Russia’s wealthiest men, imposing sanctions on those viewed as enriching themselves off President Vladimir V. Putin’s government.

Now it turns out that one of the men, Viktor F. Vekselberg, was also singled out in another of the efforts to confront Russia’s election interference: the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

Federal agents working with Mr. Mueller stopped Mr. Vekselberg, a billionaire businessman, at a New York-area airport this year, searched his electronic devices and questioned him, according to people familiar with the matter. They confronted him after he stepped off a private plane about two months ago, according to one of the people.

There is no indication that Mr. Mueller suspects Mr. Vekselberg of wrongdoing. But Mr. Vekselberg attended the presidential inauguration last year, and the interest in him suggests that the special counsel has intensified his focus on potential connections between Russian oligarchs and the Trump campaign and inaugural committee.

Though it is unclear what prompted Mr. Mueller’s investigators to approach Mr. Vekselberg, his widespread corporate interests and attendance at Mr. Trump’s inauguration are among the potential avenues for examination.

Mr. Vekselberg also attended a December 2015 dinner in Russia where Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, was also among the guests and sat beside Mr. Putin. The dinner was hosted by RT, the English-language television news network financed by the Kremlin.

Mr. Flynn was ousted weeks after the inauguration amid revelations that he misled the vice president and others about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty in December to lying to the F.B.I. and is cooperating with the special counsel.

Another potential area of interest for Mr. Mueller is Mr. Vekselberg’s business in Cyprus, the Mediterranean nation considered a magnet for Russian money. Mr. Vekselberg has controlled a company that has been the largest single shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus. Around the same time that Mr. Vekselberg was investing in the bank, Mr. Trump’s future commerce secretary, Wilbur L. Ross, was its vice chairman.

Mr. Mueller’s interest in Mr. Vekselberg has not been previously reported. CNN has reported that investigators for the special counsel stopped an unnamed Russian oligarch at a New York-area airport.

A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment; a lawyer and a spokesman for Mr. Vekselberg did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, the spokesman confirmed that Mr. Vekselberg attended Mr. Trump’s swearing-in as president.

Mr. Vekselberg’s ticket to the inauguration came from his cousin and business associate, Andrew Intrater. Mr. Intrater, an American who lives in New York, donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, campaign finance records show.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Intrater, according to a person briefed on the matter, though there is no indication that he is suspected of wrongdoing. A person close to Mr. Intrater said that he was encouraged to attend the inauguration by an American friend, and that he had wanted to use the trip as an opportunity to meet with business associates in Washington. Documents the person provided indicated that Mr. Intrater intended to hold business meetings during the weekend of the inauguration.

Mr. Intrater is the chief executive of Columbus Nova, an investment management firm whose biggest client is the Renova Group, Mr. Vekselberg’s sprawling conglomerate that operates in the energy sector and elsewhere.

At one point, Renova donated $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Mr. Vekselberg, who has a net worth estimated at more than $13 billion by Forbes, has primarily made his fortune in oil and metals. And as his wealth has risen, he appears to have maintained strong ties to the Kremlin.

Mr. Vekselberg is among the select Russian oligarchs who made their fortunes in the early post-Soviet period and managed to retain wealth under Mr. Putin while others went to prison or into exile. In 2010, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the Russian president at the time, appointed Mr. Vekselberg to help lead a technology-business project near Moscow.

Mr. Vekselberg, who is believed to have a favorable relationship with Mr. Putin, was one of seven Kremlin-linked oligarchs hit with sanctions in April by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration’s decision to target Mr. Vekselberg and the Renova Group with sanctions underscored his perceived closeness to the Kremlin.
The sanctions — against seven of Russia’s richest men and their companies as well as 17 top government officials — were aimed at penalizing those seen as enriching themselves from Mr. Putin’s government.


And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Russian-American joint venture, according to an archived version of the company’s website.

And during a thaw in United States-Russian relations — the so-called reset orchestrated by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state — Mr. Vekselberg was appointed to help attract Silicon Valley investors to the technology park outside Moscow, known as Skolkovo.

“The whole country needs some sort of breakthrough,” he told The New York Times in a 2010 interview about the effort.

Mr. Vekselberg also donated to Fort Ross, a state park in California that is the site of a 19th-century Russian settlement, to keep it open during the state’s financial crunch in the recession.

After making his fortune in aluminum and oil in Siberia in the 1990s, Mr. Vekselberg, together with partners, closed in 2003 what was at the time the largest private transaction in Russian history by forming a joint oil-pumping venture with the British company BP, called TNK-BP.

But soon, BP executives came to suspect the Russian partners had close ties to the F.S.B., the main successor intelligence agency to the K.G.B., and other Russian security services. The F.S.B. classified oil field maps and closely tailed British employees. Once, during a business dispute with the Russians, BP’s office in Moscow was raided by police officers armed with assault rifles.

Amid this conflict with BP, one of Mr. Vekselberg’s partners, German Khan, turned up for a dinner with a BP executive at a remote hunting lodge in Russia with a chrome-plated pistol, according to a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks. Mr. Khan confided to the executive that he considered the 1972 film “The Godfather” a “manual for life.”

Mr. Khan, too, has crossed paths with the special counsel investigation: Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer sentenced to 30 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I., is his son-in-law.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/viktor-vekselberg-mueller-investigation.html

Emails Suggest Russian Reset-Clinton Foundation/ State Dept. Conflict of Interest



The lines between the Clinton Foundation and the Hillary Clinton-run state department are getting blurrier every day.

Emails obtained by the Washington Examiner revealed that the Clinton Foundation was pushing for a relationship with Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg at the same time Vekselberg was running a key part of the “Russian reset” which was the responsibility of Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Last month we detailed a report by Peter Schweizer released in a report called “From Russia With Money,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton oversaw “a major technology transfer initiative” that “may have substantially undermined U.S. national security.”

Coincidentally (if you believe in coincidences) the Clinton Family enriched themselves out of the deal. This was all part of the failed Clinton effort to improve relations with Russia that began with presenting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a button she thought said “reset” in Russian, but it actually said “overcharged.”

Mr. Schweitzer revealed that a key program of the “reset” was to help Russia develop its own version of Silicon Valley. Called “Skolkovo” and located near Moscow, it housed technology for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies.

On first glance the project itself seemed benign and possibly a good deal for both sides, the Russians get access to American cash and some of the country’s best technology, the U.S.-based companies, gets access to the Russian market, receive special tax status and “special access to research in Russia.

For example, one investment firm received “priority access to the database of the Skolkovo Foundation projects and companies, enabling it to select the most promising projects early in their development.”

On the other hand, there are warnings from the FBI that and within Ms. Clinton’s own state department at the time that Skolkovo may have created a for Russia a legal way to gain access to America’s classified technology, the kind of access they used to use espionage to access.

At the time we learned that Skolkovo Foundation chief and billionaire Putin confidant Viktor Vekselberg was a donor.

Vekselberg’s Renova Group has donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, donor records show. Another firm associated with Vekselberg, OC Oerlikon, donated $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Now emails obtained by the Washington Examiner reveal that Clinton Foundation staff pushed Hillary’s State Department to approve a meeting between Bubba Clinton and Vekselberg at the same time the State Dept. was lining up investors for Vekselberg’s Skolkovo project.

The Clintons’ relationship with Viktor Vekselberg, the billionaire whose name appears in the documents, has taken on new significance amid an expanding criminal investigation into his company.

Last week, authorities raided the offices of Vekselberg’s firm, Renova Group, following allegations of bribery from several of Renova’s subsidiaries.


The emails reveal another case of “blurred lines” between Hillary’s State Department and the Bubba Clinton run foundation.

The Examiner reports that starting in 5/2010 a Clinton Foundation employee, Amitabh Desai, who acted as a frequent to the State Department on behalf the former president asked officials at state if they had objections to the former Bubba’s plan to meet with a handful of Russian executives on an upcoming trip through the country. One of the executives named was Viktor Vekselberg.

After receiving no reply, Desai asked senior members of Hillary Clinton’s staff again 10 days later for their thoughts on Bill Clinton’s proposed meetings. On June 3, 2010, Desai said he and the former president “urgently need feedback” about what he had described as a “possible trip to Russia.”

Finally, after Desai entreated the State Department for a response to the list of names for the fourth time on June 7, 2010, Jake Sullivan, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, forwarded the request to another State Department official and asked: “What’s the deal [with] this?”

In April of that year, Bill Clinton’s staff had submitted to the State Department ethics office a request for the former president to deliver a paid speech for a half million dollars.

The speech would be delivered in Moscow on June 28, 2010 to Renaissance Capital, an engagement that necessitated the trip to Russia that Desai described. The State Department had given its approval for the trip just two days after Bill Clinton’s office filed its request.

According to leaked documents obtained by Mr. Schweitzer “U.S. State Department officials beginning in 2009 played a substantial role in assisting Russian government entities in accessing U.S. capital and in seeking investments in U.S. high technology companies.”

The former president’s travel to Russia for the speech and potential meetings with Vekselberg and others came at the same time the State Dept. was helping Vekselberg with his Silicon Valley-like project, Skolkovo.

So where does it all fit together?

As revealed above, Hillary Clinton and the state department was “tasked with finding companies to invest in and work with Skolkovo in the early months of her tenure.”

Four days after Hillary Clinton met with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in March 2010, Medvedev announced that Vekselberg would head up the Skolkovo project.

Just one day after Hillary Clinton had a private phone call with John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, Medvedev met with Cisco executives in California. That same day, Vekselberg announced that Cisco and Boeing would invest in Skolkovo.

Both Cisco and Boeing are major Clinton Foundation donors.

Cisco paid Bill Clinton $256,000 for a speech in Oct. 2010, just three months after Vekselberg’s announcement that the firm would invest $1 billion in Skolkovo.

In fact as Peter Schweizer reported in “From Russia With Money“, 17 of the 28 companies that were ultimately listed as “key partners” in Skolkovo were also Clinton Foundation donors.

Per the Citizens United emails, in 2012 when Hillary was still running State, the Clinton Foundation’s Mr. Desai asked members of Hillary Clinton’s staff if they had “concerns” about Vekselberg attendance at an upcoming Clinton Global Initiative meeting. At the time Vekselberg was still working with State finding investors for the Skolkovo project.

Vekselberg was reportedly questioned a year later during a 2013 investigation of alleged corruption within Skolkovo.

Russian security officials raided the Moscow offices of Renova last week amid “allegations that executives in firms controlled by Vekselberg had bribed regional officials,” according to a Reuters report.

The new emails come as Hillary Clinton struggles to reconcile her claim that the Clinton Foundation posed no conflicts of interest for her family while she served as secretary of state with her pledge to eliminate foreign and corporate donations to the charity if she wins the presidency.

And don’t forget Hillary has made Trump’s receptiveness to Putin’s complements an issue in the campaign, but this shows that the Clinton foundation relationship with Vekselberg was at best a conflict of interests with Hillary’s job at the State Dept.

Kind of makes one wonder if there are some Clinton Foundation/State Dept./Vekselberg emails in the thousands described by the FBI as being erased AFTER they were subpoenaed by Congress.

https://lidblog.com/emails-suggest-clinton-foundationstate-dept-conflict-of-interest-vekselberg-deals/


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