money. Importantly, Intesa’s participation gave the Rosneft sale the appearance of booking billions of dollars in non-Russian capital, which helped balance the state budget and disguise the source of any cash that transacted. Since the consortium shareholders may have used their purchased Rosneft shares as collateral for loans, those shares could revert to the lenders in the event of default. And the ultimate lender could be Rosneft if it indemnified the bank loans, said Pirrong. And as billions of dollars sloshed back and forth, well-positioned brokers could essentially print money for themselves. Who got a fee? The question is worth asking because it has not been answered. In early 2017, Amos Hochstein, the former oil industry lobbyist who Obama had charged with coordinating sanctions enforcement actions with the departments of State and Treasury, commented to the press on the secretive structure of the Rosneft deal, Peter Byrne Peter Byrne’s reporting has been recognized by Investigative Reporters & Editors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Professional Journalists. His books on strange physics, medical fraud, and political corruption are critically acclaimed. Based in Northern California, his work can be found at www.peterbyrne.info .
“Clearly this is not what we hoped for when we instituted sanctions.” He promised to get to the bottom of it. One of Trump’s first actions in office was to replace Hochstein with Mary Burce Warlick, a career foreign service officer with experience in Russian energy privatization plays.
And as billions of dollars sloshed back and forth, well-positioned brokers could essentially print money for themselves.
Last June, this reporter filed an “urgent” public record request with OFAC to find out what the enforcement agency knows about Rosneft’s deal with Glencore. OFAC’s director John E. Smith denied expediting the request, even though faster processing is required when the information is of such importance that there is “an urgency to inform the public.” Short of being forced to comply with a court order, OFAC will take several years to release the requested data at its usual gastropodic pace. ExxonMobil and Rosneft are publicly traded corporations. Allowing businesses to avoid regulatory oversight and taxation by making secretive offshore deals is a recipe for cooking up conflicts of interest, money laundering, and bribery. The sanctions are bound to keep creating odd bedfellows, and in the ensuing chaos caused by the sanctions... the brokers can win... bigly . Just ask Carter Page.
80 March 2018
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