- Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross - Jared Kushner Trump Son-in-law
A huge new leak of some 13.4 million financial documents has exposed the secret investments of some of the wealthiest people in the world. The documents also throw a flood of light on the financial affairs of two of President Trump’s closest advisers, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41876942
The vast trove of leaked documents was unearthed by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung which has enlisted the help of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to oversee the investigation.
US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has been under intense scrutiny ever since he was appointed in February 2017 because of his former role as vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus. Only a month earlier the German Deutsche Bank had been busted by US and European regulators for laundering billions of dollars of Russian money through the Bank of Cyprus into the hands of clients in New York city. In turn Deutsche Bank had already spent years loaning suspiciously large amounts of money to Donald Trump, even though most other banks had concluded he was a poor credit risk.
The new documents disclose that Mr Ross also retained an interest in a shipping company Navigator Holdings which earns millions of dollars a year transporting oil and gas for a Russian energy giant called SIBUR whose shareholders include Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law Kirill Shamalov, as well as two other men who are currently subject to US sanctions - Gennady Timchenko and Leonid Mikhelson. None of this was disclosed during Wilbur Ross’s confirmation hearings
“In concealing his interest in these shipping companies—and his ongoing financial relationship with Russian oligarchs—Secretary Ross misled me, the Senate Commerce Committee, and the American people,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said in a statement on Sunday. He characterized Ross’ financial disclosures as a “Russian nesting doll, with blatant conflicts of interest carefully hidden within seemingly innocuous companies.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/massive-leak-reveals-new-ties-between-trump-administration-and-russia-implicating-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-and-jared-kushner
Jared Kushner has long insisted that he has never taken any money from Russian sources. The new trove of documents reveal a pair of major investments into Kushner’s companies which can be traced back to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin.
According to an article in The Daily Beast the documents reveal that Russian tech leader Yuri Milner invested $850,000 in a startup called Cadre that Kushner co-founded in 2014.
Yuri Milner who also became a major investor in the social media giants Facebook and Twitter holdings (8% and 5 % respectively) has always declined to clarify who his own investors were. The new documents show that hundreds of millions of dollars used in these investments came from the Kremlin controlled Gazprom energy giant and from VTB bank which has been described as “Vladimir Putin’s personal slush fund.”
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia.html?referer=https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/05/trump-paradise-papers-finance-244577
