Trump’s
Commerce Pick Also Has Suspicious Russian Ties
By
Phil Mattera for the Dirt Diggers Digest
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| Thumbs up if you are in Putin's pocket |
The
79-year-old Ross, who was an advisor to Trump’s presidential campaign, is best
known as a vulture capitalist who made a fortune restructuring troubled steel,
coal and textile companies and then selling them off.
Yet
he continues to have associations with a wide range of companies.
Among
those is the Bank of Cyprus, where Ross has served as
vice chairman of the board of directors since leading a financial rescue of the
institution in 2014.
According
to reporting in late 2016 by McClatchy and Mother Jones, the Cypriot bank has close
ties to wealthy Russian businessmen linked to Vladimir Putin.
One
of those is Viktor Vekselberg, whose Renova Group became the second largest
shareholder in the bank. One of Renova’s executives, Maksim Goldman, was named
to the bank’s board of directors and is now a vice chairman alongside Ross.
McClatchy
also pointed out that the Bank of Cyprus was mentioned thousands of times in
the Panama Papers in connection with the offshore activities of Putin’s
cronies.
And
then there’s the fact that the chair of the bank Ross helped to install is
Josef Ackermann, the retired chief executive of Deutsche Bank, which last month agreed to pay $425 million to resolve
allegations by the New York State Department of Financial Services that it
helped Russian clients engage in what amounted to money laundering through an
international mirror-trading scheme.
What
makes all of this more significant is that among the agencies Ross would
oversee as Commerce Secretary is the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS),
which along with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control,
administers the sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama Administration
and which, for the moment, are still in effect.
The BIS portion of those sanctions includes restrictions on the ability of U.S. companies to export certain military and energy products to Russian parties whose names are on what is known as the Entity List.
The
latest Russian additions to
the list were made in the final weeks of the Obama Administration in the wake
of new sanctions imposed in response to Russian interference in the U.S.
presidential election.
In
his confirmation hearing last month, Ross was not interrogated about his views
on Russian sanctions or how he might adjust the role of BIS. And Ross has
defused much of the opposition to his nomination by vowing to divest from
most (though not all) of his holdings.
Yet
in light of the ongoing controversy over the Russian links of other figures in
Trump’s campaign and his administration, Ross’s ties to the Putin network
deserve a lot more scrutiny (as do his China connections).
Note: The Bureau of
Industry and Security and the Office of Foreign Assets Control, along with the
State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, are among the
agencies whose cases will be included in an update of Violation
Tracker that will be posted next week.