Расшифровка «Досье Трампа»: да, состоялась сделка по приватизации «Роснефти»
Originally posted by aillarionov at Расшифровка «Досье Трампа»: да, состоялась сделка по приватизации «Роснефти»
Trump Russia Dossier Decoded: Yes, There Really Was A Massive Oil Deal
Grant Stern Mar 21
Circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that President Donald J. Trump and his campaign associates brokered a massive oil privatization deal, where his Organization facilitated a global financial transaction to sell Russian Oil stock to its Syrian War adversary, the Emirate of Qatar. The Trump Russia Dossier describes a massive privatization deal to deliver a chunk of the state-owned Rosneft Oil company to Qatar and also a secret buyer in the Cayman Islands. Qatar has been a tenant at Trump Tower since 2008, though recent reports indicate. they may have recently vacated their state-run airlines’ corporate campus.
Donald Trump and Russia conducted the transaction in three phases; Phase 1 began in early 2016 with a meeting of the minds at The Mayflower Hotel to start the deal and a due diligence period, Phase 2 began just before the Republican National Convention and continued through Election Day, and Phase 3 happened after Trump’s shocking win and concluding just days before Buzzfeed published the bombshell dossier describing the deal.
The end result allowed Russia to trade stolen emails to help to Donald Trump’s election campaign (as well as that of many Republican Congressmen), in exchange for help circumventing American sanctions to transact the sale of Rosneft, which Putin desperately needed to finance his budget deficit.
The Rosneft transaction also purportedly sent a $500 million dollar brokerage fee to Carter Page, or perhaps the Trump Organization.
For the first time here, we’ve broken down the entire Rosneft privatization transaction and US election, by using open source media stories to create a comprehensive timeline of events over three phases in a single graphic. This is the transaction Ranking House Intel Committee Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) described when kicked off Congress’ Russia hearings discussing Rosneft’s privatization deal, and the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Putin’s allies.
The most deal significant milestone was the “meeting of the minds” which occurred last April 27th at the Center for National Interest gathering in Washington, D.C. Four Ambassadors convened at The Mayflower Hotel, who represent the three countries definitely involved in the Rosneft privatization deal: Italy, Russia, Singapore, and also the Philippines. They all attended Donald Trump’s foreign policy campaign speech. Key players from every country involved were in that one room, for one night, one time only, and even now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was there.
The former Alabama Senator only admitted that he had two meetings with the Russian Ambassador, publicly excusing his own lies maintaining that contacts both weren’t campaigning discussions, even though one meeting was at the RNC in Cleveland. The April contact makes a third undisclosed meeting by Sessions with Ambassador Kislyak. Former US Ambassador Richard Burt is now a Russian lobbyist, and is thought to have written the speech that night, and serves on the Center’s Board of Directors.
After the-Republican candidate Donald Trump locked down the GOP nomination in early May against Ted Cruz, the plan described in Steele’s dossier leapt into action. From the look of events, starting in July, a massive international oil privatization transaction began, and it was concluded in early January, right around the time the Electoral College certified Donald Trump as America’s 45th President.
The April 27th campaign speech at CNFI effectively concluded the due diligence or first phase of the Dossier’s privatization transaction and began a ‘quiet period’ before the pace of events quickened.
The second phase of the transaction began just before the Republican Convention and ran through election day. The third phase happened after election day, and before the January 10th disclosure of the Steele Dossier, itself just a few short days after the Rosneft privatization sale finished.
This week, the Democratic Coalition just released a 40-page report which factually confirms more than a dozen major allegations of the Trump Russia Dossier published by Buzzfeed on January 10th. Our exhaustive research breaks down the findings of the Dossier chronologically and highlights the ties between Trump and the buyer of Russia’s oil company shares. Oil-rich Gulf Arab nation of Qatar was the end buyer of a massive stake in the Russian, state-run oil company Rosneft’s privatization deal.
The new Democratic Coalition report (below) reveals that Trump has hosted a Qatari state-run business owned by the QIA - the buyer of Rosneft shares in this transaction - located in the Manhattan Trump Tower for many years, as well as numerous factual confirmations of the dossier’s findings.
Democratic Coalition Senior Advisor Scott Dworkin is set to advise a bipartisan group of Congress people this week on his factual findings, which back up the information contained in the Dossier that implicate President Trump in a foreign affair with Vladimir Putin. He tells us this is his main advice:
“The Dossier and its contents are mostly real.”
The President’s son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador during the Transition period, with disgraced General Michael Flynn. “Carter Page met with Rosneft in December to assist with the deal, and he’s on the record admitting it but claims he didn’t meet Igor Sechin,” said Dworkin incredulously. “Really? It must have been a webcast with an intermediary. Everything in the Dossier adds up, and it still leaves more questions than answers.”
A mighty brokerage fee to one of the Trump campaign advisors, Moscow-based investment banker Carter Page, is highlighted in the former MI-6 operative’s report. Theoretically, the former Merrill Lynch investment banker, Page, may have only been the “bag man” or go-between and someone else is the recipient of the cash premium in the dossier. Five hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and conceivably, many members of the Trump Organization, or family, could be involved in a deal of that scope.
What is most unusual about the sale is that Qatar is on the opposite sides of the Syrian war from Russia. Not only that but in 2004 Russian agents openly assassinated a top Chechen rebel in Doha, the capital of Qatar, by bombing his SUV. However, friendship between Donald Trump and the Qatari state-run airline who paid him anywhere from $19,000-100,000 a month in rent since 2008, must run deep.
Rosneft began taking steps towards a sale in early 2016, which accelerated right around the time of the Republican National Convention. Russia’s state oil companies both declared that they would not privatize in 2016, right after Trump’s feud with a gold star family whose patriarch Khizr Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Putin announced the sale after new management changed the Trump campaign’s momentum in an exclusive Bloomberg interview in early September, which set the price at $11 billion dollars.
Reuters: Rosneft stake Ownership Chart
Six countries are known to have participated in the massive privatization deal of Russia’s jewel, its state-run oil company, which left the end ownership of the stake impenetrable, and a purchase price of roughly $10.7 billion dollars, which Reuters reported about in January as: “How Russia sold its oil jewel: without saying who bought it.”
In early October, once Russia knew about their damaging cache of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta’s emails, they re-ignited the privatization sales. Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin had already spent $5 billion dollars to buy out a foreign stake in Bashneft, another massive Russian oil partnership, whose oligarch was compromised, and charged (as Putin often does) with criminal offenses. The Bashneft deal closed right before the damaging Access Hollywood political scandal, which would’ve swamped a presidential campaign without Trump’s collusive assistance from Putin’s massive propaganda machine. After the Access Hollywood tape releases had seemed to doom Trump’s campaign, Putin even announced that the companies would buy their own shares if they had to - there was a serious budget hole to fill.
Nineteen and a half percent of Rosneft’s stock was agreed to be transferred on December 7th, before the board was informed of the transaction’s terms only after it took place. The “matryoshka” (named after the famous nesting dolls) or complex deal structure is most likely designed to avoid American sanctions imposed over the Ukraine invasion against Rosneft, its CEO Igor Sechin and its parent company Gazprom.
The highlighted yellow company in the below organization chart is a total mystery and based in the Cayman Islands law firm Walkers. This is the kind of financial engineering it took for the Italian bank Intesa, to lend money to the buyers of the Rosneft stake.
The story continues below:
Original Graphic By Grant Stern based upon Reuters report (on right)
Anonymous blogger The Trump Watchdog indicates that the Walkers law firm is linked to Trump economic advisor Steven Schwartzman, a co-founder of the Wall Street giant Blackstone, because they own the Intertrust Group, who provided the Singapore holding company (item 17.) The shelf company owned by Intertrust Group was renamed QHG Holdings - which was discovered after internet sleuths tracked down a scrivener’s error - and which probably links US interests to the international transaction. Coincidentally, the other co-founder of Blackstone Pete Peterson also happens to be on the Board of Directors for the Center for National Interest who booked The Mayflower Hotel at the last moment for the April 27th meeting with the four ambassadors, Trump, and Sessions.
Disgraced former Reagan National Security Advisor “Bud” McFarlane also attended The Mayflower Hotel speech on April 27th - in an especially ironic twist, where he attended another speech nearly 30 years earlier by Ronald Reagan, which he attended six short months before another international scandal erupted named Iran-Contra. Reagan’s speech that night demanded House Democrats to fund the Contra’s guerrilla war in Nicaragua, and like Trump’s speech proposing an unusual Russian “peace” deal, 30-years ago that Republican President described a foreign policy wish list, which eventually was revealed to have illegally transpired.
In November, despite Bud McFarlane’s public criticism in April, the Trump Transition team included the ex-felon’s compliments of Fox TV personality KT McFarland’s appointment as a Deputy NSA in their official press release. Anyone who knows the Trump Administration, knows that they’re hypersensitive to criticism, yet oddly, this Trump critic was allowed to make a national security appointment so signficant that qualified applicants refused the job after Flynn’s dismissal, just to avoid KT McFarland being on their staff.
Then, Bud McFarlane mysteriously re-appeared at Trump Tower on December 5th, just two days before the Rosneft deal was announced, which didn’t make news when Henry Kissinger’s visit - he’s the Chairman Emeritus of the Center for National Interest - drew major headlines that day in Manhattan.
The end game for Russia was to funnel at least $5 billion dollars of new capital into state coffers to staunch some of the red ink expected to plague Putin’s budgets going into his 2018 elections, and through at least 2020 according to economists; and to do the deal while tiptoeing past American financial sanctions.
That’s where the cash-rich Gulf Arab nation stepped in to make a deal. The Qatari sovereign wealth fund (QIA) is the known buyer of 50% of these shares of Rosneft. Yet still, nobody knows where well over $2 billion dollars of equity for the purchase came from, as Reuters reports: "Although Qatar has never publicly confirmed how much it has contributed to the deal or the size of the stake that it bought, Glencore and Rosneft say it contributed 2.5 billion euros. Along with the 300 million from Glencore and the 5.2 billion loaned by Intesa [an Italian bank], that still leaves a shortfall of 2.2 billion euros."
The QIA is coincidentally also the largest shareholder in the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore, who executed the purchase with a minimal direct investment, and used the “Singapore vehicle” or holding company to hold their Rosneft share. Glencore guaranteed the Italian bank Intesa’s loan for only 1/3rd of its value.
Donald Trump has had business ties to Qatar’s government for years, according to a Jan. 10th report in Time: "Trump has stakes in four companies that appear to be tied in business in the desert nation. The country’s state-owned carrier, Qatar Airways, has leased an office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower since 2008. Ivanka Trump told Hotelier Middle East in 2015 that the Trump Hotel Collection was eyeing opportunities in Qatar."
It’s unclear when or if Qatari Airlines left Trump Tower, or when their lease actually expires, but a Jan. 28th story in Vox says that their operations have departed the President’s home building in New York.
What is clear is that Qatari Airlines’ CEO has publicly called Donald Trump a “good friend” and it is one of the countries excluded from the Muslim Ban, which coincidentally, does business with the President.
Recently, CEOs of American airliners met with Trump recently to decry government subsidized competition from Qatar and other foreign state-run carriers, which is an obvious conflict for President Trump.
If that wasn’t enough conflicted interest, Trump Organization announced a plan to build or license their brand in Qatar in 2015, but there are no further reports to substantiate the move. The CEO of Qatari Airlines says that he was one of the first people to give congratulations after election day: "Qatar Airways’ Group Chief Executive Akbar al-Baker, who voiced support for Trump even after his comments about Muslims, welcomed his victory. “Our relationship goes way back, and I was one of the first to commend Donald on his well-deserved new leadership position,” he said in a statement to Reuters.
Qatari Airlines rented pricey office space at President Trump’s tower for many years. If their lease continues today, it would be a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prevents federal employees and the executive from accepting any foreign payments whatsoever.
Qatar’s complete and total involvement in the Rosneft deal is undeniable. The small Emirate that just publicly participated in the purchase of Russia’s state-run oil and gas giant - happens to be extremely close to Donald Trump.
It’s unknown if the Philippines had any direct or indirect involvement in the Rosneft transaction, but their President Duarte is a staunch Trump supporter, who assigned one of the President’s business partners as a trade envoy. The island nation took the unusual step of hosting Russian naval ships in early January, which is extremely out of the ordinary for the longtime US ally and former colony.
Why Russia Needed The Money
At the heart of the Dossier’s disclosures is the Russian goal of ending economic sanctions, some of which specifically target Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who was Putin’s top deputy in government service just a few short years ago, in a country where the lines between business and government can be blurry.
President Obama’s 2014 sanctions have crippled the Russian economy when compounded with low global oil prices. That caused a massive budget gap last year, which led Putin to privatize assets to pay current costs for the Russian government. After President Obama leveled retaliatory sanctions in December 2016 and expelled diplomats in late December for meddling in our election, Vladimir Putin announced and then stunningly reserved retaliation.
Last month, disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn was fired as NSA, apparently just for discussing Russian sanctions with the Russian Ambassador in late December. At the time, Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats and spies sparked a highly unusual public “bromance” between the President-elect and the dictator, which sparked speculation about a quid pro quo when Trump tweeted a love letter to the Russian dictator. Strategically, Russia is desperate to shake the larger economic sanctions, but America’s Congress is seeking more, not less economic retaliation against Putin’s regime.
Shortly after taking office, President Trump did indeed relax sanctions against Russia’s lead spy agency, the FSB, but most observers said was a minor concession. Into that void, Trump’s lawyer and a group of his Ukrainian family connections and lawmakers, and the notorious Felix Sater appeared with a “peace plan” that would’ve accomplished the end of sanctions. One of the ‘peacemakers,’ a Ukrainian relative of Trump’s trusted lawyer Michael Cohen, has already perished under mysterious circumstances since then.
If America lifts sanctions against the Putin regime, then the value of Russia’s public oil companies stands to skyrocket. Already, Donald Trump’s presence has sparked a market rally on Moscow’s MICEX stock exchange.
US Media Is Connecting The Dots On Steele’s Dossier
Open source journalism confirms some of the more important political elements of the Trump Russia Dossier. My original report two weeks ago revealed a major point of affirmation in CNN’s interview with former Trump campaign associate, J.D. Gordon, whose remarks confirmed a serious political allegation in the Trump Russia Dossier.
Then, Rachel Maddow echoed the essence of our report on MSNBC a few days later and added that Politico linked a participant in the RNC Ukraine policy changes to one of then-Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort’s associates, who is himself a foreign national being investigated by the FBI.
Wikileaks involvement to assist Russia in Trump’s campaign is a cornerstone of the dossier’s claims; it was seen as essential for Putin and Russia to maintain plausible deniability for political interference.
Sure enough, new factual data shows that the anti-secrecy organization switched to their web hosting to use a Russian DNS server right before releasing the most damaging email material during last year’s elections.
That means Vladimir Putin certainly has knowledge of the physical location of Wikileaks’ servers and allows their messages to be broadcast using Russian soil. Trump’s former top advisor Roger Stone admitted to communicating with Russian hackers in August 2016, during the election about releases of information through Wikileaks.
This month, Gen. Flynn revealed that he was secretly an unregistered Turkish foreign agent ‘volunteering’ his time during the Trump campaign, and Congress revealed proof this week, which he was simultaneously on the payroll of Russian state-sponsored RT “News” and the Kaspersky security firm, who is thought to have been involved in the election hacks.
One must imagine that Flynn’s role as a secret, unregistered foreign agent of two nations (in other words, he’s a SPY) is one of the main targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation. “When the dossier became public it generated more questions than answers,” says Scott Dworkin late at night via chat. “Over the last several months we’ve corroborated the dossier with the facts. The deeper we dig, the more truth we find in it. Just look at the author - Christopher Steele - who is a former MI-6 agent who’s saved more lives than Trump ever has.”
“He’s the real person people imagine James Bond to be.”
The Trump Russia Dossier describes the Rosneft privatization deal almost exactly, and Putin’s resulting purge of Russian allies and ex-officials looks like the kind of deadly cover up a dictator would apply, to erase his friends who knew about the deal.
Scott Dworkin says to expect full confirmation of the report within a week from official sources, or when Steele testifies in front of Congress in person or via remote link. “A majority of the dossier and its contents are factual,” says the intrepid investigator Dworkin, who began making #TrumpLeaks posts in October. Now, when he tweets @funder 3 million people per day see and share his research. “The dossier is more real than anything Trump’s ever said.”
“A majority of it is factual and news reports over time have proven some of those facts.”
This weekend, the Republican Chair of the House Intel Committee said that only one person is being investigated for treason in the White House by the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence division. There’s no way a deal of this magnitude would completely envelop the Trump Campaign, its manager, its outside affiliates and inside agents so thoroughly, without the principal or head of a group knowing that something was happening.
Any reasonable person would have to conclude that Donald Trump is the FBI’s target, based upon the bevy of circumstantial evidence tying RNC campaign events to Russian oil, economic sanctions, and the simmering conflict in Ukraine.
Nearly three decades ago, Trump admitted on national television to participating in a straw-man transaction with the Sultan of Brunei and infamous Iran-Contra middleman Adnan Khashoggi, through which he acquired a large yacht, so we’ve got proof that the Trump Organization has engaged these kinds of multi-national transactions in the Middle East.
The most important commodity traded in the oil business or politics is money. The privatization deal described in Christopher Steele’s dossier has played out on the pages of Bloomberg and Reuters for a year - shows that there was a whole lot of money in brokering oil deals for Donald Trump’s associates, and a rapid profit by Qatar if sanctions are released this year.
The only question that’s not even pondered in these many public reports, and which must be a central focus of the American intelligence community’s investigations:
Where is the $500 million dollar brokerage fee today?
Where did the other $2 billion dollars come from?
What is Donald Trump’s true role in the deal?
Here’s the complete Democratic Coalition report:
Democratic Coalition Report On Trump Russia Dossier by Grant Stern on Scribd
Here’s an infographic which describes many of the key players in the Trump Russian Dossier:
https://medium.com/@grantstern/trump-russia-dossier-decoded-yes-there-really-was-a-massive-oil-deal-e33370349b67#.2zz06ahfv
Trump Russia Dossier Decoded: Yes, There Really Was A Massive Oil Deal
Grant Stern Mar 21
Circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that President Donald J. Trump and his campaign associates brokered a massive oil privatization deal, where his Organization facilitated a global financial transaction to sell Russian Oil stock to its Syrian War adversary, the Emirate of Qatar. The Trump Russia Dossier describes a massive privatization deal to deliver a chunk of the state-owned Rosneft Oil company to Qatar and also a secret buyer in the Cayman Islands. Qatar has been a tenant at Trump Tower since 2008, though recent reports indicate. they may have recently vacated their state-run airlines’ corporate campus.
Donald Trump and Russia conducted the transaction in three phases; Phase 1 began in early 2016 with a meeting of the minds at The Mayflower Hotel to start the deal and a due diligence period, Phase 2 began just before the Republican National Convention and continued through Election Day, and Phase 3 happened after Trump’s shocking win and concluding just days before Buzzfeed published the bombshell dossier describing the deal.
The end result allowed Russia to trade stolen emails to help to Donald Trump’s election campaign (as well as that of many Republican Congressmen), in exchange for help circumventing American sanctions to transact the sale of Rosneft, which Putin desperately needed to finance his budget deficit.
The Rosneft transaction also purportedly sent a $500 million dollar brokerage fee to Carter Page, or perhaps the Trump Organization.
For the first time here, we’ve broken down the entire Rosneft privatization transaction and US election, by using open source media stories to create a comprehensive timeline of events over three phases in a single graphic. This is the transaction Ranking House Intel Committee Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) described when kicked off Congress’ Russia hearings discussing Rosneft’s privatization deal, and the many contacts between the Trump campaign and Putin’s allies.
The most deal significant milestone was the “meeting of the minds” which occurred last April 27th at the Center for National Interest gathering in Washington, D.C. Four Ambassadors convened at The Mayflower Hotel, who represent the three countries definitely involved in the Rosneft privatization deal: Italy, Russia, Singapore, and also the Philippines. They all attended Donald Trump’s foreign policy campaign speech. Key players from every country involved were in that one room, for one night, one time only, and even now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was there.
The former Alabama Senator only admitted that he had two meetings with the Russian Ambassador, publicly excusing his own lies maintaining that contacts both weren’t campaigning discussions, even though one meeting was at the RNC in Cleveland. The April contact makes a third undisclosed meeting by Sessions with Ambassador Kislyak. Former US Ambassador Richard Burt is now a Russian lobbyist, and is thought to have written the speech that night, and serves on the Center’s Board of Directors.
After the-Republican candidate Donald Trump locked down the GOP nomination in early May against Ted Cruz, the plan described in Steele’s dossier leapt into action. From the look of events, starting in July, a massive international oil privatization transaction began, and it was concluded in early January, right around the time the Electoral College certified Donald Trump as America’s 45th President.
The April 27th campaign speech at CNFI effectively concluded the due diligence or first phase of the Dossier’s privatization transaction and began a ‘quiet period’ before the pace of events quickened.
The second phase of the transaction began just before the Republican Convention and ran through election day. The third phase happened after election day, and before the January 10th disclosure of the Steele Dossier, itself just a few short days after the Rosneft privatization sale finished.
This week, the Democratic Coalition just released a 40-page report which factually confirms more than a dozen major allegations of the Trump Russia Dossier published by Buzzfeed on January 10th. Our exhaustive research breaks down the findings of the Dossier chronologically and highlights the ties between Trump and the buyer of Russia’s oil company shares. Oil-rich Gulf Arab nation of Qatar was the end buyer of a massive stake in the Russian, state-run oil company Rosneft’s privatization deal.
The new Democratic Coalition report (below) reveals that Trump has hosted a Qatari state-run business owned by the QIA - the buyer of Rosneft shares in this transaction - located in the Manhattan Trump Tower for many years, as well as numerous factual confirmations of the dossier’s findings.
Democratic Coalition Senior Advisor Scott Dworkin is set to advise a bipartisan group of Congress people this week on his factual findings, which back up the information contained in the Dossier that implicate President Trump in a foreign affair with Vladimir Putin. He tells us this is his main advice:
“The Dossier and its contents are mostly real.”
The President’s son-in-law and White House advisor Jared Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador during the Transition period, with disgraced General Michael Flynn. “Carter Page met with Rosneft in December to assist with the deal, and he’s on the record admitting it but claims he didn’t meet Igor Sechin,” said Dworkin incredulously. “Really? It must have been a webcast with an intermediary. Everything in the Dossier adds up, and it still leaves more questions than answers.”
A mighty brokerage fee to one of the Trump campaign advisors, Moscow-based investment banker Carter Page, is highlighted in the former MI-6 operative’s report. Theoretically, the former Merrill Lynch investment banker, Page, may have only been the “bag man” or go-between and someone else is the recipient of the cash premium in the dossier. Five hundred million dollars is a lot of money, and conceivably, many members of the Trump Organization, or family, could be involved in a deal of that scope.
What is most unusual about the sale is that Qatar is on the opposite sides of the Syrian war from Russia. Not only that but in 2004 Russian agents openly assassinated a top Chechen rebel in Doha, the capital of Qatar, by bombing his SUV. However, friendship between Donald Trump and the Qatari state-run airline who paid him anywhere from $19,000-100,000 a month in rent since 2008, must run deep.
Rosneft began taking steps towards a sale in early 2016, which accelerated right around the time of the Republican National Convention. Russia’s state oil companies both declared that they would not privatize in 2016, right after Trump’s feud with a gold star family whose patriarch Khizr Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Putin announced the sale after new management changed the Trump campaign’s momentum in an exclusive Bloomberg interview in early September, which set the price at $11 billion dollars.
Reuters: Rosneft stake Ownership Chart
Six countries are known to have participated in the massive privatization deal of Russia’s jewel, its state-run oil company, which left the end ownership of the stake impenetrable, and a purchase price of roughly $10.7 billion dollars, which Reuters reported about in January as: “How Russia sold its oil jewel: without saying who bought it.”
In early October, once Russia knew about their damaging cache of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta’s emails, they re-ignited the privatization sales. Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin had already spent $5 billion dollars to buy out a foreign stake in Bashneft, another massive Russian oil partnership, whose oligarch was compromised, and charged (as Putin often does) with criminal offenses. The Bashneft deal closed right before the damaging Access Hollywood political scandal, which would’ve swamped a presidential campaign without Trump’s collusive assistance from Putin’s massive propaganda machine. After the Access Hollywood tape releases had seemed to doom Trump’s campaign, Putin even announced that the companies would buy their own shares if they had to - there was a serious budget hole to fill.
Nineteen and a half percent of Rosneft’s stock was agreed to be transferred on December 7th, before the board was informed of the transaction’s terms only after it took place. The “matryoshka” (named after the famous nesting dolls) or complex deal structure is most likely designed to avoid American sanctions imposed over the Ukraine invasion against Rosneft, its CEO Igor Sechin and its parent company Gazprom.
The highlighted yellow company in the below organization chart is a total mystery and based in the Cayman Islands law firm Walkers. This is the kind of financial engineering it took for the Italian bank Intesa, to lend money to the buyers of the Rosneft stake.
The story continues below:
Original Graphic By Grant Stern based upon Reuters report (on right)
Anonymous blogger The Trump Watchdog indicates that the Walkers law firm is linked to Trump economic advisor Steven Schwartzman, a co-founder of the Wall Street giant Blackstone, because they own the Intertrust Group, who provided the Singapore holding company (item 17.) The shelf company owned by Intertrust Group was renamed QHG Holdings - which was discovered after internet sleuths tracked down a scrivener’s error - and which probably links US interests to the international transaction. Coincidentally, the other co-founder of Blackstone Pete Peterson also happens to be on the Board of Directors for the Center for National Interest who booked The Mayflower Hotel at the last moment for the April 27th meeting with the four ambassadors, Trump, and Sessions.
Disgraced former Reagan National Security Advisor “Bud” McFarlane also attended The Mayflower Hotel speech on April 27th - in an especially ironic twist, where he attended another speech nearly 30 years earlier by Ronald Reagan, which he attended six short months before another international scandal erupted named Iran-Contra. Reagan’s speech that night demanded House Democrats to fund the Contra’s guerrilla war in Nicaragua, and like Trump’s speech proposing an unusual Russian “peace” deal, 30-years ago that Republican President described a foreign policy wish list, which eventually was revealed to have illegally transpired.
In November, despite Bud McFarlane’s public criticism in April, the Trump Transition team included the ex-felon’s compliments of Fox TV personality KT McFarland’s appointment as a Deputy NSA in their official press release. Anyone who knows the Trump Administration, knows that they’re hypersensitive to criticism, yet oddly, this Trump critic was allowed to make a national security appointment so signficant that qualified applicants refused the job after Flynn’s dismissal, just to avoid KT McFarland being on their staff.
Then, Bud McFarlane mysteriously re-appeared at Trump Tower on December 5th, just two days before the Rosneft deal was announced, which didn’t make news when Henry Kissinger’s visit - he’s the Chairman Emeritus of the Center for National Interest - drew major headlines that day in Manhattan.
The end game for Russia was to funnel at least $5 billion dollars of new capital into state coffers to staunch some of the red ink expected to plague Putin’s budgets going into his 2018 elections, and through at least 2020 according to economists; and to do the deal while tiptoeing past American financial sanctions.
That’s where the cash-rich Gulf Arab nation stepped in to make a deal. The Qatari sovereign wealth fund (QIA) is the known buyer of 50% of these shares of Rosneft. Yet still, nobody knows where well over $2 billion dollars of equity for the purchase came from, as Reuters reports: "Although Qatar has never publicly confirmed how much it has contributed to the deal or the size of the stake that it bought, Glencore and Rosneft say it contributed 2.5 billion euros. Along with the 300 million from Glencore and the 5.2 billion loaned by Intesa [an Italian bank], that still leaves a shortfall of 2.2 billion euros."
The QIA is coincidentally also the largest shareholder in the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore, who executed the purchase with a minimal direct investment, and used the “Singapore vehicle” or holding company to hold their Rosneft share. Glencore guaranteed the Italian bank Intesa’s loan for only 1/3rd of its value.
Donald Trump has had business ties to Qatar’s government for years, according to a Jan. 10th report in Time: "Trump has stakes in four companies that appear to be tied in business in the desert nation. The country’s state-owned carrier, Qatar Airways, has leased an office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower since 2008. Ivanka Trump told Hotelier Middle East in 2015 that the Trump Hotel Collection was eyeing opportunities in Qatar."
It’s unclear when or if Qatari Airlines left Trump Tower, or when their lease actually expires, but a Jan. 28th story in Vox says that their operations have departed the President’s home building in New York.
What is clear is that Qatari Airlines’ CEO has publicly called Donald Trump a “good friend” and it is one of the countries excluded from the Muslim Ban, which coincidentally, does business with the President.
Recently, CEOs of American airliners met with Trump recently to decry government subsidized competition from Qatar and other foreign state-run carriers, which is an obvious conflict for President Trump.
If that wasn’t enough conflicted interest, Trump Organization announced a plan to build or license their brand in Qatar in 2015, but there are no further reports to substantiate the move. The CEO of Qatari Airlines says that he was one of the first people to give congratulations after election day: "Qatar Airways’ Group Chief Executive Akbar al-Baker, who voiced support for Trump even after his comments about Muslims, welcomed his victory. “Our relationship goes way back, and I was one of the first to commend Donald on his well-deserved new leadership position,” he said in a statement to Reuters.
Qatari Airlines rented pricey office space at President Trump’s tower for many years. If their lease continues today, it would be a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prevents federal employees and the executive from accepting any foreign payments whatsoever.
Qatar’s complete and total involvement in the Rosneft deal is undeniable. The small Emirate that just publicly participated in the purchase of Russia’s state-run oil and gas giant - happens to be extremely close to Donald Trump.
It’s unknown if the Philippines had any direct or indirect involvement in the Rosneft transaction, but their President Duarte is a staunch Trump supporter, who assigned one of the President’s business partners as a trade envoy. The island nation took the unusual step of hosting Russian naval ships in early January, which is extremely out of the ordinary for the longtime US ally and former colony.
Why Russia Needed The Money
At the heart of the Dossier’s disclosures is the Russian goal of ending economic sanctions, some of which specifically target Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who was Putin’s top deputy in government service just a few short years ago, in a country where the lines between business and government can be blurry.
President Obama’s 2014 sanctions have crippled the Russian economy when compounded with low global oil prices. That caused a massive budget gap last year, which led Putin to privatize assets to pay current costs for the Russian government. After President Obama leveled retaliatory sanctions in December 2016 and expelled diplomats in late December for meddling in our election, Vladimir Putin announced and then stunningly reserved retaliation.
Last month, disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn was fired as NSA, apparently just for discussing Russian sanctions with the Russian Ambassador in late December. At the time, Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats and spies sparked a highly unusual public “bromance” between the President-elect and the dictator, which sparked speculation about a quid pro quo when Trump tweeted a love letter to the Russian dictator. Strategically, Russia is desperate to shake the larger economic sanctions, but America’s Congress is seeking more, not less economic retaliation against Putin’s regime.
Shortly after taking office, President Trump did indeed relax sanctions against Russia’s lead spy agency, the FSB, but most observers said was a minor concession. Into that void, Trump’s lawyer and a group of his Ukrainian family connections and lawmakers, and the notorious Felix Sater appeared with a “peace plan” that would’ve accomplished the end of sanctions. One of the ‘peacemakers,’ a Ukrainian relative of Trump’s trusted lawyer Michael Cohen, has already perished under mysterious circumstances since then.
If America lifts sanctions against the Putin regime, then the value of Russia’s public oil companies stands to skyrocket. Already, Donald Trump’s presence has sparked a market rally on Moscow’s MICEX stock exchange.
US Media Is Connecting The Dots On Steele’s Dossier
Open source journalism confirms some of the more important political elements of the Trump Russia Dossier. My original report two weeks ago revealed a major point of affirmation in CNN’s interview with former Trump campaign associate, J.D. Gordon, whose remarks confirmed a serious political allegation in the Trump Russia Dossier.
Then, Rachel Maddow echoed the essence of our report on MSNBC a few days later and added that Politico linked a participant in the RNC Ukraine policy changes to one of then-Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort’s associates, who is himself a foreign national being investigated by the FBI.
Wikileaks involvement to assist Russia in Trump’s campaign is a cornerstone of the dossier’s claims; it was seen as essential for Putin and Russia to maintain plausible deniability for political interference.
Sure enough, new factual data shows that the anti-secrecy organization switched to their web hosting to use a Russian DNS server right before releasing the most damaging email material during last year’s elections.
That means Vladimir Putin certainly has knowledge of the physical location of Wikileaks’ servers and allows their messages to be broadcast using Russian soil. Trump’s former top advisor Roger Stone admitted to communicating with Russian hackers in August 2016, during the election about releases of information through Wikileaks.
This month, Gen. Flynn revealed that he was secretly an unregistered Turkish foreign agent ‘volunteering’ his time during the Trump campaign, and Congress revealed proof this week, which he was simultaneously on the payroll of Russian state-sponsored RT “News” and the Kaspersky security firm, who is thought to have been involved in the election hacks.
One must imagine that Flynn’s role as a secret, unregistered foreign agent of two nations (in other words, he’s a SPY) is one of the main targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation. “When the dossier became public it generated more questions than answers,” says Scott Dworkin late at night via chat. “Over the last several months we’ve corroborated the dossier with the facts. The deeper we dig, the more truth we find in it. Just look at the author - Christopher Steele - who is a former MI-6 agent who’s saved more lives than Trump ever has.”
“He’s the real person people imagine James Bond to be.”
The Trump Russia Dossier describes the Rosneft privatization deal almost exactly, and Putin’s resulting purge of Russian allies and ex-officials looks like the kind of deadly cover up a dictator would apply, to erase his friends who knew about the deal.
Scott Dworkin says to expect full confirmation of the report within a week from official sources, or when Steele testifies in front of Congress in person or via remote link. “A majority of the dossier and its contents are factual,” says the intrepid investigator Dworkin, who began making #TrumpLeaks posts in October. Now, when he tweets @funder 3 million people per day see and share his research. “The dossier is more real than anything Trump’s ever said.”
“A majority of it is factual and news reports over time have proven some of those facts.”
This weekend, the Republican Chair of the House Intel Committee said that only one person is being investigated for treason in the White House by the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence division. There’s no way a deal of this magnitude would completely envelop the Trump Campaign, its manager, its outside affiliates and inside agents so thoroughly, without the principal or head of a group knowing that something was happening.
Any reasonable person would have to conclude that Donald Trump is the FBI’s target, based upon the bevy of circumstantial evidence tying RNC campaign events to Russian oil, economic sanctions, and the simmering conflict in Ukraine.
Nearly three decades ago, Trump admitted on national television to participating in a straw-man transaction with the Sultan of Brunei and infamous Iran-Contra middleman Adnan Khashoggi, through which he acquired a large yacht, so we’ve got proof that the Trump Organization has engaged these kinds of multi-national transactions in the Middle East.
The most important commodity traded in the oil business or politics is money. The privatization deal described in Christopher Steele’s dossier has played out on the pages of Bloomberg and Reuters for a year - shows that there was a whole lot of money in brokering oil deals for Donald Trump’s associates, and a rapid profit by Qatar if sanctions are released this year.
The only question that’s not even pondered in these many public reports, and which must be a central focus of the American intelligence community’s investigations:
Where is the $500 million dollar brokerage fee today?
Where did the other $2 billion dollars come from?
What is Donald Trump’s true role in the deal?
Here’s the complete Democratic Coalition report:
Democratic Coalition Report On Trump Russia Dossier by Grant Stern on Scribd
Here’s an infographic which describes many of the key players in the Trump Russian Dossier:
https://medium.com/@grantstern/trump-russia-dossier-decoded-yes-there-really-was-a-massive-oil-deal-e33370349b67#.2zz06ahfv