30 January 2018
By Alec Luhn and Ben Riley-Smith
Chelsea (click here) owner Roman Abramovich has for the first time been included on a list of officials and oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin that could serve as a basis for future US sanctions.
Although Monday's “name-and-shame” list of 210 people does not stipulate any punitive measures, it was drawn up as part of sanctions legislation reluctantly signed by Donald Trump in August.
The US treasury department issued the document to congress, which is expected to push for further sanctions against Russia in the coming months. A classified annex to the list may include additional names and information....
August 18, 2017
By Stephanie Baker, Irina Reznik, and Katya Kazakina
As federal investigators probe possible Kremlin links (click here) with the Donald Trump campaign, one connection that hasn’t gotten much attention is that between Jared Kushner and one of Russia’s most powerful and influential billionaires: Roman Abramovich.
The men have met three to four times in social settings, and their wives have been friends for a decade, facts that Kushner and Ivanka Trump revealed on their security-clearance forms to join the White House staff, according to a person familiar with the filings. The form, SF-86, asks applicants whether they have had “close and/or continuing contact with a foreign national within the last seven years with whom you or your spouse or cohabitant are bound by affection, influence or common interests.”
In 2014, the Kushners spent four days in Russia at the invitation of Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. The couples sat at the same table along with a few other people during a high-powered fundraising dinner for Moscow’s Jewish Museum. Kushner also was invested in an online art business of which Zhukova is a founding partner. Ivanka Trump, Kushner and his brother, Joshua, have accompanied Zhukova to sporting events in the New York area....
From Newsweek:
Janaury 30, 2018
By Christina Maza
Just before midnight Monday, the Treasury Department released an unclassified list of Russian oligarchs, influential politicians and business professionals who are close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and could be the target of future sanctions.
The new list has more than 200 individuals, including all senior members of the political administration at the Kremlin and every Russian oligarch with a net worth of $1 billion or more.
Some of the names on the list are well known to Westerners, like Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
German Klimenko, the director and owner of internet company LiveInternet. Klimenko is considered one of Putin’s top advisers on all things digital.
Yevgeny Kaspersky, a Russian cybersecurity expert and CEO of the IT company Kaspersky Lab.
There are no exceptions for length of friendship. Quite the contrary, Russians have great patience in planning assaults against democracy. Al Qaeda did the same thing. The pilots of 911 were in the USA for years before they acted.
The USA has many enemies from all over the world. Some are long time enemies while others are recruited. The latest methodology that was used to destabilize an enitire region of the world was that of Daesh. The influence of power brokers such as Daesh can never be respected as sovereign governments. Daesh was a coup, not a rise to power through politics and elections. However, such methods have to be sought out before they destablize. There were too many guns on the street in the Middle East and the rise of Deash was faciliatated by those guns and it's charasmatic movement carried it into international borders.
Today in Iraq a woman was sentenced to life in prison (click here) for simply stating she was a wife to a member of Daesh.That will continue forever, no different than anyone identifying remotely as a Nazi. Such notions should be held at arms length from policial parites and ridiculed from powerful postions in government.
Countries accumulate power over time which is why the Mueller investigation is vital to the USA sovereignty and national security. It is in no way a witch hunt.
Russian oligarchs with ties to Donald Trump campaign associates, Trump's family and Trump himself.
The heads of two Russian state gas and oil companies, Alexey Miller at Gazprom and Igor Sechin at Rosneft,...Steele alleges that former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page met with Sechin during a trip to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Page later admitted to meeting with Rosneft representatives during the trip.
Roman Abramovich, a Russian billionaire and owner of the Chelsea Football Club
Billionaire Oleg Deripaska is also on the list. An aluminum magnate, he has sued former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates for over $25 million in damages for allegedly stealing $1.1 million from his company.
Manafort allegedly offered to provide Deripaska with personal briefings about the 2016 presidential campaign. The two men have business ties going back decades, despite the fact that Deripaska was repeatedly denied a U.S. visa due to alleged links with organized crime.
Dmitry Rybolovlev, the president of the Monaco football club, who paid Trump $95 million for a beachfront mansion in Florida in 2008. The price was more than double what Trump paid for the house four years earlier, and Rybolovlev had never visited the property before he bought it.
In 2016, during Trump's campaign for president, journalists investigated why Rybolovlev's and Trump's aircraft landed in the same cities within an hour of each other on three separate occasions. Trump claims that he never met Rybolovlev
The U.S. Treasury and the State Department are mandated by the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, which passed in Congress last July, to complete the list. The CAATSA also ordered the Trump administration to sanction companies and individuals within Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors. The sanctions are meant to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, interference in eastern Ukraine and ongoing human rights violations.
Early Monday, Trump declined to impose sanctions on companies and foreign countries doing business with Russian defense and intelligence entities blacklisted under CAATSA. He claimed that the legislation is already serving as a deterrent.
