United Way was a Great Charity, Right?

Yes, but everything is subject to power and money. When it comes to your child, take extreme caution, ask questions, research and don’t trust anyone. That includes Bill Gates and Common Core. You are the real watchdog for your children, regardless of age, take comfort however, there are people doing great work on your behalf. Use these tools.

   <<— Big and scary

Parents: Don’t Listen to the United Way. Don’t Sign Away Your Child’s Data and Give Up a Constitutional Right to Privacy.

The Family Education Rights Privacy Act (FERPA) has been a stumbling block in accessing data in education reformer plans for many years.  According to the ed reform talking points, it is imperative that personally identifiable information be available so that all federal agencies, state educational agencies and third party researchers have access to this information ostensibly to ‘help your child’.   The request for information and the need for this information has been requested repeatedly by education reformers needing that data for company/agency existence.  The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services need that information as well in order to ‘help your child and your family’ reach the goals the government (not the parents) has indicated is success.

From a previous 2013 article on escholar, a company wanting to use data to track students:

 

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Common Core and the revision of FERPA by the US Department of Education allows intensive data mining and sharing of student information to various federal agencies and private firms selected the the USDOEd.  The company eScholar is one education reform company eager and ready to data mine information on students.  From wsj.com and Education Data Companies Chosen, 08.13.2012:

 

New York state education officials Monday said they selected four companies to build a broad education database that will host students’ test scores, curriculum materials and education apps, paid for by up to $50 million in federal Race to the Top funds.

The state Education Department said that by fall 2013, school districts will be able to use one of the data systems created by either ConnectEDU, eScholar or Pearson PLC and its subsidiary Schoolnet.
The systems are supposed to store student test scores, student demographic information, curriculum materials, lesson plans and other items that teachers or parents can access. Companies will get paid, in part, based on how many school districts select their data system.

It’s financially lucrative for data mining companies to compile student data and advantageous for them to have start up funding provided by taxpayer money. eScholar has produced a video about “Bobby”, a hypothetical student the company is tracking.  From the eScholar website:

 

“Have you met Bobby yet?”

(access video here)

Meet Bobby, the newest member of the eScholar myTrack team. We think that educators have a lot of students like Bobby, students who have things that they want to do, but aren’t always sure how to get there. Check out the video to see how Bobby and his team of supporters use myTrack to help him reach his goals. What do you think? Do you have any students like Bobby?  

eScholar is a company that received federal stimulus dollars to track your child without your knowledge or permission.  Could such behavior and practice be considered not just data mining but stalking?

Should the tracking of student academic and non-academic information and sharing it with federal agencies and private organizations without parental/student knowledge/permission be allowed?  How is the difference in the dissemination of personal information about “Bobby” to others and monitoring “Bobby’s” computer usage via the relaxation of FERPA any different than the definition of how stalkers operate?

Here’s an example of what eScholar will gather on “Bobby” and why:

Enabling P-20 Data Warehousing

Today, a consensus has emerged amongst educators at all levels that there is a need to create an LDS that provides a comprehensive view of education from early childhood through postsecondary and beyond (P-20). This capability is essential to maximizing the effectiveness of our efforts to encourage every student to achieve his or her greatest potential. A key element of this LDS is a comprehensive data warehouse that supports the data requirements of the P-20 world. With the introduction of CDW-PS, which integrates with our eScholar Uniq-ID® products supporting unique identification and ID management of individuals from early childhood through postsecondary, eScholar now has a complete solution for a P-20 data warehouse. Thedata model for the CDW-PS product is specifically designed to integrate with the eScholar Complete Data Warehouse® for PK-12 product to create a comprehensive LDS of over 3,000 data elements encompassing student and teacher academic history from pre-K through higher education. This powerful combination enables SEAs to answer key P-20 questions through one software product solution. 

Should the tracking of student academic and non-academic information and sharing it with federal agencies and private organizations without parental/student knowledge/permission be allowed?  How is the difference in the dissemination of personal information about “Bobby” to others and monitoring “Bobby’s” computer usage via the relaxation of FERPA any different than the definition of how stalkers operate?

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The United Way Salt Lake City (a private NGO) is making a pitch to parents to sign away their children’s right to privacy by agreeing to waive their FERPA protections so that the organization can ‘help’ their child and agencies can then determine the ‘right’ services for their children.  Apparently the Salt Lake City United Way just can’t do its job without parents giving their human capital information to federal agencies, NGOs like The United Way and third party researchers.   Unlike escholar, United Way is making a pitch directly to parents to give away a right that has been constitutionally provided.  The United Way is asking parents to provide active permission to data mine students.  It doesn’t give information on exactly where that information is directed and other than promises that it will make United Way’s partners jobs easier, there is no indication on who has access to this data.

From Emily Talmage in United Way to Parents: Give Us Your Gold:

To get around this law, United Way of Salt Lake City, which has recently partnered with an organization called “StriveTogether” – a subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks Foundation that has received millions from the Gates Foundation – is now encouraging parents to sign a form waiving their FERPA rights.

They’ve even put together a video to convince parents just how important it is that they give up their children’s personal information to just about any organization in the city that wants it – including the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce.

 

Here is The United Way’s video cajoling parents into giving their child’s data away.  It’s the same argument made by escholar, it’s because we want the best for your child.  Don’t fall for it.  It’s to have access to the dossier on your human capital.  Do a search on ‘United Way and FERPA’. The United Way is supportive of this administration’s educational reforms and ESSA and many United Way agencies are requesting parents give away their child’s constitutional right to privacy.

In 2015: 84 million

Just imagine, the cyber espionage….industrial espionage….the hacking…..

Do you really want to continue to tell the world about everything you do and who you are connected with on Facebook?

Cybercriminals Making Computer Malware at a Record Rate: Researchers

NBC: Last year was a particularly bad year for hacks and computer intrusions, and it looks like 2016 will only get worse, Panda Security says.

The Spain-based Internet security company said its lab researchers detected and disabled more than 84 million new samples of malware in 2015 — 9 million more than the previous year. The figure means cybercriminals were churning out new malware samples at a rate of more than 230,000 a day throughout 2015.

In fact, more than a quarter (27 percent) of all malware samples ever recorded were produced in 2015, Panda Security said in a news release.

“We predict that the amount of malware created by cybercriminals will continue to grow,” said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. “We also can’t forget that the creation of millions of Trojans and other threats corresponds to the cybercriminals’ needs to infect as many users as possible in order to get more money.”

Malware is any type of software that is designed to gain access to and damage or disable a computer.

Trojans, a type of malware disguised as legitimate software, accounted for more than half the malware detected in 2015, according to Panda Security.

China topped the list of countries with the highest rate of infected computers, followed by Taiwan and Turkey. At the other end of the spectrum, nine of the top 10 countries with the lowest rates of infection were in Europe, led by Finland, Norway and Sweden.

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Barack Obama has been a big user of BIG DATA but he experienced a huge firestorm after the exposure of the NSA programs by Edward Snowden. Barack Obama enlisted John Podesta, at the time his chief of staff and now Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign architect to commission a study. Sheesh…but nonetheless, here is what you should read in the findings.

From the White House: Over the past several days, severe storms have battered Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and other states. Dozens of people have been killed and entire neighborhoods turned to rubble and debris as tornadoes have touched down across the region. Natural disasters like these present a host of challenges for first responders. How many people are affected, injured, or dead? Where can they find food, shelter, and medical attention? What critical infrastructure might have been damaged?

Drawing on open government data sources, including Census demographics and NOAA weather data, along with their own demographic databases, Esri, a geospatial technology company, has created a real-time map showing where the twisters have been spotted and how the storm systems are moving. They have also used these data to show how many people live in the affected area, and summarize potential impacts from the storms. It’s a powerful tool for emergency services and communities. And it’s driven by big data technology.

In January, President Obama asked me to lead a wide-ranging review of “big data” and privacy—to explore how these technologies are changing our economy, our government, and our society, and to consider their implications for our personal privacy. Together with Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, the President’s Science Advisor John Holdren, the President’s Economic Advisor Jeff Zients, and other senior officials, our review sought to understand what is genuinely new and different about big data and to consider how best to encourage the potential of these technologies while minimizing risks to privacy and core American values.

Over the course of 90 days, we met with academic researchers and privacy advocates, with regulators and the technology industry, with advertisers and civil rights groups. The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology conducted a parallel study of the technological trends underpinning big data. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy jointly organized three university conferences at MIT, NYU, and U.C. Berkeley. We issued a formal Request for Information seeking public comment, and hosted a survey to generate even more public input.

Today, we presented our findings to the President. We knew better than to try to answer every question about big data in three months. But we are able to draw important conclusions and make concrete recommendations for Administration attention and policy development in a few key areas.

There are a few technological trends that bear drawing out. The declining cost of collection, storage, and processing of data, combined with new sources of data like sensors, cameras, and geospatial technologies, mean that we live in a world of near-ubiquitous data collection. All this data is being crunched at a speed that is increasingly approaching real-time, meaning that big data algorithms could soon have immediate effects on decisions being made about our lives.

The big data revolution presents incredible opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy and every corner of society.

Big data is saving lives. Infections are dangerous—even deadly—for many babies born prematurely. By collecting and analyzing millions of data points from a NICU, one study was able to identify factors, like slight increases in body temperature and heart rate, that serve as early warning signs an infection may be taking root—subtle changes that even the most experienced doctors wouldn’t have noticed on their own.

Big data is making the economy work better. Jet engines and delivery trucks now come outfitted with sensors that continuously monitor hundreds of data points and send automatic alerts when maintenance is needed. Utility companies are starting to use big data to predict periods of peak electric demand, adjusting the grid to be more efficient and potentially averting brown-outs.

Big data is making government work better and saving taxpayer dollars. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have begun using predictive analytics—a big data technique—to flag likely instances of reimbursement fraud before claims are paid. The Fraud Prevention System helps identify the highest-risk health care providers for waste, fraud, and abuse in real time and has already stopped, prevented, or identified $115 million in fraudulent payments.

But big data raises serious questions, too, about how we protect our privacy and other values in a world where data collection is increasingly ubiquitous and where analysis is conducted at speeds approaching real time. In particular, our review raised the question of whether the “notice and consent” framework, in which a user grants permission for a service to collect and use information about them, still allows us to meaningfully control our privacy as data about us is increasingly used and reused in ways that could not have been anticipated when it was collected.

Big data raises other concerns, as well. One significant finding of our review was the potential for big data analytics to lead to discriminatory outcomes and to circumvent longstanding civil rights protections in housing, employment, credit, and the consumer marketplace.

No matter how quickly technology advances, it remains within our power to ensure that we both encourage innovation and protect our values through law, policy, and the practices we encourage in the public and private sector. To that end, we make six actionable policy recommendations in our report to the President:

Advance the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. Consumers deserve clear, understandable, reasonable standards for how their personal information is used in the big data era. We recommend the Department of Commerce take appropriate consultative steps to seek stakeholder and public comment on what changes, if any, are needed to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, first proposed by the President in 2012, and to prepare draft legislative text for consideration by stakeholders and submission by the President to Congress.

Pass National Data Breach Legislation. Big data technologies make it possible to store significantly more data, and further derive intimate insights into a person’s character, habits, preferences, and activities. That makes the potential impacts of data breaches at businesses or other organizations even more serious. A patchwork of state laws currently governs requirements for reporting data breaches. Congress should pass legislation that provides for a single national data breach standard, along the lines of the Administration’s 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.

Extend Privacy Protections to non-U.S. Persons. Privacy is a worldwide value that should be reflected in how the federal government handles personally identifiable information about non-U.S. citizens. The Office of Management and Budget should work with departments and agencies to apply the Privacy Act of 1974 to non-U.S. persons where practicable, or to establish alternative privacy policies that apply appropriate and meaningful protections to personal information regardless of a person’s nationality.

Ensure Data Collected on Students in School is used for Educational Purposes. Big data and other technological innovations, including new online course platforms that provide students real time feedback, promise to transform education by personalizing learning. At the same time, the federal government must ensure educational data linked to individual students gathered in school is used for educational purposes, and protect students against their data being shared or used inappropriately.

Expand Technical Expertise to Stop Discrimination. The detailed personal profiles held about many consumers, combined with automated, algorithm-driven decision-making, could lead—intentionally or inadvertently—to discriminatory outcomes, or what some are already calling “digital redlining.” The federal government’s lead civil rights and consumer protection agencies should expand their technical expertise to be able to identify practices and outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that have a discriminatory impact on protected classes, and develop a plan for investigating and resolving violations of law.

Amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The laws that govern protections afforded to our communications were written before email, the internet, and cloud computing came into wide use. Congress should amend ECPA to ensure the standard of protection for online, digital content is consistent with that afforded in the physical world—including by removing archaic distinctions between email left unread or over a certain age.

We also identify several broader areas ripe for further study, debate, and public engagement that, collectively, we hope will spark a national conversation about how to harness big data for the public good. We conclude that we must find a way to preserve our privacy values in both the domestic and international marketplace. We urgently need to build capacity in the federal government to identify and prevent new modes of discrimination that could be enabled by big data. We must ensure that law enforcement agencies using big data technologies do so responsibly, and that our fundamental privacy rights remain protected. Finally, we recognize that data is a valuable public resource, and call for continuing the Administration’s efforts to open more government data sources and make investments in research and technology.

While big data presents new challenges, it also presents immense opportunities to improve lives, the United States is perhaps better suited to lead this conversation than any other nation on earth. Our innovative spirit, technological know-how, and deep commitment to values of privacy, fairness, non-discrimination, and self-determination will help us harness the benefits of the big data revolution and encourage the free flow of information while working with our international partners to protect personal privacy. This review is but one piece of that effort, and we hope it spurs a conversation about big data across the country and around the world.

Read the Big Data Report.

See the fact sheet from today’s announcement.

#13 Hours, the Stand Down of American Power

Having been so close to the mater of the Benghazi attack since it happened and deeply researching all the facts pre and post attack, seeing the movie was a personal quest to complete the circle of known circumstances and facts.

There were clearly political objectives by not only the U.S. State Department in cadence with other foreign diplomatic agencies with regard to Libya. This played out on the screen at the beginning of the movie. It is the common conclusion by the majority with interest in the matter of Libya, that the United States was running weapons from Libya to Syrian rebels. I still to this day somewhat dispute that notion, however, the bigger takeaway from the movie is the White House and State Department resolve to wean the U.S. military power from the global landscape and to install misguided diplomatic efforts in its place not only in Libya but several dozen countries across the globe.

For decades, the United States has been the leader in the world, and rightly so to maintain as much equilibrium as possible, often deploying in order, diplomatic efforts, CIA efforts and finally military efforts. Once Barack Obama made the case in the April 2009 famous Cairo speech, the forecast was clear that he was going to even out the power and positions of nations in the world with particular emphasis on securing Muslim based nations as protected and promoted states.

The last real offensive military operation with any kind of ‘win’ was Libya to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power. Since, we have seen the rise of al Qaeda, Khorasan, Islamic State and the Taliban, where rules of engagement have been so feeble the death tolls rise and the refugee numbers are staggering. This demonstrates that when there is a mission, strategy and resolve to an objective, it can be achieved.

13 Hours proved Libya was in complete chaos for quite some time prior to the attack on September 11, 2012. There had been countless terror attempts, growing militant factions and assassination attempts leading up to that fateful day. Was going back in to Libya to complete the task of establishing a real and functional government beyond the scope of attention and resolve by the State Department and the White House?

I would argue, the unspoken objective of Barack Obama is to no longer demonstrate the power of the United States including military might, but rather to have diplomatic achievements that are only gained by allowing the other side to completely prevail as is the case with Iran.

One of the jobs of the Global Response Staff is to protect people and interests by deploying all assets near and far, calculating responses, time, personnel and approvals. Such was not the case in Libya and in countless other countries during that entire week in September. Many locations had protests and attacks on U.S. posts.

The movie demonstrated that movement of U.S. personnel in Libya was by all foreign contractors or borrowed assets. This places the safety and security of people at risk from the start. No lessons were learned or heeded or laws followed from previous historical attacks.

In March of 2015, there was a growing terror condition in Yemen by the Iranian back Houthis. Yemen was a very large CIA operation there to address AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Moving into April, the United States under John Kerry at the State Department once again failed to respond and upwards of 5000 were at risk, their fate unknown had to fend for themselves. Global Response Staff teams or the military exfil FEST teams or the QRF, Quick Reaction Force were not deployed at the behest of the State Department. Thankfully, India provided the larger portion of the rescue operations.

The military does not leave anyone behind and neither does  any human being with a shred of benevolence. The exceptions are Barack, Hillary and John. America and Americans fate is damned by this trio. Of this, there is no dispute.

By the way, leaving Benghazi, a borrowed oil company aircraft was used for the first flight out and a Libyan transport plane was use for the last flight out, carrying 4 dead Americans. Still no Americans as the lights went out in Benghazi.

 

 

The Biggest Silent Lie Yet?

Hillary’s fingerprints are all over this and it is likely the biggest betrayal to the families and the U.S. taxpayers yet. The shame never ends.

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. TAXPAYERS, NOT TEHRAN, COMPENSATED VICTIMS OF IRANIAN ATTACKS AGAINST AMERICANS
BY JONATHAN BRODER

Newsweek: A little-noticed side agreement to the Iran nuclear deal has unexpectedly reopened painful wounds for the families of more than a dozen Americans attacked or held hostage by Iranian proxies in recent decades. U.S. officials, the families say, insisted that Tehran would pay for financing or directing the attacks, but American taxpayers wound up paying instead.


The agreement, which resolved a long-running financial dispute with Iran, involved the return of $400 million in Iranian funds that the U.S. seized after the 1979 Islamic revolution, plus another $1.3 billion in interest. Announced on January 17—the same day the two countries implemented the nuclear deal and carried out a prisoner swap—President Barack Obama presented the side agreement as a bargain for the United States, noting that a claims tribunal in the Hague could have awarded Iran a much larger judgment. “For the United States, this settlement saved us billions of dollars that could have been pursued by Iran,” Obama said.


But for the victims, the side deal is a betrayal, not a bargain. In 2000, the Clinton administration agreed to pay the $400 million to more than a dozen Americans who had won judgments against Iran in U.S. courts. At the time, American officials assured the victims that the Treasury would be reimbursed from the seized Iranian funds. That same year, Congress passed a law empowering the president to get the money from Iran. “We all believed that Iran would pay our damages, not U.S. taxpayers,” says Stephen Flatow, a New Jersey real estate lawyer who received $24 million for the death of his 19-year-old daughter in a 1995 bus bombing in the Gaza Strip. “And now, 15 years later, we find out that they never deducted the money from the account. It makes me nauseous. The Iranians aren’t paying a cent.”
Flatow’s cohorts agree. They include the families and survivors of some of the most high-profile foreign attacks against Americans in recent decades. Among them: five former Beirut hostages whom the Iran-backed Islamist group Hezbollah held for years during the 1980s; the wife of U.S. Marine Colonel William Higgins, whom Hezbollah kidnapped in 1988, before torturing and hanging him; the family of Navy diver Robert Stethem, whom an Iranian-backed group murdered in Beirut during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner; and a family whose daughter was killed in a Hamas bus bombing in Jerusalem in 1996.
Stuart Eizenstat, a deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration who helped negotiate the settlement, admits he never told the victims and their families the truth about the money. Unbeknownst to the victims and their lawyers, he says, Tehran had filed a claim with the U.S.-Iran tribunal in the Hague over the funds. “We didn’t have the full freedom to say we’re just going to take the $400 million because that money was now part of a formal claim,” Eizenstat says.
What’s further angered the victims and their families: A senior Iranian military official now claims the $1.7 billion is effectively a ransom for the five American hostages Tehran released in January. “This money was returned for the freedom of the U.S. spies, and it was not related to the nuclear negotiations,” Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi said Wednesday, according to the state-run Fars News Agency. The Obama administration denies any link between the prisoners and the $1.7 billion. But Republicans, already fuming over the nuclear deal, are now calling for an inquiry. “It’s bad enough the administration is giving Iran over $100 billion in direct sanctions relief, resumed oil sales and new international trade,” says Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois. “But now it’s using U.S. taxpayer money to pay the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism a $1.7 billion ‘settlement.’”
Administration officials are trying to play down the deal, noting it follows a 2000 law that created the compensation mechanism for the victims and their families. One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with State Department protocol, says the law only required the U.S. government, acting in place of the victims, to deal with their damage claims “to the satisfaction of the United States, which was the case with this settlement.” A major reason the U.S. was satisfied: The U.S. and Iran disagreed over whether the $400 million should have been placed in an interest-bearing account in 1979. “We reached this settlement on interest,” the official says, “to avoid significant potential exposure we faced at the tribunal on that question.”
But the revelation that Iran never paid the money has hit some of the families hard. They’ve lost the feeling that some measure of justice was served. “I feel like a schnorrer,” says Flatow, using the Yiddish term for a mooch, because U.S. taxpayers, not Iran, paid his damages. Other victims say they’re bothered by the administration’s reluctance to discuss the details of the side deal. It’s brought back memories from 20 years ago, when the victims won their judgments against Iran in U.S. courts, only to find themselves blocked at every turn by the Clinton administration. “There are limited ways to react to your child getting murdered,” says Leonard Eisenfeld, a Connecticut doctor whose son was killed in the 1996 bus bombing in Jerusalem. “Creating a financial deterrent to prevent Iran from more terrorism was one way, but we had to struggle very hard to do that.”
In a series of legal challenges, Clinton administration officials identified $20 million in Iranian assets in America. Among them: Tehran’s Washington embassy and several consulates around the country. But in arguments that sometimes echoed Tehran’s concerns, the officials maintained that attaching those assets to pay even a small portion the victims’ damages would violate U.S. obligations to respect the sovereign immunity of other countries’ diplomatic property.
Though their arguments succeeded in court, the optics were bad. The case caught the attention of the media and Congress, where many lawmakers openly supported the victims. The contours of a settlement began to emerge when lawyers for some of the victims, acting on a tip from a sympathizer inside the administration, located the $400 million in Iranian funds languishing in a foreign military sales (FMS) account at the Treasury. The money came from payments made by the shah for U.S. military equipment that was never delivered after the Iranian leader was overthrown in 1979. After several more clashes with the administration over the funds, first lady Hillary Clinton stepped in at a time when the bitter battles could have hurt her with Jewish voters in her 2000 bid for a New York Senate seat. She persuaded her husband to appoint Jacob Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to negotiate a settlement that would utilize the frozen Iranian funds.
That same year, Congress passed the legislation that paved the way for an agreement. The legislation required the Treasury to pay the $400 million in damages and empowered the president to seek reimbursement from Iran. Flatow, who had insisted the payments come directly from the Iranian account, recalls his negotiations with Lew. “I said, ‘Jack, where’s the money coming from? Is it coming from the foreign military sales account?’ And he said, ‘No, Steve. All checks that the United States of America writes come from the United States Treasury. But the statute says that we have the right to offset any payments we make against that FMS money.’ So I said, ‘OK, it’s not what I was hoping for, but it’s a settlement.’ We got paid in 2001. And we all believed that the government would reimburse itself from Iran’s foreign military sales account.”
Lew, now Obama’s Treasury secretary, declined to comment, as did former officials from the George W. Bush administration, which also never reimbursed the Treasury from the Iran weapons account.

In retrospect, Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary, says it was a mistake to pay the judgments against Iran using U.S. funds with no financial consequences for Tehran. The payments have made Flatow, Eisenfeld and the others the only victims of Iranian attacks to receive compensation. That is expected to change this year now that Congress has established a $1 billion fund to begin paying other notable victims of Iranian attacks, including the Tehran embassy hostages and survivors of the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut. This time, however, the money for their damage judgments will come not from U.S. taxpayers but from fines collected from a French bank that laundered billions for Iran.
For Flatow and others like him, that’s little consolation. In the agreement, he notes, “there wasn’t a single sentence, not a single word that would ameliorate the pain of people who lost their loved ones. That’s very hurtful.”

John Kerry Gave Iran the Pass, is Russia Next?

Seems like any country demonstrating not only bad behavior, but those that are killing regimes are enjoying a new legitimacy by the entire Obama administration and it has Europe in the same camp. Russia is no different from Iran for the most part and yet with 7000 dead in Ukraine and the silent assassinations at the behest of Putin….Russia is getting a pass by the world.

Kerry Says Moves to Lift Russia Sanctions May Begin in `Months’

Bloomberg: The U.S. may be able to consider lifting sanctions it imposed on Russia over its involvement in violence in Ukraine later this year if the Kremlin complies with the Minsk peace deal, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said.

“With effort and with bone fide, legitimate intent to solve the problem on both sides, it’s possible in these next months to find those Minsk agreements implemented,” he told an audience in Davos, Switzerland. If this happens, it would “get to the place where sanctions can be appropriately — because of the implementation — be removed,” he said.

Kerry’s comments are all the more optimistic since as recently as last month the U.S. Treasury Department expanded sanctions related to Russia’s role in Ukraine.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko blamed Russia for delays in implementing the Minsk accord and said sanctions enacted by the U.S. and Europe over the conflict are working. The conflict has killed more than 9,000 people and continues to simmer in the country’s easternmost regions.

While the original peace accord, signed last February in Minsk, was due to be completed by 2015, a new deadline hasn’t been set. Russia blames Ukraine for the delays.

Now enter the matter and history of Russian and Europe

Britain’s KGB Sugar Daddy

Weiss/DailyBeast: To understand Britain’s cowardice in standing up to Vladimir Putin, just follow the money.

On Monday, a freelancer photographer called Steve Back snapped a photograph of a document being carried cavalierly in the open by British officials entering Downing Street. The document was a list of suggested countermoves by Westminster to play against the Kremlin for Russia’s recent invasion of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Some of the items tracked with what other European and American counterparts were thinking. Let’s not fuel up the NATO jets quite just yet; let’s send a monitoring team from the UN and/or OSCE to Crimea (Robert Serry, a UN envoy was nearly kidnapped earlier this week by armed gunmen in Simferopol); let’s draw up financial and energy contingency plans to help the embryonic new government in Kiev. But one item stuck out above the rest: “Not support, for now, trade sanctions… or close London’s financial centre to Russians.”

Two of Britain’s finer Russia-obsessed journalists, Ben Judah and Oliver Bullough, have dealt admirably with why London has all of a sudden gone wobbly on Putinist aggression in Europe. The flow of Moscow gold to the sceptr’d isle, they argue, has now become so steady, so dependable and so relied-upon that no act of geopolitical thuggery can ever again lead to a Churchillian showdown with the Kremlin.

The Cold War may be over in the Western imagination for a number of reasons, but the triumph of cold hard cash is one of them. Russians have bought nearly five percent of the premium London properties in 2013. They’ve kept the tills full at Harrods during an “austerity” economy. They’ve sent their children to elite boarding schools and Oxbridge colleges, paying full tuition fees. And they’ve shoved their questionably-gotten gains into British tax shelters or financial institutions. In return, the political establishment, be it Labour or Tory, has only asked for more.

Old, numerous and bipartisan are the tales that corroborate this dreary hypothesis. At meetings with his Russian counterpart, David Cameron is said to politely cough about the ongoing carnage in Syria before getting down to the real business of greater Anglo-Russian trade and energy cooperation. And wasn’t Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, once spotted dining aboard the Corfu-anchored “super-yacht” belonging to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian aluminum magnate who was allegedly considering ways to donate to the Conservative Party even though donations by foreigners are illegal under British electoral law?  The then-Shadow Chancellor of course denied that any chatter about creative campaign financing ever took place. But also aboard Deripaska’s Queen K was Lord Peter Mandelson, a serially-employed Blairite then inhabiting his role as the European Commissioner for Trade. He was reportedly chatting with the oligarch about relaxing E.U. aluminum tariffs. Mandelson refused to flat-out deny that that discussion took place, preferring instead to focus on the “media squalls” and “sensationalist headlines,” but in any event, the tariffs did get lowered, and Deripaska’s metals empire Rusal benefited from looser trade with the E.U. Did I mention that the man to put both Tory and Labour Brits on the mega-yacht was a Rothschild, and that Deripaska’s registered lobbyist in the United States to help with a sticky visa situation has been Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (PDF)?

If you didn’t know any better, you’d start to think that the cousins would gladly pay for the pleasure of selling themselves to Moscow. One celebrated English author has gone that far already:

Plus another thing, Hector!” he barks. “What’s wrong, when you come down to it, with turning black money to white, at the end of the day? All right, there’s an alternative economy out there. A very big one. We all know that. We’re not born yesterday. More black than white, some countries’ economies are, we know that too. Look at Turkey. Look at Colombia, Luke’s parish. All right, look at Russia too. So where would you rather see that money? Black and out there? Or white, and sitting in London in the hands of civilized men, available for legitimate purposes and the public good?”

“Then maybe you should take up laundering yourself, Billy,” says Hector quietly. “For the public good.”

John le Carré is notorious for taking the establishment for which he once toiled as a spy at its lowest estimation.  But in Our Kind of Traitor, his penultimate novel published in 2010, he barely had to stray from the latest headlines in the Daily Mail to depict a credit-crunched nation heavily floated by what every Fleet Street hack has come to semi-affectionately refer to as the “Londongrad” or “Moscow-on-Thames” demimonde.

Dima, an ox-like Russian hood—“World Number One money-launderer”—wants to come in from the cold and set himself and his family up in the high English lifestyle to which so many of his compatriots have grown accustomed. In exchange for a little help from MI6, he promises to show Westminster where all the bodies are buried and where all the illicit assets of the Russian mob and the Russian state are being kept, a task made easier by the fact that the mob has now become the state under the leadership of the ultimate Russian hood, Vladimir Vladimirovich. But therein lies the problem for poor Dima, whose fate actually brings le Carré’s cynicism to new lows, even if the novelist’s grasp of empirical reality has never been less veiled or more vividly represented.  There’s even a scene in Our Kind of Traitor set aboard a yacht anchored off the coast of the Adriatic Sea featuring a Shadow Minister with the “haughty sub-Byronic gaze of sensual entitlement” (here’s a photograph of George Osborne.) And Billy, the apologist for money-laundering referenced above, is meant to be the Service’s “longest-standing and most implacable troubleshooter and left-hand man to the Chief himself.”

***

I lived in London for close to three years, from 2010 to the end of 2012. For the better part of half that period, I spent a great deal of time sussing out the connections between two elites: where the interests of those in positions of financial or political authority in Britain intersected with those of the Russian plutocracy. I left convinced that the reason Putin was able to get away with irradiating Alexander Litvinenko in broad daylight was that he understood that the brutality of Marxism-Leninism was more readily applied in the service of Mammon. Murder could now be weighed as a necessary price to pay for realpolitik. Western democrats became hypocrites in the face of consultancy contracts or low-cost oil and gas. Everyone wants to get rich, no one wants to fight money, however dirty or blood-soaked it may be. As the Economist phrased it during those frenzied months of tracing the source of a radioactive isotope through Piccadilly and beyond, “British diplomats’ biggest worry is not that Scotland Yard will be flummoxed, but that it might succeed” in identifying Litvinenko’s killers. This grim saga continued all through my time in England. The British Home Office last year, under a new administration, cited “international relations” in rejecting Litvinenko’s widow’s call for a public enquiry into her husband’s assassination seven years earlier. A British High Court judge has only just last month ordered the government to reconsider its decision. The siloviki, meanwhile, hug themselves with glee to watch as Scotland Yard reaches for the Geiger counter whenever a seemingly healthy Russian emigré is found dead in Surrey.

Still, there were those trying to end this sordid special relationship. Occasionally I’d get an email from, or have a meeting with, what was then known as the UK’s Financial Services Authority, a quasi-judicial regulatory body that has since cleaved into two separate organizations. The FSA—not to be confused with the anti-Assad rebels in Syria—were always interested in hearing what I’d come up with, but they’d confess immediately that they were hamstrung when it came to doing anything but keeping files on such-and-such finding. “We’re up against all of Downing Street, all of the City,” I remember one enforcement agent telling me, the City being the synecdoche for London’s financial centre, its Wall Street. He might have added a media that was itself hamstrung by Britain’s ludicrous libel laws.

More frustrating was the fact that the funny money was not so terribly obscure or recondite anymore thanks to Britain’s having become a favored jurisdiction for Russians looking to sue each other. As Oliver Bullough points out in the New Republic, “60 percent of the London Commercial Court’s workload now comes from Russia and Eastern Europe, and the pay-offs are huge.”

Alexey Navalny, the leader of the opposition in Russia as well as its foremost anti-corruption campaigner, published an op-ed in the London Times in 2012 in which he called for the Brits to adopt legislation similar to the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which aims to blacklist and sanction Russian officials guilty of gross human-rights violations. In Britain, such a law was needed even more urgently, Navalny wrote. “Local banks apply meagre ‘know your client’ procedures to vet applicants: a passport copy and a utility bill are all that is needed to open an account at any London-based private bank. Then, as if by magic, funds pour into the UK as clean capital, free from any taxation or further scrutiny. Getting the right to stay permanently in the UK with an investor visa is just as easy; all that is needed is a minimum of £2 million in personal assets.”

Moreover, where British banks weren’t doing the work, Russian ones were. I’d later work with Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption on a report it released on VTB Group, which is 60 percent state-owned by the Russian government. Originally Vneshtorgbank, which was formed in the 1990s following Mikhail Gorbachev’s breakup of the Soviet State Bank of Russia, or Gosbank, it was rebranded VTB in 2006. Today, the bank has a presence in over 20 countries, with assets amounting to $230 billion. In 2011, it took in upwards of $712 million in deposits in France and Germany, including from those countries’ pensioners. In 2007, as a brainchild of Putin, it inaugurated a “People’s IPO” designed to prompt ordinary Russians to become minority shareholders. Small business-owners to babushkas were encouraged to invest in what then-Prime Minister Putin called a “stable” growth vehicle; 130,000 lined up to buy at the offering price of 13.6 kopecks a share, making the IPO the largest in the world that year. Yet days after the IPO was launched, VTB’s stock price dropped; then it tanked, following the global economic crisis, driving the stock down to 1.9 kopecks. Putin tried to correct for this in 2012, by forcing VTB to buy back minority shares from only the IPO investors, at the original share price of 13.6 kopecks. Institutional investors were excluded from this act of czarist munificence and were rightfully furious for being cheated. Rinat Kirdan of Aton Capital told Bloomberg: “Over the years we have seen considerable evidence support in the view that VTB is more a state vehicle than a pro-oriented or shareholder-oriented business.”

The bank’s investment arm, VTB Capital, established a presence in London in 2008, in a building formerly occupied by Lloyds. Not longer thereafter, VTB went to court in London to reclaim losses. Another High Court Justice found in 2012 that “[i]t is not clear from the evidence presently available what, if any, due diligence was carried out by or on behalf of either VTB Moscow or VTB.” This case, involving the purchase of six Russian dairy farms, saw VTB issue a $225 million loan to a company whose collateral was worth less than $45 million. Moreover, the buyer of the farms, the bank later claimed to have discovered (though has not proven), was also the owner. The loan defaulted within a year. In January of this year, one of the defendants in the case, Konstanin Malofeev, filed a $600 million suit against VTB—also in London’s High Court.

Other allegations of rampant mismanagement or crony lending schemes designed to enrich bank executives continue to dog VTB. So have more serious charges that it has been keeping accounts for a mass murderer.

Last September, Senators Kelly Ayotte, Richard Blumenthal, John Cornyn and Jeanne Shaheen asked the U.S. Treasury Department to stop “Russian banks that have repeatedly undermined American, European Union and United Nations sanctions by helping the Assad regime in Syria.” VTB was one of them, although spokesmen for the bank denied that it had taken any deposits from either Assad or any other member of the “Syrian leadership.” A Syrian state-controlled newspaper disagreed; in 2011 it reported that the Syrian Central Bank did indeed have accounts with VTB, as well as Gazprombank—the financial arm of the Russian gas giant—and Vneshekonombank (VEB). Both of these banks are also owned by the Russian government.

Actually, Damascus has been a prominent third party in more recent Londongrad hiccups in the media. Consider the case of Vladimir Lisin, Russia’s second-wealthiest man, with a net worth of $15.9 billion, according to Forbes. Lisin was the vice president of Russia’s Olympic Committee for the 2012 London Games, a role that granted him temporary diplomatic status in Britain. In June 2012, I discovered that a Russian cargo ship called the Professor Katsman, which had already been accused by Western diplomats of running weapons to Assad via Syria’s Russian-maintained port at Tartus, was owned by Lisin through a series of multinational shell companies. As with a lot of Russian businesses, the ownership was concealed in a matryoshka dolls-like series of parents and subsidiaries. The boat was technically registered by a Maltese concern called Rusich 12 Ltd, which was owned by a Cypriot one called Russich-NW Shipholding (PDF), which belonged to North Western Shipping, a Russian entity, which was controlled by Universal Cargo Logistics (UCL) Holding, an international transportation group with corporate addresses in Moscow and Amsterdam. UCL Holding is widely acknowledged as Lisin’s shipping behemoth. Its Amsterdam address, as I noted at the time in the Telegraph, gave sufficient grounds for the Netherlands and other E.U. members-states, which had imposed an arms embargo on Syria, to investigate whether or not the Katsman had violated European law. Moreover, if the British government itself investigated this ship and found evidence that it had been shipping weapons to Syria, then what might be doable to any assets or properties owned by Lisin in the UK, such as his 3,300-acre Aberuchill Castle estate in Perthshire, Scotland?

After my story was published, and a more expansive follow-up appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, UCL Holdings issued a press release stating: “At the moment we don’t have any prove [sic] that Profesor [sic] Katsman had delivered to Syria anything of a military nature that can be used against civilians.” This was itself a curious way of phrasing the matter because the Russian Foreign Ministry back in 2012 liked to say that hardware such as refurbished attack helicopters or spare parts for them wasn’t being used against civilians in Syria (even though it plainly was); it was “defensive” in nature. Also, Lisin threatened to sue the Telegraph if it pursued this line of inquiry further, according to another journalist at the newspaper. As for Malta, the Netherlands, Cyprus and Britain, not a peep was heard about the Katsman’s cargo or its wealthy, Olympic-loving owner. Nor did the Syrian opposition get any joy when it took up the matter itself.

In some cases, the journey of dubious rubles through, past or straight into Blighty involves senior Russian officials who, no matter what accusations may be leveled against them with however much eyebrow-raising evidence, always remain senior Russian officials.

Igor Shuvalov is the first deputy prime minister in Dmitry Medvedev’s cabinet and Putin’s longtime economic consigliere. He’s also the Kremlin’s “sherpa” to three important international bodies: the World Trade Organization, which Russia joined over a year ago after much U.S. string-pulling on its behalf; the Davos World Economic Forum, where the oligarchs turn up each year; and the G8, from which the U.S., along with every other G7 nation, has now pulled its attendance at the forthcoming summit in protest of Moscow’s invasion of Crimea. Shuvalov won acclaim at home and abroad for being the man to lure the 2018 World Cup to Russia. As you might expect, then, he’s done very nicely for himself, but he’s had help.

In 2004, Alisher Usmanov had an idea. The Uzbek-born industrialist who would later become a percipient investor in Facebook, Groupon and Twitter, and as well as a major shareholder in Britain’s Arsenal Football Club, had decided to buy a 13 percent equity interest in an erstwhile Anglo-Dutch steel manufacturer called Corus Group, which was then a whisper away from bankruptcy. (Today, Corus Group has become Tata Steel, having been acquired by the Indian conglomerate; it’s also the second largest steel manufacturer in all of Europe.) To purchase this equity interest, Usmanov needed $319 million. And so the financing for this transaction, which drew the attention of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission at the time, came by way of a Bahamas-registered company called Sevenkey Limited. The owner of that entity was one Olga Shuvalova, Igor Shuvalov’s stay-at-home wife and fellow former law school classmate. Olga’s declared income was $12 million in 2008, $20 million in 2009, and $10 million in 2010.

As Barron’s reported in 2011, the entirety of the $49.5 million was deposited in a Sevenkey bank account just weeks before the money was then transferred to Gallagher Holdings, a company registered in Cyprus, through which Usmanov bought up his Corus stake. The transfer of the money was arranged, Barron’s said, by a man called Eugene Shvidler, another billionaire oligarch who has both Russian and American citizenship.

Shvidler has since admitted in a separate British High Court  case that for the last 10 years he has managed all of the business interests of his dear friend Roman Abramovich, still another lucky enlistee in the nine-figure fortune club. Abramovich is today the ninth richest man in Russia, with a net worth of $12.1 billion, according to Forbes. Having formerly been successful in keeping head below the parapet or out of the spotlight, Abramovich has in the last decade become a conspicuous fixture in the tabloid press because of his ownership of the revered Chelsea Football Club in west London, the purchase of which in 2003 was rumored to have been personally sanctioned by Putin himself, as was Abramovich’s divorce from his second wife, a former Aeroflot stewardess, in 2007. So close are Abramovich and Shvidler that the latter is sometimes referred to as former’s “representative on earth;” so intimate are they that, in 2006, Abramovich “gifted” to Shvidler Le Grand Bleu, a luxury yacht that came with its speedboat, helicopter and indoor aquarium. Together, they also form the majority ownership of Evraz, a Britain-based steel and mining company that is traded on the FTSE 100 Index of the London Stock Exchange and employs 100,000 people worldwide.

But what’s interesting about the “loan” made by Olga Shuvalova’s Sevenkey Limited to Gallagher Holdings—apart from the obvious question of where the unemployed wife of Putin’s trusted economic advisor got $49.5 million to lend to anybody—was that the stated level of interest had been set to five percent per annum. And yet, Gallagher ended up reimbursing Sevenkey to the tune of $119 million from 2005 to 2007: a rate of return of more than 40 percent. In other words, Olga Shuvalova, and by extension her public servant husband, more than doubled their money in the space of three years.

What else was noteworthy about this deal?

Recall that Usmanov said he couldn’t raise money from banks to finance his purchase of 13 percent of Corus’s equity. Well, according to the 2006 audit of Gallagher Holdings, he could and did. In fact, that audit disclosed nothing about a $49.5 million loan coming from Sevenkey, but plenty about other loans Usmanov managed to secure, at the more gentlemanly rate of nine percent annual interest, to help finance his investment.

Sevenkey has altered its ownership structures over the years, but not its ultimate legal beneficiary who was and remained, as of 2011, Olga Shuvalova. Its current sole shareholder is a company called Severin Enterprises, which is registered in the British Virgin Islands, a dependent territory of the UK. Meanwhile,  Sevenkey’s corporate secretary is a man called Alastair Tulloch, a London-based attorney; its director is another Brit called Sean Hogan. When last I looked up Hogan on the UK Companies House website, I discovered that he has been a nominee for 782 companies registered in the Britain.

Prior to 2008, Sevenkey paid no profits to its owners; it was used to manage the assets of the Shuvalov family, which include or once included a Jaguar, a few Mercedes, two limos, apartments in Russia, Austria and London, and “District 4”—a giant villa once frequented by R&R-seeking members of the Soviet Politburo. Abramovich is a neighbor.

After news of the Shuvalov affair broke in the international financial press, the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation, then closed it, claiming it had found no evidence of any illegality or untoward behavior in this cozy arrangement between and amongst two prominent oligarchs and the Kremlin’s influential financial advisor. Moreover, the Office declared, the Shuvalovs were good and regular Russian taxpayers, having replenished the public coffers even on the money made from the Sevenkey-Gallagher transaction. It apparently mattered not at all that Shuvalov later served, from 2008 to 2009, as head of a state commission on stabilizing the distressed Russian economy, a commission which signed off on the issuance of stimulus subsidies to various private enterprises. One such recipient of $30 billion in state guarantees was Metalloinvest, Russia’s largest iron ore company. Metalloinvest is owned by Alisher Usmanov. In 2013, he was named not only the richest man in Russia by Forbes, but also the richest man in Britain by the TheSunday Times, which reckoned that his net worth currently hovers at around $22 billion.

To make matters even more intriguing (and incestuous) Shuvalov has insisted that he and his wife got the money for the Gallagher loan from dividends earned through a 0.5 percent stock option in Sibneft, an oil company created in the mid-1990s for the purpose of rapid privatization. Brits have grown quite familiar with Sibneft over the last few years. It was featured prominently and repeatedly in court room epic drama of “Berezovsky v Abramovich,” the most expensive civil litigation in British history, initiated by Boris Berezovsky, the now-deceased Russian oligarch who did more than any other person to facilitate Putin’s ascent to the presidency in 2000, then squandered his enormous wealth trying to unmake that disastrous decision.  Berezovsky had claimed that, because he’d fallen afoul of Putin in the early aughts and been driven from Russia, he’d been forced to sell his stake in Sibneft for much lower than what it had been worth at the time, and so Abramovich owed him $5 billion in damages. Still another High Court judge found otherwise and ruled in defendant Abramovich’s favor, lambasting Berezovsky as an “unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness,” not long after which the plaintiff committed suicide by hanging himself in his own bathroom in Surrey— at least according to the official coroner’s report, which many Russians in both London and Moscow are loath to believe. Meanwhile, Lord Sumption, Abramovich’s defense barrister, is said to have cleared a cool $5 million in legal fees and now has a seat on the British Supreme Court. It was in “Berezovsky v Abramovich” that Shvidler helpfully testified to managing all of Abramovich’s business affairs for the last decade.

But the notion that Shuvalov made a killing via a mystery stock option for a now vanished Russian oil company sounded fishy to many. “What’s the reason for giving an option to Shuvalov in that period of time when he was not an official [of Sibneft]?,” Navalny wrote in 2011, adding that any such stock option would have emerged in later corporate due diligence performed on the company for its merger in 1998 with Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s subsequently confiscated oil giant. (Full disclosure: I work for the Institute of Modern Russia, a New York-based think tank, the president of which is Pavel Khodorkovsky, Mikhail’s son.)

Another Russian opposition figure, Natalia Pelevina, raised the Corus investment with both Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, citing Usmanov and Abramovich’s residency in the UK, and with the F.B.I, citing Shvidler’s American citizenship. Pelevina told me that neither agency has paid much attention to the case, although others clearly have done. She has received death threats in Moscow for kicking up a fuss about this affair. A little over a year ago, she said that she’d been passed messages from anonymous parties through her own lawyer informing her: “When we do you, it won’t be clean like [Anna] Politkovskaya. It’ll be a drunkard smashing your head in with a cinder block.” (I’ve obtained Pelevina’s permission to relay this threat publicly.)

Finally, even those with the ear of the British monarchy have benefited from life in Londongrad. Earlier I mentioned that Abramovich and Shvidler’s largest known investment in Britain is Evraz, the London Stock Exchange-traded steel and mining enterprise.  A “senior, independent non-executive” member of Evraz’s board of directors and a member of its Audit Committee is Sir Michael Peat, who was formerly Keeper of the Privy Purse—i.e. Queen Elizabeth’s treasurer—and the principal private secretary to Prince Charles. Sir Michael’s annual compensation for services rendered to Evraz is £250,000 or $418,000, which isn’t bad for a little independent, non-executive corporate advisement and accountancy. But there appear to be other perks to enjoying a close relationship with two of Russia’s most recognizable oligarchs.

On January 3, 2012, Shvidler was appointed (PDF) to the board of MC Peat & Co LLP, a boutique investment firm established by Sir Michael’s son, Charlie Peat, in order to develop “distribution contracts in Russia, the CIS and the Middle East,” as the company’s website has it. Two days later, on January 5, 2012, MC Peat & Co LLP took out a loan in the amount of £2.73 million, or $4.5 million. The issuer of the loan was an Aruba-based company known as Horizon Investments AVV, which, according to the Department of Civil Aviation in Aruba, formerly owned an EC-135 model Eurocopter. The base of operations for that aircraft, as of 2004, was listed as “United Kingdom—Embarked on the Motor Yacht ‘Le Grand Bleu.’” That yacht, as you may recall, was given as a present by Abramovich to Shvidler in 2006.

Charlie Peat denied to me by email that his investment house was lent any money from Roman Abramovich. However, when I asked if the £2.73 million loan for Charlie’s investment firm might have been provided by Abramovich’s representative on earth, I was referred to Shvidler’s press office. (That office never responded to my inquiries.)

Evraz’s 2011 annual report did disclose that its board of directors considered “an arm’s length business arrangement between one of the non-independent directors and the son of Sir Michael Peat…and satisfied itself that his arrangement has no impact on Sir Michael Peat’s independence.”   “Arm’s length” is a nice way of putting it, although Sir Michael and Shvidler may have recently found they needed still more length. In May 2013, Shvidler quit the board of MC Peat & Co LLP. The lending company of the £2.73 million loan is also no longer listed as a helicopter-owning shell in Aruba.

***

As a result of Russia’s invasion of Crimea, the Russian economy has taken a beating. The Russian Trading System indexed dropped 12 percent on Monday, though seems to have recovered somewhat over the last two days. Gazprom’s stock has sunk more than 18 percent since February 18; VTB’s stock is down 20 percent since the Ukraine crisis hit. With news today that Crimea’s parliament, led by a gangster known as “Goblin,” has just voted to join the Russian Federation, the market in Moscow dipped still further. The ruble, says VTB Capital, is as much as 8.5 percent behind the emerging market average index, with Ukraine accounting for 2.0-3.0 percentage points of that shortfall. Anders Aslund says that “[t]he Russian economy was earlier set to stagnate, but now it is likely to contract.”

Yet Putin is unfazed by all this gloom and doom. In the case of emergency, he cuts a cheque. His initial bribe to Viktor Yanukovych—naturally couched as a loan—was a unilateral $15 billion, to be disbursed in installments, for repudiating a modest Association Agreement with the E.U. in favor of Ukraine’s enlistment in Russia’s neo-Soviet protectionist Customs Union. Now, in order to compete with that sum, the U.S. has had to offer a post-Yanukovych government $1 billion in loan guarantees (more that it offered all the post-Arab Spring countries combined), while the E.U. has just floated $15 billion in aid over the next two years, broken up into loans, credits, and grants. Nevertheless, not a single E.U. country has announced sanctions or trade restrictions against Moscow or any of the Kremlin elite dispatched abroad to do Moscow’s bidding. Even the Czech Republic, which was formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, has ruled out such a contingency.

Will Putin really lose? His long-game (assuming he hasn’t gone mad, as Angela Merkel believes) has been twofold: wait for Ukraine’s economy to implode and then come rushing to the rescue, secure in the knowledge that no European power now crying foul over his actions will have the courage eject Russian lucre from its shores. In order for this gambit to work, he had to count on Britain, Russia’s foremost enemy apart from the United States during the Cold War which had lately transformed into a leading recipient of Russian foreign direct investment, to be first among equals in financial acquiescence. Britain has behaved exactly as Putin expected.