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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Viktor Vekselberg, Russian Billionaire, Was Questioned by Mueller’s Investigators
Now it turns out that one of the men, Viktor F. Vekselberg, was also singled out in another of the efforts to confront Russia’s election interference: the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
Federal agents working with Mr. Mueller stopped Mr. Vekselberg, a billionaire businessman, at a New York-area airport this year, searched his electronic devices and questioned him, according to people familiar with the matter. They confronted him after he stepped off a private plane about two months ago, according to one of the people.
There is no indication that Mr. Mueller suspects Mr. Vekselberg of wrongdoing. But Mr. Vekselberg attended the presidential inauguration last year, and the interest in him suggests that the special counsel has intensified his focus on potential connections between Russian oligarchs and the Trump campaign and inaugural committee.
Though it is unclear what prompted Mr. Mueller’s investigators to approach Mr. Vekselberg, his widespread corporate interests and attendance at Mr. Trump’s inauguration are among the potential avenues for examination. Mr. Vekselberg also attended a December 2015 dinner in Russia where Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, was also among the guests and sat beside Mr. Putin. The dinner was hosted by RT, the English-language television news network financed by the Kremlin.
Mr. Flynn was ousted weeks after the inauguration amid revelations that he misled the vice president and others about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty in December to lying to the F.B.I. and is cooperating with the special counsel.
Another potential area of interest for Mr. Mueller is Mr. Vekselberg’s business in Cyprus, the Mediterranean nation considered a magnet for Russian money. Mr. Vekselberg has controlled a company that has been the largest single shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus. Around the same time that Mr. Vekselberg was investing in the bank, Mr. Trump’s future commerce secretary, Wilbur L. Ross, was its vice chairman.
Mr. Mueller’s interest in Mr. Vekselberg has not been previously reported. CNN has reported that investigators for the special counsel stopped an unnamed Russian oligarch at a New York-area airport.
A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment; a lawyer and a spokesman for Mr. Vekselberg did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, the spokesman confirmed that Mr. Vekselberg attended Mr. Trump’s swearing-in as president.
Mr. Vekselberg’s ticket to the inauguration came from his cousin and business associate, Andrew Intrater. Mr. Intrater, an American who lives in New York, donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, campaign finance records show.
Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Intrater, according to a person briefed on the matter, though there is no indication that he is suspected of wrongdoing. A person close to Mr. Intrater said that he was encouraged to attend the inauguration by an American friend, and that he had wanted to use the trip as an opportunity to meet with business associates in Washington. Documents the person provided indicated that Mr. Intrater intended to hold business meetings during the weekend of the inauguration.
Mr. Intrater is the chief executive of Columbus Nova, an investment management firm whose biggest client is the Renova Group, Mr. Vekselberg’s sprawling conglomerate that operates in the energy sector and elsewhere.
At one point, Renova donated $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
Mr. Vekselberg, who has a net worth estimated at more than $13 billion by Forbes, has primarily made his fortune in oil and metals. And as his wealth has risen, he appears to have maintained strong ties to the Kremlin.
Mr. Vekselberg is among the select Russian oligarchs who made their fortunes in the early post-Soviet period and managed to retain wealth under Mr. Putin while others went to prison or into exile. In 2010, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the Russian president at the time, appointed Mr. Vekselberg to help lead a technology-business project near Moscow.
Mr. Vekselberg, who is believed to have a favorable relationship with Mr. Putin, was one of seven Kremlin-linked oligarchs hit with sanctions in April by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration’s decision to target Mr. Vekselberg and the Renova Group with sanctions underscored his perceived closeness to the Kremlin. The sanctions — against seven of Russia’s richest men and their companies as well as 17 top government officials — were aimed at penalizing those seen as enriching themselves from Mr. Putin’s government.
And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Russian-American joint venture, according to an archived version of the company’s website.
And during a thaw in United States-Russian relations — the so-called reset orchestrated by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state — Mr. Vekselberg was appointed to help attract Silicon Valley investors to the technology park outside Moscow, known as Skolkovo.
“The whole country needs some sort of breakthrough,” he told The New York Times in a 2010 interview about the effort.
Mr. Vekselberg also donated to Fort Ross, a state park in California that is the site of a 19th-century Russian settlement, to keep it open during the state’s financial crunch in the recession.
After making his fortune in aluminum and oil in Siberia in the 1990s, Mr. Vekselberg, together with partners, closed in 2003 what was at the time the largest private transaction in Russian history by forming a joint oil-pumping venture with the British company BP, called TNK-BP.
But soon, BP executives came to suspect the Russian partners had close ties to the F.S.B., the main successor intelligence agency to the K.G.B., and other Russian security services. The F.S.B. classified oil field maps and closely tailed British employees. Once, during a business dispute with the Russians, BP’s office in Moscow was raided by police officers armed with assault rifles.
Amid this conflict with BP, one of Mr. Vekselberg’s partners, German Khan, turned up for a dinner with a BP executive at a remote hunting lodge in Russia with a chrome-plated pistol, according to a State Department cable published by Wiki Leaks. Mr. Khan confided to the executive that he considered the 1972 film “The Godfather” a “manual for life.”
Mr. Khan, too, has crossed paths with the special counsel investigation: Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer sentenced to 30 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I., is his son-in-law.
It's so satisfying whenever they go after another Oligarch.
edited 4th May '18 7:42:48 PM by megaeliz
While the New Deal may have tried to exclude blacks as much as possible, the joke was still on the racists - simply because the racial wealth disparity was so great that a disproportionate share of the money and jobs made it to African-Americans anyway.
That's the problem with socialism. Unless you're a Middle Eastern petrostate, it really does go to everyone.
One myth I'd like to see die, is one that that makes the Federal Government to be horribly inefficient, because generally, it's not, at least at the Civil Service/admistrative side of things.
The problem becomes when things are insufficiently funded.
edited 4th May '18 8:14:28 PM by megaeliz
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
If it is, it's not by design or inevitability, it's because the Republicans go out of their way to try and make it so. Starving the beast and all that.
edited 4th May '18 8:14:48 PM by LSBK
State Governments are almost always less effcient, because they have less resources and are bound by "balance sheet economics", and are completely dependent on the revenue they take in, making their budgets much smaller and less flexible than the federal Government's.
edited 4th May '18 8:32:26 PM by megaeliz
As for Trump winning a Nobel Prize, I think his son Donald Trump Jr. put it best: "Remember who decides this stuff. The globalist elite would never give him that win."
edited 4th May '18 9:43:04 PM by ElSquibbonator
I wouldn't say he put it best...
It's one thing to make a spectacle. It's another to make a difference.
Also, calling this breakthrough in Korea the equivalent of 9/11 in terms of its effect on the 2020 election is a big mistake. George W. Bush's approval rating shot up overnight by almost 30 per cent, the highest single-day increase in approval of any President ever. Trump's approval has gone up maybe 2 or 3 per cent in the past week. Big difference.
It's also important to note that American politics are much more partisan than they were in 2001; Trump's approval ceiling in the polls has always been somewhere in the range of 45%, and that's probably where it will stay. With Bush, you had plenty of people who were sort of "in the middle" regarding him and could be convinced to change their minds. Trump isn't like that. You either love him or hate him. People who hate Trump aren't going to suddenly start liking him because he made peace with North Korea—not in big enough numbers to be meaningful, at least.
Which brings me to the subject of the midterm elections this year. Do you remember how the Republicans won big in both 2010 and 2014? That was partly because while Obama was able to energize voters, the various senators and representatives weren't. It'll probably be the same this time. A lot of people weren't just voting Republican, after all, they were voting Trump. Not as much to get enthusiastic about. Democrats, by contrast, are showing a lot of enthusiasm and are over-performing in many special elections.
Vampire Hunter
The thing about Trump is that he's the political equivalent of Marmite... Those that love him really love him and those that hate him really hate him. Despite people's claims to the contrary, there aren't very many people who are actually moderate on Trump. This is why Trump's approval ratings hover between the upper 30s and the lower 40s no matter what he does. Ninety percent have made up their minds on Trump one way or another and had done so before the general election leaving ten percent as actual moderates in regards to Trump.
edited 4th May '18 11:26:49 PM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food Badly
Oh, bother.
Trump's more like a durian. Though I wager durians smell better.
Disgusted, but not surprised
He has a yellow lid that can be hard to pull off with aplomb.
It's also tradition to call out a racist using something toned towards the colour they despise. Eugene Terre'Blanche = Aubergine.
I'm sorry Tien, but I must go all out.
Than Trump is shit.
Nah, shit isn't ruthlessly marketed, labelled and lidded in yellow to invoke gold or love-hate in nature. Or owned by much bigger fish. Yup, Putin is Unilever in this analogy.
edited 5th May '18 12:11:49 AM by Euodiachloris
It's also important to note that American politics are much more partisan than they were in 2001; Trump's approval ceiling in the polls has always been somewhere in the range of 45%, and that's probably where it will stay. With Bush, you had plenty of people who were sort of "in the middle" regarding him and could be convinced to change their minds. Trump isn't like that. You either love him or hate him. People who hate Trump aren't going to suddenly start liking him because he made peace with North Korea—not in big enough numbers to be meaningful, at least.
Thus the inevitable fumbling of the government response to the tragedy would almost certainly sabotage the electoral benefits that he could get otherwise.
That's why I'm personally not very surprised by the massive enthusiasm gap in that it fits well with past trends and established political realities.
edited 5th May '18 3:38:50 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
Stop Killing My Titles
So I've been told that this happened recently.
Can anyone confirm the authenticity of this? It seems a bit out there even as far as US politics are concerned - if only because being pro-furry is something that I imagine Republicans would accuse Democrats of as promoting moral degeneracy and the like.
grah
She didn't make it her avatar, but she did retweet a fursona of herself someone drew. I'm not sifting through a whole day's worth of Republican tweets to see the thing for myself, but it definitely happened.
Also, IOKIYAR.
edited 5th May '18 4:20:35 AM by PhysicalStamina
It's one thing to make a spectacle. It's another to make a difference.
Seems pretty irrelevant, like how does that impact her ability to do her job? Or is it just a "I view this as weird and thus makes me uncomfortable" knee-jerk reaction? Because I for one do not have much sympathy for that.
edited 5th May '18 4:23:21 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
Oh, bother.
After the pedophile and the multiple Neo-Nazis, a furry is not a big deal at all.
Disgusted, but not surprised
I get the feeling she has no idea what the implications of "furry" are. If you aren't someone who's spent all their time on the internet, it just means cartoon animal person. "Oh, that's cute." She may have thought when she saw the drawing of herself as a mouse. On the internet, you can't just casually be a fan of animal people (or most things), you're either just a normie or you're a part of a weird, obsessive lifestyle.
But yeah, I think this is kind of irrelevant. There was that one old congressman who was apparently an actual furry, but I don't think anyone really cared.
In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good.
Why should anyone care? It's as relevant as her favorite color.
The idea of an open furry politician is just amusing is all.
It's one thing to make a spectacle. It's another to make a difference.
So am I the only one here who thinks that Trump does deserve some credit for the possibility of a North Korea peace deal? Granted, it's because he took one hell of a gamble (albeit unwittingly) by calling NK's bluff, something no rational person would do due to the stakes at play, but I think Moon is right in his assessment. Plus, we have no idea what backstage politicking that the State Department played during the entire mess (which Trump tried scuttling whenever he could), similar to how the Cuban Missile Crisis was actually resolved due to a backstage deal where the US would withdraw nukes from Turkey 7 months after the USSR removed theirs from Cuba, allowing Kennedy to save face.
That said, no fucking way should Trump be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, let alone win one - aside from his ego being as atrocious as it is, he also made it abundantly clear that he didn't exactly want peace.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"
I'm off the mindset that Trump deserves credit only as far as the fact that Kim Jong Un realized he's the answer to Who Would Be Stupid Enough? Not due to any direct deliberate act on Trump's part to bring this outcome about
edited 5th May '18 6:31:21 AM by sgamer82
FDR appointed blacks to positions in government to the point it was controversial and included them in some of his programs.
But it should be noted he was a Democrat and they were the party of the South as well as segregation.
Mind you, FDR is why so many blacks switched from Republican to Democrat. So at least some of them liked him.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.