Category Archives: Gangs and Crimes

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Smashed Hard Drives and the FBI

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EXCLUSIVE: FBI Seized Smashed Hard Drives From Wasserman Schultz IT Aide’s Home

FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s information technology (IT) administrator, according to an individual who was interviewed by Bureau investigators in the case and a high level congressional source.

Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately tried to get the hard drives back, the individual told The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.

The congressional source, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, confirmed that the FBI has joined what Politico previously described as a Capitol Police criminal probe into “serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network” by Imran and three of his relatives, who had access to the emails and files of the more than two dozen House Democrats who employed them on a part-time basis.

Related reading on the same case: Democrats Version of Vetting, Ethics Violations and Terror

Capitol Police have also seized computer equipment tied to the Florida lawmaker.

Awan’s younger brothers, Abid and Jamal, his wife, Hina Alvi, and Rao Abbas, Imran’s best friend, are also under investigation. There have been no arrests in the case.

There is also evidence of financial schemes that extend beyond the Capitol Police’s purview and may expand to Pakistan, where Imran spends significant portions of the year.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said in March that the Capitol Police are “getting the kind of technical assistance they need to do that. This is under an active criminal investigation, their capabilities are pretty strong but, they’re also able to go and get the kind of help they need from other sources.”

The brothers’ stepmother independently filed court documents in Virginia accusing the brothers of wiretapping and extorting her.

Soon after Imran began working for Wasserman Schultz in 2005, his two brothers and two of their wives — plus Abbas and another friend — began appearing as IT staffers on the payrolls of other House Democrats. Collectively, the Awan group has been paid $4 million since 2009.

Fellow IT staffers interviewed by TheDCNF said the Awans were often absent from weekly meetings and email exchanges. One of the fellow staffers said some of the computers the Awans managed were being used to transfer data to an off-site server.

Shortly after the criminal probe was revealed in February, Imran abruptly moved out of his longtime home on Hawkshead Drive in Lorton, Va., and listed it for rent on a website that connects landlords with military families.

One of new tenants — a Marine Corps veteran married to a female Navy Officer — said he found “wireless routers, hard drives that look like they tried to destroy, laptops, [and] a lot of brand new expensive toner.”

The tenants called the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and not long after, FBI agents arrived together with the Capitol Police to interview them and confiscate the equipment. The Marine spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns for his wife’s naval career, saying she doesn’t want to be associated with a national security incident.

“It was in the garage. They recycled cabinets and lined them along the walls. They left in a huge hurry,” the Marine said. “It looks like government-issued equipment. We turned that stuff over.”

Wasserman Schultz resigned as DNC chief in July 2016 after the committee’s IT system was hacked. She has since refused to fire Imran despite learning that he is a target of a criminal investigation.

The Marine said Imran wanted the hard drives back so desperately that he threatened to sue the renter for stealing them.

“It was unbelievable. I don’t know where they get off thinking they’re going to sue us for items we have no obligation to hold onto,” he said.

Imran came to the house for the items “three to four times,” but the Marine wouldn’t let him enter.

“Their lawyer contacted us today via email and said we owed $350 in late charges and the items he left in the house,” the Marine said.

The Marine heard about the House investigation on the radio, and by that time, he had noticed other bizarre signs of desperation from his landlord.

“When we first moved in, a mailman came with certified mail from the House of Representatives. We were trying to be nice and signed for it. They lost their shit, saying ‘why did you sign for it, this is illegal!’ It was certified from the [Chief Administrative Officer of the House],” he said.

“The postman came a second time with a certified letter and I called Imran on the spot, asking ‘what do you want me to do.’” He said ‘just send him away, I’m homeless.’ They refused to forward their mail.”

Imran’s brother Abid has also been evasive about his location, failing to provide an accurate address for delivery of court materials in a lawsuit in which he is accused of defrauding the brothers’ stepmother. Imran’s wife, Hina, has traveled to Pakistan since the probe was revealed, according to neighbors.

Wasserman Schultz has demanded return of a laptop seized by the Capitol Police because it was purportedly used by Imran and was found hidden in a vacant office. The Florida Democrat used a Capitol Police budget hearing to threaten “consequences” for them if the laptop wasn’t returned.

On Thursday it was reported that police have not examined its contents because of the invocation of the Constitution’s “Speech and Debate clause,” and after months of refusal, her lawyer is now “negotiating” access to the data on yet-to-be-determined terms.

Members have been unusually mum about the apparent cybersecurity breach, especially given the pattern of cyberattacks on other government and political institutions.

The Marine expressed disgust with the muted reaction, saying “I served in the Marine Corps for 14 years; if I downloaded files to an offsite server, I’m going to prison for a lot of years.”

He implied he’s a Democrat but said when it comes to national security “political ideology doesn’t matter.”

He believes “there’s no way they could get this far without help” from some of the Democratic members of Congress for whom the brothers worked. Other Democrats have ignored a major security breach because it could look like a “black eye” in that they failed to vet the Pakistanis, he said.

“He’s dangerous. This is a crime syndicate that has successfully indicated Congress,” he said.

“If Donald Trump and the Republicans had hired foreign nationals to be their top IT guys and somehow their congressional files had been compromised, this would have been all over the news,” he continued.

A Bureau spokesman said the “FBI does not have anything to provide on this and I will still have to refer you to [Capitol Police] for any public comment.”

 

Hezbollah Terror Cells in Lebanon and Latin America

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Kuwait expels Iranian diplomats over ‘terror’ cell: United Nations (United States) (AFP) – US Ambassador Nikki Haley on Wednesday accused Lebanon’s Hezbollah of amassing weapons and said the world must turn its attention to the actions of the powerful paramilitary organization.

  kataeb

Anyone ever ask or investigate the Hezbollah weapons inventory in Latin America?

 

No Latin American Country Has Branded Hezbollah a Terror Group Despite Ties to Major Attacks

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Latin American countries have failed to register Iranian proxy Hezbollah as a terrorist organization despite the threat it poses to the region, a Peruvian official revealed during a discussion on Capitol Hill.

The Shiite group is involved in various illicit activities in Latin America to generate money that some experts believe is used to fund terrorist activities in the Middle East.

During a discussion Wednesday on Capitol Hill hosted by the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS), Moises Vega de la Cruz, a public prosecutor for the Peruvian government specializing in terrorism cases, revealed that “in Latin America, Hezbollah is not recognized as a terrorist organization.”

“I think Hezbollah is a threat to Latin America. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that is advancing not only in Peru but in other Latin American countries as well,” he told Breitbart News.

Joseph Humire, an expert on Iranian activity in the Western Hemisphere and executive director of SFS, noted that no Latin American country has registered Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

The United States and the European Union have deemed Lebanon’s Shiite group Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

In the United States, Hezbollah’s main supporter Iran has been officially labeled a state sponsor of terror.

Peru recently adjudicated a case involving an alleged Hezbollah operative accused of explosives-related crimes in 2014. The individual avoided prosecution, but De La Cruz has appealed the decision.

“Most Latin Americans don’t view Islamist terrorism as a significant threat in their region and little public pressure has been placed on the establishment, reform, or improvement of weak or non-existent anti-terrorism laws across the region,” SFS pointed out in a statement. “Consequently, the Islamic State [ISIS/ISIL], Hezbollah, and other Jihadist networks and sympathizers are spreading throughout South America with impunity.”

The U.S. government has acknowledged the presence of both Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni ISIS in Latin America.

De la Cruz noted that Hezbollah maintains a presence in Peru, where it is reportedly converting people and trying to get involved politically.

The Peruvian Latina news agency reported last year that the Shiite group has registered as an official political party in Peru’s Abancay province, home to the largest concentration the country’s small Muslim community.

Hezbollah has established itself as an official political party in its main base of Lebanon.

Argentinian authorities have linked Hezbollah to fatal attacks against the South American country’s Jewish community, including the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA)—the deadliest terrorist attack in the Western Hemisphere before September 11, 2001.

The U.S. military and the Department of State have expressed concern about the group’s presence in Latin America.

According to the U.S. State Department, Venezuela has provided a “permissive environment” that has allowed Hezbollah to thrive in the region.

Last year Michael Braun, a former DEA operations chief, told American lawmakers that Hezbollah is generating hundreds of millions from a “cocaine money laundering scheme” in Latin America that “provides a never-ending source of funding” for its terrorist operations in Syria and elsewhere.

Hezbollah is fighting on behalf of Iran on the side of the Russian-backed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

In an annual report to Congress issued earlier this year, U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) noted that “Hezbollah members, facilitators, and supporters engage in licit and illicit activities in support of the organization, moving weapons, cash, and other contraband to raise funds and build Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the region.”

SOUTHCOM is charged with overseeing American military activity in most of Latin America.

The group is believed to be operating throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Iran ‘foremost state sponsor of terrorism in 2016’: US state department

The department’s annual report on global terrorism accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force — which is responsible for operations outside the country — along with Iranian partners, allies, and proxies, of ‘playing a destabilising role in military conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen’

Iran was the “foremost state sponsor of terrorism in 2016”, the US state department said on Wednesday in its annual report on terrorism worldwide.

The 2016 Country Reports on Terrorism — the first released by the state department since US president Donald Trump assumed office — also highlighted Hizbollah’s increasing reach in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and an increase in “its long-term attack capabilities”.

Although the report said there had been a 9 per cent drop in global terror attacks last year from 2015, as well as a 13 per cent drop in terror-related fatalities, it stressed that “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) remained the most potent terrorist threat to global security” in 2016.

Al Qaeda and its regional affiliates also “remained a threat to the US homeland and our interests abroad despite counter-terrorism pressure by US partners”, the report said.

On Iranian sponsorship of terrorism, the report accused the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force — which is responsible for operations outside the country — along with Iranian partners, allies, and proxies, of “playing a destabilising role in military conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen”. It also said “Iran continued to recruit fighters from across the region to join Iranian-affiliated Shia militia forces engaged in conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and has even offered a path to citizenship for those who heed this call”.

The 2016 report put more emphasis on the threat from Hizbollah than in previous years. It described the Lebanese political party and militia as “playing a major role in supporting the Syria government’s efforts to maintain control and territory, and providing training and a range of other support for Iranian-aligned fighters” in these conflict zones.

The state department said “there are reportedly about 7,000 Hizbollah fighters in Syria”, though it also highlighted that the group had lost “several senior military commanders and hundreds of fighters” in fighting there last year.

The report also highlighted Hizbollah’s continued efforts to “develop its long-term attack capabilities and infrastructure around the world”.

Justin Siberell, the state department’s acting coordinator for counter-terrorism, told The National on Wednesday that “Hizbollah maintains a sophisticated operation with [a] broad network group around the world”.

Mr Siberllel said it was unclear, however, if the Syrian conflict had boosted Hizbollah’s standing. On the one hand, the group had gained military expertise in Syria, he said, while on the other, it had suffered large number of casualties.

“It’s a mixed picture,” he said.

On Bahrain, the report said that “during 2016 the Bahraini government continued to make gains in detecting, neutralising, and containing terrorist threats from violent Shia militants and ISIS sympathisers”. It also referenced improved counter-terror co-operation with the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

The report voiced concerns over Al Qaeda exploiting the ongoing war in Yemen to make gains. It said that “despite leadership losses, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) remained a significant threat to Yemen, the region, and the United States, as ongoing conflict in Yemen hindered US efforts to counter the group”. It was a similar situation with Al Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria, the report said.

“Al Nusra Front continued to exploit ongoing armed conflict to maintain a territorial safe haven in select parts of northwestern Syria,” the report said, referring to the group that now calls itself Jabhat Fatah Al Sham.

When it came to the Emirates, the report said that in 2016 “the UAE government maintained a robust counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism (CVE) partnership with the United States through its collaboration with US law enforcement; support of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS; and counter‑messaging initiatives, such as the Sawab and Hedayah Centers.”

The report made reference to the UAE’s deployment of forces to Yemen “to counter the spread of AQAP and ISIS” there, highlighting that, “along with its Yemeni partners, the UAE military successfully ejected AQAP from the port city of Mukalla in April — depriving AQAP from millions [of dollars] in monthly income — and from the coastal towns of Balhaf and Bir Ali in December”.

The report also highlighted wins for UAE border security.

“UAE government security apparatus continued monitoring suspected terrorists in the UAE, and successfully foiled terrorist attacks within its borders,” it said, adding: “UAE customs, police, and other security agencies improved border security and worked together with financial authorities to counter terrorist finance.”

Opioid Crisis Then and Now

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The Opioid Crisis Is Dire. Why We Need a National Conversation About It Separate From Obamacare.

Let’s be honest—the opioid crisis in America is huge, it is severe, and it is devastating. But this partisan-fought legislation just isn’t the place to put that funding. And it would likely do little to help stem and reverse the opioid crisis.

First, it’s not as though funding for opioid treatment and recovery has been absent from the federal budget. As recently as last month, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, was touting signed legislation that spent more than $1 billion to fund recovery programs.

This money was authorized separately from the debate over Obamacare in two pieces of legislation known as the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act and the 21st Century Cures Act.

We know that prevention programs have worked in the past, whether they pertain to forest fires or drunk driving or, for that matter, the massive reduction in drug use we witnessed in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Such a prevention program for the opioid crisis must start with leadership from the White House in leading these conversations and highlighting the devastation of substance abuse initiation.

It requires detailing what is driving the opioid epidemic—namely, illegal fentanyl, heroin, and other illegal drug use and diversion. It requires more law enforcement—from border and customs policies and cracking down on cartels to international initiatives. And it requires messaging to our youth. More here.

Socrata

This Isn’t the First U.S. Opiate-Addiction Crisis

Doctors overprescribed painkillers in the 19th century. Eventually, they stopped.

Problem and solution. Source: Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago/Getty Images

Bloomberg: The U.S. is in the throes of an “unprecedented opioid epidemic,” reports the Centers for Disease Control. The crisis has spurred calls for action to halt the rising death toll, which has devastated many rural communities.

It’s true that there’s an opioid epidemic, a public health disaster. It’s not true that it’s unprecedented. A remarkably similar epidemic beset the U.S. some 150 years ago. The story of that earlier catastrophe offers some sobering lessons as to how to address the problem.

Opioids are a broad class of drugs that relieve pain by acting directly on the central nervous system. They include substances such as morphine and its close cousin, heroin, both derived from the opium poppy. There are also synthetic versions, such as fentanyl, and medications that are derived from a mix of natural and synthetic sources, such as oxycodone.

Opioid addiction can take many forms, but the current crisis began with the use and abuse of legal painkillers in the 1990s, and has since metastasized into a larger epidemic, with heroin playing an especially outsized role.

All of this is depressingly familiar. The first great U.S. opiate-addiction epidemic began much the same way, with medications handed out by well-meaning doctors who embraced a wondrous new class of drugs as the answer to a wide range of aches and pains.

The pharmacologist Nathaniel Chapman, writing in 1817, held up opium as the most useful drug in the physician’s arsenal, arguing that there was “scarcely one morbid affection or disordered condition” that would fail to respond to its wonder-working powers. That same year, chemists devised a process for isolating a key alkaloid compound from raw opium: morphine.

Though there’s some evidence that opiate dependency had become a problem as early as the 1840s, it wasn’t until the 1860s and 1870s that addiction became a widespread phenomenon. The key, according to historian David Courtwright, was the widespread adoption of the hypodermic needle in the 1870s.

Prior to this innovation, physicians administered opiates orally. During the Civil War, for example, doctors on the Union side administered 10 million opium pills and nearly three million ounces of opium powders and tinctures. Though some soldiers undoubtedly became junkies in the process, oral administration had all manner of unpleasant gastric side effects, limiting the appeal to potential addicts.

Hypodermic needles by contrast, delivered morphine directly into a patient’s veins with no side effects, yielding immediate results. As Courtwright notes: “For the first time in the entire history of medicine near-instantaneous, symptomatic relief for a wide range of diseases was possible. A syringe of morphine was, in a very real sense, a magic wand.”

An enthusiastic medical profession began injecting morphine on a vast scale for all manner of aches and pains, much the way that a more recent generation of doctors began prescribing Oxycontin and other legal drugs in a reaction against widespread undertreatment of pain. Wounded veterans became addicts, but so, too, did people suffering from arthritis. Women also became addicts en masse, thanks to the practice of treating menstrual cramps – or for that matter, any female complaint of pain – with injections of morphine.

Skeptics in the medical profession warned about the dangers of administering too much morphine. Yet these warnings generally fell on deaf ears. Some of the problem lay with the doctors themselves. One well-regarded doctor put it this way: “Opium is often the lazy physician’s remedy.”

But distance played a role, too. Doctors traveling dirt roads on horseback couldn’t always follow up with patients in pain, and so they left their charges with vials of morphine. Well-meaning doctors who might otherwise resist administering morphine also faced pressure from patients and families to do so. If they refused, it was easy to find a doctor who would comply.

In the end, though, the medical profession largely solved the problem on its own. As awareness of physicians’ role in fostering addiction spread, medical schools taught aspiring doctors to avoid prescribing morphine except under carefully controlled circumstances. The growing availability of milder analgesics – salicylates like aspirin – made the job easier, offering a less powerful, but far safer, alternative to morphine.

While the younger generation of doctors stigmatized morphine, the problem was increasingly linked to older, poorly trained doctors who had come of age in an era when the hypodermic needle was touted as a cure-all. A study in 1919, for example, found that 90 percent of opiate prescriptions in Pennsylvania came from only a third of the state’s doctors, most of whom were over 50 years old.

As the medical profession started to police its ranks, shaming those who enabled addiction, the epidemic began to burn itself out. “Old addicts died off faster than new ones were created,” writes Courtwright. The smaller group of addicts who became the face of opiate addition tended to be poorer “pleasure users” who picked up the habit in the criminal underworld.

Today’s opioid epidemic is similar to the one that came and went over a century ago. While there is plenty of room for government assistance in funding treatment for addicts, never mind regulation of drugs, history suggests that the medical profession will ultimately play the most important role.

There are some promising signs. The number of opioid prescriptions written by doctors has dropped by small amounts over the past few years, though some of the evidence suggests that the decline has more to do with patients anxious about the potential for addiction.

Still, it took decades during the 19th century for doctors to shy away from injecting patients with morphine for the slightest complaint. It may take just as long before doctors kick the habit of prescribing powerful pain pills.

Manafort to Testify, Financial Fraud Exposure?

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The Senate Judiciary Committee intends to call Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to testify next week on a panel about foreign influence in elections.

The panel is also scheduled to include Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of the firm that commissioned the salacious dossier on President Donald Trump’s connections to Russia.

Should he attend the July 26 hearing, Trump Jr. is certain to be asked about his role in arranging a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 with officials connected to the Russian government, which he says he had hoped would result in the delivery of incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. More from Politico.

*** SuissNews

Manafort Was in Debt to Pro-Russia Interests, Cyprus Records Show

NYT’s: Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016.

The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort’s business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions. The Cyprus documents obtained by The New York Times include audited financial statements for the companies, which were part of a complex web of more than a dozen entities that transferred millions of dollars among them in the form of loans, payments and fees.

President Vladimir V. Putin with the Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska in 2013. In a 2015 court complaint, Mr. Deripaska claimed that Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business. Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

The records, which include details for numerous loans, were certified as accurate by an accounting firm as of December 2015, several months before Mr. Manafort joined the Trump campaign, and were filed with Cyprus government authorities in 2016. The notion of indebtedness on the part of Mr. Manafort also aligns with assertions made in a court complaint filed in Virginia in 2015 by the Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, who claimed Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business.

After The Times shared some of the documents with representatives of Mr. Manafort, a spokesman, Jason Maloni, did not address whether the debts might have existed at one time. But he maintained that the Cyprus records were “stale and do not purport to reflect any current financial arrangements.”

A financial statement for a Cyprus shell company, Lucicle Consultants, showing a $9.9 million loan to a Delaware company connected to Mr. Manafort.

“Manafort is not indebted to Mr. Deripaska or the Party of Regions, nor was he at the time he began working for the Trump campaign,” Mr. Maloni said. “The broader point, which Mr. Manafort has maintained from the beginning, is that he did not collude with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.” (Mr. Manafort resigned as campaign manager last August amid questions about his past work in Ukraine.)

Still, the Cyprus documents offer the most detailed view yet into the murky financial world inhabited by Mr. Manafort in the years before he joined the Trump campaign.

Mr. Manafort’s political consulting operation was run out of a first-floor office on Sofiivska Street in Kiev, Ukraine. Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

Mr. Manafort is one of several former Trump associates known to be the focus of inquiries into Russian meddling in the presidential election. He was among those in attendance at a meeting in June 2016 at which Donald Trump Jr. was told they would receive compromising information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

Mr. Manafort’s Cyprus-related business activities are under scrutiny by investigators looking into his finances during and after his years as a consultant to the Party of Regions in Ukraine. He recently filed a long-overdue report with the Justice Department disclosing his lobbying efforts in Ukraine through early 2014, when his main client, President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, was ousted in a popular uprising and fled to Russia.

LOAV Advisers, a Cyprus company linked to Mr. Manafort, reported a $7.8 million loan from an entity associated with Mr. Deripaska.

The Cyprus documents detail transactions that occurred in 2012 and 2013, during the peak of Mr. Manafort’s decade-long tenure as a political consultant and investor in the former Soviet republic, where his past work remains a source of controversy. Last year, his name surfaced in a handwritten ledger showing $12.7 million designated for him by the Party of Regions, and documents recovered from his former office in Kiev suggest some of that money was routed through offshore shell companies and disguised as payment for computer hardware.

The byzantine nature of the transactions reflected in the Cyprus records obscures the reasons that money flowed among the various parties, and it is possible they were characterized as loans for another purpose, like avoiding taxes that would otherwise be owed on income or equity investments.

Ivan Fursin, a Party of Regions lawmaker, appears to have ties to Lucicle Consultants. UNIAN (Ukrainian Independent News and Information Agency)

One of the Manafort-related debts listed in the Cyprus records, totaling $7.8 million, was owed to Oguster Management Limited, a company in the British Virgin Islands connected to Mr. Deripaska. The debtor was a Cyprus company, LOAV Advisers, that the Deripaska court complaint says was set up by Mr. Manafort to make investments with Mr. Deripaska, a billionaire close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The loan is unsecured, bears 2 percent interest and has “no specified repayment date,” according to a financial statement for LOAV.

The other debt, for $9.9 million, was owed to Lucicle Consultants, a Cyprus company that appears to have ties to a Party of Regions member of Parliament, Ivan Fursin. Lucicle, whose precise ownership is unclear, is linked to Mr. Fursin through another offshore entity, Mistaro Ventures, which is registered in St. Kitts and Nevis and listed on a government financial disclosure form that Mr. Fursin filed in Ukraine. Mistaro transferred millions to Lucicle in February 2012 shortly before Lucicle made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C., a Delaware company that Mr. Manafort previously used to buy real estate in New York. The loan to Jesand was unsecured, with a 3.5 percent interest rate, and payable on demand.

There is no indication from the financial statements that the loans had been repaid as of the time they were filed in December 2015. The statements contain a note saying that as of January 2014, the debts and assets for Lucicle and LOAV had been assigned to “a related party,” which is not identified. The records define related parties as entities that are under common control, suggesting that the assignment did not affect the ultimate debtors and creditors. The statements also said there had been no other changes after the financial reporting period covered by them, which was for the 2013 calendar year.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Deripaska declined to comment. Mr. Deripaska appears to have stopped pursuing his court action against Mr. Manafort and his former investment partners, Rick Gates and Rick Davis, in late 2015. In addition to the $19 million he said he had invested with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Deripaska claimed he paid Mr. Manafort an additional $7.3 million in management fees.

Mr. Manafort has previously said any payments he received for his Ukraine activities were aboveboard and made via wire transfers to an American bank. The Cyprus records suggest that at least some transactions originated with shell companies in tax havens like the Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands, and passed through financial institutions on Cyprus, including Hellenic Bank and Cyprus Popular Bank.

Mr. Manafort’s name does not show up in the Cyprus records. However, hints of his dealings in Ukraine appear throughout.

A 23-page financial statement for a Cyprus shell, Black Sea View Limited, lists transactions that include one with Pericles Capital Partners. Both Black Sea View and Pericles Capital are identified in court papers filed by Mr. Deripaska in the Cayman Islands as part of the corporate structure that Mr. Manafort put together to invest in a Ukrainian telecommunications business, Black Sea Cable. The same statement also reports what are described as $9.2 million in loans received in 2012 from four other entities, including one controlled by two Seychelles companies, Intrahold A.G. and Monohold A.G., which Ukrainian authorities have asserted were involved in the looting of public assets by allies of the Yanukovych government. The Black Sea Cable business was controlled at one point by Monohold and Intrahold.

Similarly, Manafort-connected entities appear in the financial records for Lucicle Consultants, the Cyprus shell that received financing from a company associated with Mr. Fursin, the Party of Regions politician in Ukraine. Mr. Fursin did not respond to a request for comment. Lucicle received money from Black Sea View and PEM Advisers Limited, another firm identified in court papers as controlled by Mr. Manafort. It also made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C.

Jesand appears to be a conflation of Jessica and Andrea, the names of Mr. Manafort’s two daughters. In hacked text messages belonging to Andrea Manafort that were posted last year on a website used by Ukrainian hackers, Jesand is mentioned in the context of financial dealings involving the Manaforts. Jesand was used by Mr. Manafort and his daughter Andrea in 2007 to buy a Manhattan condominium for $2.5 million.

The condo was one of several expensive pieces of real estate that Mr. Manafort bought, often with cash, during and after his time in Ukraine. He also invested millions with his son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai, who set up a business to buy and redevelop luxury properties in the Los Angeles area. The business failed amid accusations of fraud by another former investor, who claimed Mr. Yohai had exploited his connection to Mr. Manafort to raise funds.

Last year, while trying to salvage his investments with Mr. Yohai, Mr. Manafort embarked on a borrowing spree in the United States, obtaining mortgages totaling more than $20 million on properties controlled by him and his wife. The F.B.I. and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating some of Mr. Manafort’s real estate dealings, including the loans he obtained last year.

Bill Clinton, Trumps’ and Renaissance Capital

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Primer: The 8th person at the Trump Jr. meeting was Ike Kaveladze. He currently serves as Vice President of the Crocus Group in Moscow. Mr Balber, the lawyer for Kaveladze, said he revealed the identity of the eighth participant after receiving a call from a representative of special counsel Robert Mueller – the first indication that the Justice Department investigator is looking into the meeting. Previously, Federal investigators say Kaveladze immediately began laundering money for Russians.

Kaveladze was the president of International Business Creations, a Delaware corporation. Between 1991 and 2000, IBC and sister corporation Euro-American moved $1.4 billion from Eastern Europe through U.S. banks and back to Europe, the Government Accountability Office found in 2000.

But let’s go back to Bill and Hillary shall we? We may determine just why President Trump backed off his campaign pledge and decided not to prosecute Hillary…

THE CLINTON FAMILY BUSINESS There may be no Clinton Foundation office in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but it is not for lack of trying. Bill Clinton received half a million dollars in 2010 for a speech he gave in Moscow, paid by a Russian firm, Renaissance Capital, that has ties to Russian intelligence. The Clinton Foundation took money from Russian officials and oligarchs, including Victor Kekselberg, a Putin confidant. The Foundation also received millions of dollars from Uranium One, which was sold to the Russian government in 2010, giving Russia control of 20% of the uranium deposits in the U.S. —  the sale required approval from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. What’s more, at least some of these donations weren’t disclosed. “Ian Telfer, the head of the Russian government’s uranium company, Uranium One, made four foreign donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all such donors,” the Times has reported.

Stephen Jennings is the co-founder and CEO of Renaissance Capital and in 2010 he resided over the launch of Tatu City, a planned community for 60,000 northeast of Nairobi.

Before that Vladimir Dzhabarov was a member of the FSB’s Department “K,” or its financial counter-intelligence division . From 2006-09, he was also the First Vice President at Renaissance Capital, a Moscow-based investment firm, which the 36 year-old Magnitsky claimed was involved in a six-long-year long conspiracy by an organized crime syndicate and Russian government officials to defraud the nation’s taxpayers. Renaissance Capital denies it had any part in any tax frauds; in 2009, the bank’s deputy chief executive Hans Jochum Horn told the New York Times that any illegal transactions involving Renaissance subsidiary companies took place after those companies had been sold off to new owners.

Magnitsky claimed in 2008 that criminals tied to Renaissance Capital, who were allegedly working in lockstep with tax and law enforcement agents, stole some $470 million by orchestrating illegal and complex tax refund schemes. As part of his sweeping investigation, Magnitsky claimed that in 2001-2002, Igor Sagiryan, the former president of Renaissance Capital, had supposedly commissioned named a fellow named Dmitry Klyuev to arrange a series of tax refunds through the corrupt Russian court system. This seconding of a known mobster to a seemingly legitimate financial institution was confirmed by Yuri Sagaidak, a former KGB general who was at the time the vice president of Renaissance Capital, in Russian court testimony.

The Klyuev Group, which U.S. Senator John McCain in 2012 urged President Obama to use an executive order to sanction wholesale as a “dangerous transnational criminal organization,”concocted its first nine-figure refund scheme in 2006, according to Magnitsky and others. The conspirators allegedly included the heads of Moscow Tax Offices 28 and 25, Olga Stepanova and Elena Khimina, respectively; Klyuev’s own attorney, Andrey Pavlov; and an Interior Ministry official, Major Pavel Karpov, who had previously investigated Klyuev for attempting to steal $1.6 billion worth of shares of a profitable Russian iron ore company. (Klyuev received a two-year suspended sentence in that case.)Read more here.

It has now emerged that the US Department of Justice has traced proceeds of the fraud to a bank account in Bournemouth held by Renaissance Capital Investment Management Ltd.

A chart produced by the US Department of Justice shows funds flowing through a series of foreign companies before being channelled into three main firms, including Prevezon, against which the DoJ is taking legal action to seize assets allegedly linked to the money, and the Bournemouth Renaissance account.

Renaissance Capital is a Moscow-based investment bank now controlled by billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. Igor Sushchin, until recently the organisation’s head of IT security, was one of two FSB operatives accused by the FBI last month of hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. An indictment said it was “unknown” whether the firm “knew of his FSB affiliation”. Read more here for details and to help with the confusion.

*** In case you are wondering what Robert Mueller, the special investigator is looking at with this team, hold on this is going to get worse.

Magnitsky tracked money and found it all over the globe before he was murdered in a Russian prison, where the FSB arrested him for whistle-blowing.

According to records obtained by OCCRP, between Moscow and Geneva the money traveled all over the world in a veritable chain of shell companies set up by GT Group — a company that was connected to the sale of arms from N. Korea to Iran as well as laundering money for the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.
The couple used the same Credit Suisse accounts to purchase two apartments valued at US$2 million each at Dubai’s Kempinksi resort for tax office deputies Elena Anisimova and Olga Tsareva. According to bank records, the apartments were purchased using the same bank account Stepanova used.
US$3 million arrived in the accounts on January 3, 2008 via Bristoll Export, a company which had been registered by GT Group in New Zealand. In February, companies incorporated in Cyprus, Moldova, and the United Kingdom sent US$9 million to the Credit Suisse accounts. See detailed information on one of the companies, NOMIREX, which processed US$8 million in its accounts while filing as “inactive” in a separate story.
In May and June 2008, the accounts held by Stepanov and Stepanova sent US$10 million to a shell company called Arivust holding. Records obtained by OCCRP show that through a series of agreements, Stepanov is named as the beneficial owner of the company.
The records also show that Stepanov is the beneficial owner of another company, Aikate Properties, which sent US$2 million to his Swiss account.
Hermitage acquired copies of the Credit Suisse transactions and used them to file a complaint with the bank and the Swiss federal attorney general this spring.
Stepanova remains employed by the Russian government. She resigned from the tax ministry but now works for a new defense agency established by Medvedev that oversees procurement and allocation of police and military equipment to the country’s law enforcement and military agencies.
So do Lieutenant Colonel Artyom Kuznetsov, whose assets were estimated at US$3 million although his official annual salary is about US$10,000; and Russian Interior Ministry Pavel Karpov, whose assets were estimated at US$1.5 million while his yearly pay was only US$10,000. Transparency International ranks Russia as the most corrupt large nation on earth, and the large country most likely to bribe abroad. They also estimate that bribery alone costs Russia US$300 billion annually, the total GDP of Denmark.  Bribery “is not even half of the problem,” according to a US House of Representatives Staffer who did not want to be identified because of his frequent work with Russian officials on policy issues including the Magnitsky case. Yep…more here.

Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with 8 people in the room at Trump Tower in June of 2016. The meeting included Natalia Vesealnitskaya who was hired by and worked closely with Petr Katsyv who is/was the legal owner of Prevezon Holdings. The U.S. Justice Department for the Southern District of New York was prosecuting a money laundering case against Prevezon Holdings and it was settled too quickly directly after Jeff Sessions fired Phreet Bharara. Katsyv is also the vice president of Russian Railways, a state run rail operation run by Vladimir Yakunin and a close confidant of Vladimir Putin. Still confused and overwhelmed? Well there is more here.

Sorry there is yet another name, Sergei Roldugin. This particular Sergei is hardly a money launderer of the garden variety, in fact he is a cellist. But..he is at the center of a global scheme that moved $2.0 billion through Russian state banks, Swiss and Panamanian law firms all tied to Vladimir Putin via the investigation and release of the Panama Papers. Kinda wonder how a cellist is worth $100 million, right? Good question but money mess began at the Bank Rossiya, a top go-to bank for Putin and his inner circle. Oh yeah, Sergei Roldugin the the godfather to Putin’s oldest daughter, Maria.

In September of 2016, Roldugin announced before reporters at the Kremlin that Donadl Trump will be the next U.S. president.