Manafort to Testify, Financial Fraud Exposure?

Posted on July 20, 2017July 20, 2017 by Denise Simon

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. Credit 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. Credit 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. Credit 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

Posted on July 18, 2017July 18, 2017 by Denise Simon

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.

How Hillary’s Lawyers and DoJ Obstructed on Emails

Posted on July 12, 2017July 12, 2017 by Denise Simon

FBI document dump reveals secrets of Clinton probe as new director nominee faces Senate

FNC: Some 42 pages of highly redacted documents from the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of highly classified materials paint a picture of a serious, but flawed investigation hindered by a lack of cooperation, according to a key watchdog group.

The materials, all part of the probe dubbed “Midyear Exam,” included several documents designated as “grand jury material,” indicating the potential seriousness of the investigation that would ultimately be ended by FBI director James Comey in July, then restarted for a brief period in October before being shut down for good.

One redacted exchange reveals a back and forth subpoena response to the FBI from one of Mrs. Clinton’s private attorneys, Katherine Turner, a partner at Washington DC powerhouse firm Williams & Connolly. In the document, Turner agreed to turn over one of Mrs. Clinton’s non-secure Apple iPads and two of her BlackBerrys to the FBI.

But neither smartphone received from the law firm contain SIM cards or Secure Digital (SD) cards, and a total of 13 mobile devices identified by the FBI as potentially using clintonemail.com email addresses were never located by Williams & Connelly.

“We are presuming there are still 13 devices at issue,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told Fox News. “The new records show how badly the Obama Justice Department and FBI mishandled the Clinton email investigation. They get the equivalent of wiped phones from the Clinton lawyers and do nothing?”

IJR

READ THE DOCUMENTS

As extensively reported by Fox, Clinton would often task aides including Monica Hanley with finding and supplying the secretary of state’s never-ending demand to use non-secure BlackBerrys for all her official government work. Some of Clinton’s BlackBerrys wound up being pounded with hammers on orders by Huma Abedin after Clinton’s homebrew servers went down or when news that Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal’s email had been hacked in 2013 by the Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer”—Marcel Lehel Lazar.

The new documents offer a glimpse into the lawyering ballet inside the Beltway—as this surrendering of two BlackBerrys and one iPad by her private attorneys occurred just six days before Hillary Clinton, then the leading Democratic nominee for president, testified before Congress on Oct. 22, 2015 about the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

In a photo captured in the Benghazi hearing, Turner and her law partner David Kendall pointedly flanked Clinton during her marathon testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Also hovering nearby was longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, who was also at the epicenter of Clinton’s deliberative use of a non-secure email system while she headed one of the most sensitive federal agencies in the U.S. government.

Mills, who was Clinton’s chief of staff and counselor at State, received immunity for her cooperation into the email investigation was permitted to be in the room while Clinton interviewed by the FBI in July 2016. Comey would later admit publicly that he had never heard of a potential witness representing the subject of an FBI investigation to be present during an interview with investigators.

Nearly a year has passed since Comey’s then-boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, held her infamous tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton in Phoenix, Arizona. Eight days later, Comey announced on July 5, 2016, that “regarding the handling of classified information, our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

Comey made his determination despite noting that Clinton and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” and even though 22 top secret email exchanges deemed too damaging to national security to release. Some of those exchanges contained Special Access Privilege (SAP) information characterized by intel experts as “above top secret.”

“They (the FBI) were played by Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers and didn’t care,” Fitton said. “The Trump Justice Department needs to audit this mess and figure out if the Clinton matters need to be reopened or reinvigorated.”

In the latest documents dumped by the FBI, a whopping 325 pages are cited as “total deleted pages.” The 42 pages that were released and are only readable in parts include 177 redactions. The redactions include those made citing Freedom of Information Act exemptions under (b) (7) (e) in which the information is denied because revelations could “disclose investigation techniques.“

Now—64 days after James Comey was fired by President Donald Trump as the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray is scheduled to sit down before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the start his confirmation process.

Two former agents with the FBI told Fox News they hope that “the atmosphere is changed with a new director.”

Natalia Veselnitskaya, Prevezon, Brooklyn, NY and Money Laundering

Posted on July 11, 2017July 11, 2017 by Denise Simon

Natalia Veselnitskaya had clients to defend in New York. Those clients were Denis Katsyv, Alexander Litvak, and Timofey Krit. Natalia had expensive choices in accommodations in New York where the U.S taxpayer paid the bill.

Prevezon Holdings was part of a money laundering prosecution case in Southern District of New York that for the most part was settled in May of 2017. Prevezon is/was owned by Denis Katsyv and has a principal by the name of Timofey Krit. The Prevezon office was located in Brooklyn, New York. The registered agent for Prevezon is Gabriella Volshteyn.

Gabriella Volshteyn is a founder and a managing attorney of Volshteyn & Associates. The lawfirm boasts the following on the website:

In our Real Estate practice, we have participated in over $1 billion of transactions in commercial and residential real estate involving both the US-based and international corporate entities and individuals.

In our Business and Contract Law practice, we have represented a full range of clients from individuals and small business owners to large multinational holding companies. We have drafted contracts ranging from simple corporate agreements to complex contractual agreements related to large-scale international events, such as Sochi Olympic Games.

In our Global Corporate and Tax practice, we have considerable expertise in structuring complex corporate, banking and investment accounts for foreign investors and the establishment of offshore trusts in tax-favored jurisdictions, such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Netherlands, Antilles, the Channel Islands, Panama, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Madeira.

Our Surrogacy Law practice is an area of passion for this firm as we have been fortunate to help many families from all over the world with bringing a child in their lives. With the help of our firm, surrogacy has made the dream of having children possible for those who are infertile, unable to become pregnant, or unable to carry a child to term.

(of note, the countries listed above are those that are known to be quite common in use by front companies to hide money, evade taxes and park laundered funds)

*** While Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting on June 6, 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the meeting allegedly had several objectives including opposition intelligence on Hillary Clinton, getting waivers or removal of sanctions from the Magnitsky Act and later Russian adoption. Donald Jr. included Jared Kuschner and Paul Manafort in the meeting without vetting Natalia or on background the sanctions. Natalia also does have ties to former top members of GRU and FSB. As a normal practice, the Kremlin always dispatches operatives that are at least one layer removed from listed official positions of the Russian government.

A particular group of note for which Veselnitskaya was involved and is a large lobby operation in Washington DC is HRAGI, a front operation on human rights known as Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation. Those involved in the lobby operation on behalf of HRAGI and Prevezon include:

A. Rinat Akhmetshin – Russian national living in Washington D.C.
B. Robert Arakelian
C. Chris Cooper – CEO Potomac Square Group
D. Glenn Simpson – SNS Global and Fusion GPS
E. Mark Cymrot – Partner, Baker Hostetler
F. Ron Dellums – Former Republican Congressman (correction, Dellums is Democrat of operative status)
G. Howard Schweitzer – Managing Partner of Cozen O’Connor Public
Strategies

In more detail as published by Senator Grassley’s office:

The Russian Government also has a vested interested in ensuring that Prevezon
Holdings Limited and its affiliated companies successfully defend asset forfeiture
proceedings brought against them by the United States Government in New
York, in which Prevezon is accused of laundering proceeds of the $230 million
fraud.
Prevezon is owned by Denis Katsyv, the son of a Russian government official,
Piotr Katsyv. Denis Katsyv currently has $7million frozen by the Swiss General
Prosecutor, pursuant to a criminal investigation by the Swiss authorities into the
laundering of proceeds from the $230 million fraud. More here.

***

Another issue is Jared Kushner.

HRAGI’s other clients include Vladimir Lelyukh, a top executive at Sberbank Capital, a subsidiary of the state-owned Russian bank involved in the real estate, energy, transportation, and automotive sectors. Sberbank Capital’s CEO, Ashot Khachaturyants, is a former senior official in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and its Ministry of Economic Development and Trade.
State-owned Russian financial institutions are common conduits for surreptitious intelligence work in the country. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has faced scrutiny over a January meeting a top executive at another bank with ties to Russian intelligence, Moscow-based Vnesheconombank. For context and validation, go here.

Vnesheconombank was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2014 due to Russian annexation of Crimea and Ukraine.

Vnesheconombank also known as VEB bank has the following officers:

Last year, the Justice Department said a man who pleaded guilty to spying for the Russian government entered the country posing as an employee of VEB. VEB, incidentally, paid his legal fees.

In December, President Trump’s son-in-law and presidential adviser Jared Kushner met VEB’s Chairman in New York.

And last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that VEB helped fund construction of the president’s 65-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto. The Russian entity bought $850 million of stock in a Ukrainian steelmaker from the billionaire Russian-Canadian developer Alexander Shnaider, who was constructing the hotel at the time.

To be clear, VEB is not actually a bank at all. It’s not under the purview of Russia’s central bank, and — on its own website — says it does not compete with commercial credit institutions and participates only in those projects that cannot receive funding from private investors. Instead, VEB says its mission is “to enhance the competitiveness of the Russian economy, diversify it and stimulate investment activity.”

And Sergey Gorkov — the man Jared Kushner met in December — was handpicked to run it in 2016 by Putin himself. Gorkov is a graduate of Russia’s secret service academy, which produced a number of oligarchs who made fortunes during the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, including Putin himself. It is funded directly by Russia’s federal budget, which has sometimes meant operating in suboptimal financial conditions but also ties the bank directly to the country’s leadership. More here from BusinessInsider.

Two Senators signed a letter of inquiry regarding Sergey Gorkov and Jared Kushner illustrating concern of meeting omissions on the Kushner S-86 form and is asking the FBI for further details.

Capturing Terrorists Again and Going to Gitmo?

Posted on July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 by Denise Simon

Notice that for years, no terrorist has been captured on the battlefield, they have simply been killed per the edict of the Obama administration. It has made intelligence collection and cultivation almost impossible and in some cases under the previous administration has led to the deaths of innocent civilians due to collateral damage or bad ground control.

The most recent capture was in 2014 of Abu Khattalah of Benghazi, the only terrorist detained and he is presently being held in the Washington DC area.

Meanwhile: The case of United States v. Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi proceedings at Fort Belvoir, Va., scheduled for July 12. He was released by Obama from Gitmo to his home country Sudan and made his way to Yemen working for AQAP.

The charge sheet for Ahmed Abu Khattalah is here.

The Trump administration appears to be making its first moves toward fulfilling a campaign promise to fill the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with “bad dudes.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein visited the prison on Friday to get an update on current operations, the first concrete action the administration has taken on the facility since taking office.

Up until now, Guantanamo has been running on autopilot; the executive order from former President Obama calling for the facility to be shut down is still technically the law of the land. More here from The Hill.

ABC

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — In the highest-ranking known visit by a Trump administration official, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, were visiting this remote outpost Friday to get “an up-to-date understanding” of current war-on-terror operations.

Rod Rosenstein, Sessions’ deputy, was also on the tour. Its first stop was the war court compound, Camp Justice, where the Pentagon holds pretrial hearings in the death penalty case against five alleged plotters of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and others accused of terrorism and war crimes.

They also toured the Detention Center Zone where, after an extensive Obama administration downsizing effort, the Pentagon holds 41 war prisoners, 10 charged with crimes and five cleared for release through Obama or Bush administration review boards.

“Keeping this country safe from terrorists is the highest priority of the Trump administration,” Justice Department spokesman Ian D. Prior said in a statement issued before the VIP party landed at the base and took a special boat rather than the large ferry across Guantanamo Bay.

A court hearing was postponed until afternoon to accommodate the visit. It comes as the chief war court judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, has been openly complaining about insufficient resources to mount a robust schedule of 2018 hearings in the 9/11 and USS Cole cases.

Other attorneys general have visited the site, including Michael Mukasey for the Bush administration in 2008 and Eric Holder for the Obama administration in 2009. This visit — coming more than five months into the Trump administration, even as the White House has yet to officially rescind Barack Obama’s 2009 closure order — may be seen as a signal of support for the detention operation and the war court where six men are in pretrial, death penalty proceedings for the Sept. 11 and USS Cole attacks.

The one-day visit was announced hours before a Saudi man was due at the war court for a pre-sentencing hearing. Ahmed al-Darbi pleaded guilty to war crimes in February 2014, in exchange for a commitment to let him serve out his sentence of up to 15 years in his homeland starting next year.

“Recent attacks in Europe and elsewhere confirm that the threat to our nation is immediate and real,” Prior said in his statement, “and it remains essential that we use every lawful tool available to prevent as many attacks as possible.”

He said the goal of the visit was for the officials to meet with “the people on the ground who are leading our government-wide efforts at GTMO,” using the Navy acronym from for the 45-square-mile base in southeast Cuba. “In addition to the Department of Justice’s role in handling detainee-related litigation,” he added, “it is important for the Department of Justice to have an up-to-date understanding of current operations.”

Coats’ spokesman, Timothy L. Barrett, issued an identical statement to the Department of Justice’s on the trip’s purpose: “To gain an understanding of current operations by meeting with the people on the ground who are leading our government-wide efforts at GTMO.”

Others on the tour included Adm. Kurt Tidd, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which has oversight of the prison; Navy Rear Adm. Edward Cashman, the detention center commander; and Col. Steve Gabavics, the head of the guard force, said Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Ben Sakrisson.

He declined to say whether they visited the prison’s clandestine Camp 7, where former CIA captives are kept in military custody, in what he called a “standard tour of the camps.” The group had lunch in the Detention Center Zone at the Seaside Galley mess hall where guards and other prison staff eat.

Sessions first visited in late January 2002 as a U.S. senator and has long been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the prison and military commissions system, whose rules are a hybrid of U.S. military and federal legal systems.

The visit comes as the U.S. Southern Command, not so long ago run by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, is proposing an up to $100 million construction project to house 13,000 temporary migrants and 5,000 support staff on the base near the airstrip. The Navy, in announcing the proposal, called it a “contingency mass migration complex.”

The war court and Detention Center Zone staffed by 1,500 troops and civilians are on the opposite side of the base, requiring a ferry ride across Guantanamo Bay.

No such mass exodus is foreseen. First, the Obama administration canceled a decades-old “wet foot, dry foot” policy that let Cubans who reach U.S. shores gain legal entry. Now the Trump administration is pursuing deportations of undocumented immigrants, a program championed by Sessions.

“There are no detention facilities involved in this project,” Southcom spokesman Army Maj. Vance Trenkel said by email on Thursday. “This project is to assist with mass migration operations … caused by things such as a natural disaster.”

In the 1990s the base was used to shelter more than 50,000 Cubans and Haitians who were stopped at sea from reaching the United States.