A new leak of offshore documents – this time from British Bermuda – could ruin the successful career of investor Yuri Milner in the United States. According to Appleby documents, he used money from VTB and Gazprominvestholding to buy shares in Facebook and Twitter.
According to an investigation by the journalistic consortium ICIJ, these investments could clearly have political overtones – the Kremlin was helping Donald Trump in this way. Telegram observers are delighted: the Russian Federation can not only dig up and export raw materials, but also carry out technological operations! Even if not entirely correct, politics has never been a pure enterprise. As for Russia itself, hysteria about the allegedly approaching war is being whipped up through the structures of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and the virtual bankers Khotins have come under attack after the beginning of the “cleansing of the ranks” in Saudi Arabia – the patrons of the Yugra Bank have fallen into disgrace. Against this backdrop, stories about VTB’s money laundering in Mozambique or Marina Sechina’s investments in commercial real estate look completely vegetarian. Although, Andrei Kostin’s bank will sooner or later wait for real sanctions from the US….
Banksta
1. Austrian bankster, owner of Meinl Bank Julius Meinl after serving time for fraud decided to go on another adventure and created an investment business for Igor Sechin’s first wife Marina (even before the divorce). Her official income, according to Sechin’s declaration, amounted to a maximum of 6 million rubles (usually around zero).
The bankster organized her money laundering scheme and concealed that she was an investor in his companies. Meinl invested in commercial real estate in Russia and the Czech Republic. Only through him the young lady invested $40-80 million. This became known thanks to the offshoregate-2 with the registrar Applyby. Now Sechina has dozens of projects, such as the Kutuzovskaya Mile, for which Sergei Polonsky was almost imprisoned.
2. Milner’s agent has been uncovered
From the offshore scandal with the Appleby registrar it became clear that venture capitalist Yuri Milner invested $200-300 million of Dmitry Medvedev’s money in Facebook and Twitter through Digital Sky Technologies.
Milner received funds from Alisher Usmanov’s Gazprominvestholding (remember the movie “He’s Not Your Dimon”) and from VTB Bank, which at that time was snapping up the Bank of Moscow empire of Yuri Luzhkov and Andrei Borodin on Dmitry Medvedev’s orders. During the Bank of Moscow takeover, Facebook shares surfaced, and the Finance Ministry allocated 295 billion rubles to VTB for the alleged bailout.
If the Appleby leak is to be believed, the situation looks like the money from the Bank of Moscow partially went to Milner, who represented Dmitry Medvedev’s interests in the deals to buy 5% of Twitter and 8% of Facebook. The shares are worth billions of dollars, and since then the current prime minister has been very fond of Twitter and Facebook. Everyone is already used to our thieves, but for Americans the interesting tune is that Milner invested in the projects of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who works as an advisor to the US president.
Boiler room
1. “Kremlin agent” Milner invested in Trump.
Hard times are coming in the States for Yuri Milner, who until recently shone on the cover of American Forbes. “The Paradise Dossier”, based on documents from the Appleby law firm, sheds new light on Russian interference in the US election. The Bermuda files revealed that Milner bought Twitter shares with VTB money and that investments in Facebook were made with funds from Gazpromnivestholding, which was headed by Milner’s Mail.ru partner Alisher Usmanov. Now the New York Times recalls Milner turning down his investors and saying in interviews that he was far from politics.
Meanwhile, Milner has a joint investment with Trump Kushner’s son-in-law Jared Kushner called Cadre, it’s a company that the presentation called Uber for the real estate market. Milner invested $850,000,000 there in 2015. Just before the presidential election. This makes one wonder if Milner might have been connected to Russia’s attempts to influence the U.S. election through Facebook and Twitter ads. The conspiracy theory could go so far as to ask whether the Kremlin had the foresight to invest in high-tech through Milner in the late noughties and even then to develop an agenda to strengthen its position in the American media space.
There is now a campaign in the States to indict politicians with ties to Russia, with Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn next in line. The Paradise File fits Milner perfectly into this case. I mean, this is the perfect Kremlin agent. He took money from VTB and Gazprom through offshore companies while he publicly distanced himself from politics and moved to live in the United States. Wasn’t he involved in leaking dirty documents about Clinton to Trump’s relatives? Now Milner’s reputation in the States is ruined forever, and social networks, it turns out, were created with Gazprom’s money.
They say in vain that Russia can only export oil and gas, our political technologies are at the highest level.
2. Becoming the regime’s purse is the main insurance against disgrace.
Events in Saudi Arabia show that even people close to power in authoritarian countries are not immune from disgrace. So far, the arrested billionaires and princes are lodging in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, but it is unclear what will happen to them later. We have come to the conclusion that the people who are most insured from disgrace in Russia are those who are not only close to power, but also have real assets. If we look at the inner circle of the first person, we immediately recall Yakunin’s resignation. The all-powerful minister of Russian Railways had no real assets, except for the hotel business, which was run by his son.
But compared to the Timchenko or Rottenberg empires, Yakunin’s son’s personal business is a small nonsense at best – a few tens of millions of dollars, non-transparent at best, and entirely dependent on daddy’s resources. Another disgraced official, former head of the AP Ivanov, has not acquired a business either, which means that he cannot be useful to the regime. The man who used to be considered a contender for the post of prime minister now enjoys authority only among CSKA basketball fans, to whose games he arrives with a blinker.
Kudrin, who lost his main asset, the bank Kit Finance, during the 2008 crisis and immediately allocated 4 billion dollars for its rehabilitation, is dusting on the margins of power. The fate of Kudrin’s fund, the CSR, which pays its staff and experts below-market salaries and more resembles a collective farm research institute, is indicative of this. This is why his antipode Sechin is using his time in power to acquire real assets; Rosneft’s perimeter already includes IK Region, UCP Investment Group, NOC and MKB.
3. Saudi Arabia has abandoned Khotin.
Khotin, the former owner of Ugra, has lost an influential ally. In Saudi Arabia on suspicion of corruption detained a nephew of the Saudi king, billionaire al-Walid ibn Talal, his fortune is 18 billion dollars, that is in our realities it is like Alisher Usmanov or Mikhelson. Earlier Khotin said that al-Walid will enter the capital of Ugra and help the scandalous bank. I wonder whether Khotin’s friends from the Prosecutor General’s Office will defend the disgraced Saudi billionaire.
As part of the anti-corruption raid, 11 princes, 4 ministers and dozens of former high-ranking officials were detained. In this way, the king is clearing the way for his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who himself headed the anti-corruption committee and in just a few hours after its creation arrested his opponents who are resisting reforms to rid the country of oil dependence. The prince’s plans include modernization, building a $500 billion city of the future and bringing Saudi Aramco to the stock exchange.
The question is how relations with Russia, which dreams of supplying the United States’ main ally in the Middle East with weapons, will develop. The Crown Prince also hates Iran and is doing his best to make Tehran look like a regional pariah, so our diplomats have to do some serious maneuvering between Tehran and Riyadh. But the main moral of the story is that a palace coup would not have been possible in an environment of high oil prices when everyone had enough to live on. In Saudi Arabia, the conventional conservatives lost, and this is the first time such events are happening there, that’s how things can change literally overnight.
4. The Emergency Ministry has declared war.
Paranoia in power circles is off the charts. The employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, who by the nature of their service speak to budgetary employees at various seminars and advanced training courses, have received a mandatory order to say that war awaits us. We are told that in several regions people start to panic, get hysterical and start fucking up their friends, relatives and acquaintances. And people are not told what kind of war it is, but after the cries of Kiselev, Solovyov and other aging lackeys, it really gets scary.
People are starting to sow panic, and this is beneficial first of all to the supporters of the current government, who before the elections tell people that they need a firm hand. You can imagine what’s going on in people’s heads, how brainwashed they’ve been for 20 years of Kremlin propaganda, if you can easily indoctrinate the electorate with any bullshit, even the most delusional. People don’t read Kommersant or Vedomosti, they’re not interested in anything, they don’t even give a fuck that they get 300 dollars a month. Now they’re fucking mobilizing! What the fuck, it’s the Emergency Situations Ministry, they don’t make up bullshit
We are truly at war, a war with common sense. When we make the liberal media foreign agents, Simonyan rejoices. When she is forced to do the same in the States, it’s fucked up and an attack on freedom of speech! When we ban harmless Linkedin, it’s data protection, and when Google News kills the troll factory, the FAS, headed by big democrat and apple man Artemyev, immediately runs. He, by the way, is still working out plans with Yavlinsky to take over the world.
Thoughts Not Thoughts
The story of how the Russian bank VTB together with Swiss Credit Suisse and French PNB Pariba defrauded Mozambique for a billion dollars has reached the FBI. The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI, according to WSJ sources, have launched an investigation into the three banks. The Russian bank, which is already under all possible sanctions, could now face a colossal fine and severe restrictions on its activities in Western countries. VTB has long been perceived by the U.S. authorities as a financial cover for the Russian SVR, and now the FBI has an opportunity to beautifully frame the hit on the Russian bank.