LONDON: A company recently sanctioned by the United States for Alexei Navalny’s intoxicating attack is linked to the money laundering network that Natalia Veselnitskaya tried to cover up at the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting, according to financial records obtained for The Daily Beast.
We now know why Vladimir Putin was so desperate to downplay the international corruption investigations that began when Sergei Magnitsky discovered a $ 230 million fraud in the Russian people. For the first time, this network of dark money can be related to the chemical weapons killers program run by Russia’s notorious intelligence services.
After exposing the massive theft of state money, Magnitsky ended up dead in a Russian cell. Legislation on his behalf has been enacted around the world by governments trying to curb corruption, including the U.S. Magnitsky Act. Despite interventions by Veselnitskaya – a Russian lawyer who was sent to the United States to persuade Trump’s campaign to repeal the law – investigations into the stolen money continue to expose an international network of bank accounts related to alleged violations.
This month, the Biden administration said it was sanctioning a German chemical company called Riol-Chemie because of its “activities in support of Russia’s mass destruction programs.”
It was part of the administration’s response to the assassination attempt on Navalny, Putin’s enemy. The anti-corruption advocate survived closely a chemical weapons attack after a plane carrying him on a long flight to Moscow was diverted and was able to receive emergency medical care, first at a Siberian hospital and then to Germany, where he was flown. subsequent treatment.
After waking up from a coma for weeks, Navalny tricked a member of the assassination team into posing as a senior FSB official and tricked his aspiring assassin into telling him over the phone how the murder had rubbed Novichok’s nervous agent into the seams of Navalny’s Underpants.
President Trump put aside the attack, but the Biden team announced sanctions against seven senior Russian officials and 14 other entities involved in the production of chemical and biological weapons on March 2.
One of the entities designated by the United States government as the gear of Russia’s weapons of mass destruction program was Riol-Chemie. Investigation files compiled by Lithuanian authorities – and reviewed by The Daily Beast – show that Riol-Chemie received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a British Virgin Islands company accused of laundering some of the stolen money discover Magnitsky.
According to sources close to an independent investigation by French authorities, financial records show that two companies registered in New Zealand, which also received $ 230 million in fraud funds, connected more than $ 1 million to Riol- Chemistry.
Riol-Chemie did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
The formal U.S. designation of Riol-Chemie as a sanctioned entity does not give any details about its role in Russia’s weapons program, but purchase orders and invoices seen by The Daily Beast show that the company received components from an already defunct American manufacturer Aeroflex. Records show that Aeroflex, then headquartered in New York, received orders for radiation-hardened semiconductors and regulators in 2007. These components are often used to build missiles and satellites.
Orders were to be sent to Riol-Chemie in northern Germany, but records show that strictly controlled radiation chips were paid for by another entity accused of laundering stolen Russian money. According to the paperwork, the bill went to Tolbrist Alliance Inc, a commercial company listed in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Offshore Filters Database and registered in a British Virgin Islands mailbox. .
According to bank records reviewed by The Daily Beast, Lithuanian authorities found that Tolbrist Alliance Inc. had received about $ 50 million from companies related to the fraud discovered by Magnitsky.
“This clearly demonstrates why Putin has been shattered because of Magnitsky’s investigation.”
– Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, who was attacked with $ 230 million in fraud.
Financial records show that Tolbrist spent at least $ 1.5 million on Aeroflex.
Aeroflex, which is no longer listed on trading, was rejected by the State Department for hundreds of violations of International Arms Transit Standards (ITAR) “which largely consist of unauthorized exports.” There is no indication that the company has broken the law by delivering the rad-chips to Riol-Chemie; the transactions took place years before the U.S. government announced that the German company was a secret part of Putin’s illicit arms smuggling operation.
Repeated links between companies accused of laundering $ 230 million and Riol-Chemie may point to a broader, calculated scheme with far-reaching political implications. The money stolen from the Russian people, while the authorities were turning a blind eye, was apparently channeled into a black market weapons program. Whoever led the dispersal of the stolen funds also played a top secret role in Russian national security.
“This clearly shows why Putin has been shattered because of the Magnitsky investigation,” said Bill Browder, who led the anti-corruption campaign on behalf of his former lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. “Every layer of this peeled onion emerges, there is more and more dirty and dangerous information.”
Earlier reports also claimed that some of the stolen funds ended up in the hands of people related to Syria’s chemical weapons program.
The man in charge of closing the Magnitsky-inspired investigations that were flourishing around the world was Yury Chaika, one of Putin’s top fixers and Russia’s attorney general until last year. President Obama signed the Magnitsky Anti-Corruption Act in 2012 and Chaika’s protégé Veselnitskaya was sent to present the case against the law at the well-known Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and the former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort in 2016.
Putin raised it with Trump himself at the Helsinki summit in 2018. The former president listened, nodding with a litany of distortions about electoral interference, Crimea and Browder during a joint press conference.
Veselnitskaya was also part of the legal team defending Prevezon, another of the companies accused of laundering the stolen money, which was being investigated by the southern district of New York. The case was finally settled out of court with Prevezon paying $ 6 million. Velselnitskaya was charged with obstruction of justice for collaborating with Chaika’s Moscow office in the face of medical evidence presented in court.
While speculation about Trump and Russia was up to par, Veselnitskaya always insisted he was not in the Trump Tower to try to help influence the election; she was there to put the case against the Magnitsky investigation.
“In short, they weren’t the happiest days of my life,” Velselnitskaya told NBC amid the backlash surrounding the Trump Tower meeting.
Despite the personal costs, it looks like Putin and his comrades will not stop at anything to hinder the fraud investigations they face. But the U.S. government’s sanction on Riol-Chemie can offer an important lesson to the Kremlin: even dark money can be followed.