RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
Jonah
XBOT Suicide Prevention Squad
Russians gettin desperate... Started #Blexit (Blacks for Trump) movement again
Remember to inform your family about crap like this. Don't want another Yeezy or Hotep to pop up
Remember to inform your family about crap like this. Don't want another Yeezy or Hotep to pop up
resurrection
By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War
Welp.. 2 days until election day.. is Mueller going to have some heat ready? I think it's pretty clear he's respecting the "60 days before election" code or whatever. But how quickly after can we expect the storm of shyt to follow?
I hope he is coordinating with the Dems in preparation for a tag team effort once the dam breaks.
:ALERTRED::ALERTRED:
:moscowmjpls:
:PutinTrollFace:
:moscowmjpls:
:PutinTrollFace:
Two Capitals, One Russian Oligarch: How Oleg Deripaska Is Trying to Escape U.S. Sanctions
Image
Oleg Deripaska in London in 2011. He is one of Russia’s most prominent, and by some accounts notorious, oligarchs.CreditCreditChris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg, via Getty Images
By Andrew Higgins and Kenneth P. Vogel
- Nov. 4, 2018
Mr. Deripaska was in deep trouble. In April, the Trump administration had announced sanctionson oligarchs close to President Vladimir V. Putin, and on their companies, as punishment for Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and for other hostile acts. A billionaire who controls the world’s second-largest aluminum company, Mr. Deripaska faced possible ruin.
Portrayed as little more than a thug by his critics and suspected by United States officials of having ties to Russian organized crime, Mr. Deripaska, 50, has spent two decades trying to buy respect in the West. London welcomed him; Washington still mostly has not. Successive administrations have limited his ability to travel to the United States.
Even Mr. Putin was unable to resolve the situation when he interceded personally with Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on Mr. Deripaska’s behalf.
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But with so much on the line this time, Mr. Deripaska’s allies are now fighting back aggressively, mobilizing a vast influence machine on both sides of the Atlantic in an all-out effort to undo the sanctions against his companies before they take full effect.
The campaign to help Mr. Deripaska is playing out against an especially sensitive political backdrop. Any step by the administration that is seen as favorable to a powerful Russian is sure to draw scrutiny at a time when the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is continuing his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Moreover, Mr. Deripaska has been a subsidiary character in that inquiry, not as a target but because he at one point employed Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, as an adviser. Mr. Manafort was convicted on one set of fraud charges and pleaded guilty to other charges in cases brought by Mr. Mueller, and is now cooperating with the prosecution.
But the current lobbying effort on behalf of Mr. Deripaska’s companies still appears to have made substantial headway. In recent months, Mr. Deripaska’s firms have notched initial victories by winning multiple postponements from the Treasury Department of the sanctions on the oligarch’s holding company, EN+, and the giant aluminum company it controls, Rusal.
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Now, with the administration closing in on its latest self-imposed deadline to make a final decision by Dec. 12, there are signs that Mr. Deripaska’s companies could escape the sanctions entirely.
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, has signaled that he is open to a plan under which Mr. Deripaska would reduce his stake in his companies in return for the sanctions being lifted.
But sidestepping the business sanctions is not Mr. Deripaska’s only goal. His team is preparing an audacious and previously unreported campaign to remove the personal sanctions on him, too. Removing the personal sanctions would eliminate substantial barriers to his doing business in the United States and around the world, and could be a requirement for him to get his hands on the money — potentially billions of dollars — resulting from any sale of part of his stake in the companies.
“Oleg Deripaska understands better than most Russian oligarchs how money buys influence in Washington,” said Michael R. Carpenter, a former National Security Council official during the Obama administration who is now senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. “It seems like he’s now using that knowledge to try to save his skin.”
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The elaborate influence operation highlights one of the fastest-growing elements of the lobbying business: helping deep-pocketed foreign interests massage the sanctions, tariffs and other tools deployed by Mr. Trump against foreign governments, individuals and industries.
Image
The chairman of Mr. Deripaska’s holding company, EN+, is Lord Gregory Barker, a protégé of David Cameron, Britain’s former prime minister, and a former energy minister for climate change policy.CreditINS News Agency Ltd, via Shutterstock
The British emissary for Mr. Deripaska’s companies, Lord Barker of Battle, a protégé of David Cameron, the former prime minister of Britain, was appointed last year as chairman of EN+. Also involved are lobbyists, law firms, public relations experts, a former United States senator and a former Trump campaign official with ties to the Treasury Department and the White House. Even ambassadors to Washington from a number of countries have been approached to write letters opposing the sanctions.
The Treasury Department’s decision carries significant economic implications, given Rusal’s vital place in supplying aluminum around the world.
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Lord Barker and the team trying to fight off the sanctions say that enacting them against EN+ and Rusal would create turmoil in global metals markets, damage American manufacturers and potentially play into China’s hands. Their proposal, the “Barker Plan,” would see Mr. Deripaska sell down his ownership stake in EN+, his holding company, to below 50 percent and step away from management of EN+ and Rusal.
But this would hinge on being able to trust and verify that a Russian oligarch who has spent decades building up a global empire — amid persistent accusations that he is more a Kremlin loyalist than an independent tyc00n — is truly giving up control.
Mr. Deripaska’s track record on two continents offers a case study in how the world’s wealthiest people can mount sophisticated campaigns to fight for their interests at the highest levels, often in ways that are not fully visible and that are reliant on the willingness of insiders to provide access.
He has sought to rebrand himself as a progressive and pro-Western business executive and philanthropist.
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Mr. Manafort is among an army of lobbyists, lawyers and consultants whom Mr. Deripaska has employed around the world to help him build and protect his empire, or to try to persuade the United States to grant him visas on a regular basis.
Mr. Deripaska has courted powerful political figures in Britain, played host to lavish parties in Davos, Switzerland, and once hired a former Republican presidential nominee, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, to lobby for him.
“There is already a perception — certainly abroad, but even in Washington — that Washington is a city where you buy influence rather than having to make arguments and do the right thing,” said Peter Harrell, who worked on sanctions issues in the State Department during the Obama administration.
“That perception would be crystallized by a sanctioned company being able to lobby its way off the list,” he said. “If Deripaska faces enormous losses, it would send a message of sanctions success, but if Deripaska is able to get off with a slap on the wrist, that would be a massive blow to the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions.”
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An Oligarch in London
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An Oligarch in London
Image
The Krasnoyarsk aluminum smelter, operated by Mr. Deripaska’s company Rusal in Krasnoyarsk, Russia.CreditAndrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
Mr. Deripaska’s troubled reputation derives in large part from what was also his greatest triumph: his bare-knuckled victory over rivals and partners during the 1990s, when well-connected Russians were competing to win control of state assets after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That competition, the so-called aluminum wars, was a corpse-filled struggle for control of Siberian smelters and other state-owned Soviet assets that was so violent that even some of Russia’s toughest tyc00ns gave it a wide berth.
“There were so many murders that I refused to go into this business,” recalled Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a billionaire former oil magnate who now lives in self-exile in London and who during the 1990s forbade his associates from pursuing a smelter deal.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I told them: ‘Don’t go out there. I need you to stay alive.’”
Mr. Deripaska, who once studied physics at Moscow State University, became a billionaire. But he was left with a ruthless image, especially as claims later emerged in legal battles in London and the United States that he engaged in theft, intimidation, bribery and even murder, notably of a Russian banker in 1995. (None of the accusations have been substantiated.)
One complaint filed in Delaware cast Mr. Deripaska as a member of a criminal gang that seized control of an iron-ore mining complex in the Ural Mountains in the late 1990s. The previous manager claimed that at a meeting attended by Mr. Deripaska, a mafia leader and five armed thugs, he was told to transfer a majority share or “this is the last time you will leave here alive.”
The case was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, and Mr. Deripaska’s lawyers have routinely responded to lawsuits with counterclaims that his accusers were themselves crooks and lacked credibility. (A London arbitration tribunal did order him to pay $95 million in 2017 for knowingly lying to the tribunal while finding he had “acted oppressively” to his former partner in a Moscow property venture.)
His dominance of the Russian metals markets gave him the resources to look abroad. By 2000, he commenced a decade of overseas expansion, buying a smelter in Montenegro, an aluminum factory in Ireland and bauxite mines in Africa.
ADVERTISEMENT
Then he turned his eyes to London.
Image
Mr. Deripaska’s home in Belgravia, one of London’s most expensive areas.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times
Mr. Deripaska was now a global figure, and London was becoming the money-soaked fulcrum for a glitzy, international business and the social elite. He bought a six-story mansion on Belgrave Square, as well as a country house in Surrey. He married Polina Yumasheva, a British-educated daughter of the chief of staff of Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia’s former president. (The couple has since divorced.)
Ensconced in society, Mr. Deripaska befriended Nathaniel Rothschild, a British-born financier whose father is a British peer, and through him met the Conservative Party politician George Osborne, a future chancellor of the Exchequer, as well as Lord Peter Mandelson, a leading figure in the Labour Party.
Mr. Deripaska reveled among global movers and shakers, and he remains a regular figure at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He has always argued that these relationships were simply friendships, but soon questions would arise about whether he was really trying to buy influence.
ADVERTISEMENT
The British news media revealed that the oligarch had flown Mr. Rothschild and Lord Mandelson on his private jet in 2005 for a jaunt in Siberia. At the time, Lord Mandelson was the European Union’s trade commissioner, and in this role, he oversaw a cut in tariffs on aluminum imports from Russia requested by Poland and other members of the bloc. It was a boon to Rusal. (The European Commission has denied that Mr. Mandelson personally intervened in the matter.)
Mr. Rothschild sued a British newspaper for libel for suggesting that the trip was anything more than an act of friendship, but the judge ruled against him. In the summer of 2008, Mr. Deripaska again played host, this time on his yacht, Queen K, off the Greek island of Corfu. Onboard were Mr. Osborne, Lord Mandelson and Andrew Feldman, a Conservative Party fund-raiser.
The yacht meeting caused a media and political storm in Britain, after claims in a letter to The Times of London by Mr. Rothschild, who was also in Corfu, that Mr. Osborne had sought a contribution from Mr. Deripaska to the Conservative Party. Mr. Osborne denied requesting what would have been an illegal donation.
“Deripaska does not hang around with people like this for social reasons,” said Mark Hollingsworth, an author of “Londongrad,” a book about Russian oligarchs in the British capital. “He is not mesmerized by the historical legacy of the British elite. He is not really interested in high society and parties. It is much more hard-nosed commercial calculation: ‘Who are the big names, who has the power and who can help me?’”
ADVERTISEMENT
And London unquestionably had lawyers, bankers, consultants and former politicians willing to earn generous fees by working in the service of Russian oligarchs with unseemly pasts.
“To outsiders, it seems extraordinary that reputable banks and people would ever get involved,” said Tom Keatinge, a former banker with J. P. Morgan who now directs the Center for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a British research organization. “But when there are big fees on the table, people’s point of view is not the same.”
A Chill in Washington
Image
Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, was an adviser to Mr. Deripaska. He is cooperating in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times
Mr. Deripaska also had his eyes on the United States, where he had acquired property and had business links with Alcoa, the world’s sixth-largest aluminum producer. But in Washington, the reception was much chillier.
ADVERTISEMENT
The State Department, worried that he had connections to Russian organized crime, has restricted his travel to the United States for years, mostly forcing him to rely on occasional American visas or a Russian diplomatic passport. Despite the barriers, he has managed visits to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii, people familiar with his travel said.
Annoyed, and cognizant of the potential effect on his business, Mr. Deripaska has pursued winning easier and more regular access to the United States with near-obsessive zeal. One moment of success came in 2005, when he was given a multiple-entry American visa, after hiring Mr. Dole, the former presidential nominee who had gone into lobbying.
Mr. Dole’s firm, Alston & Bird, reported receivingan upfront lobbying fee of $300,000 from Mr. Deripaska, followed by at least $270,000 in additional payments over the next few years, according to congressional lobbying reports. In the end, the victory was short-lived: The visa was revoked not long after being granted at the request of the F.B.I., a person briefed on the process said.
Around the time his visa was being revoked, Mr. Deripaska hired Mr. Manafort and signed his firm to a $10 million-a-year contract in 2006 to advise him.
ADVERTISEMENT
One of Mr. Manafort’s associates lobbied President George W. Bush’s administration to reconsider the visa issue, but the efforts went nowhere, according to David Merkel, who worked on Russia-related issues in Mr. Bush’s White House and State Department.
“Deripaska has spent years trying to mainstream himself into the political and financial elite,” Mr. Merkel said.
Mr. Manafort and his business partner at the time, Rick Davis, arranged a meeting in 2006 on the sidelines of the Davos forum between Mr. Deripaska and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who was preparing a campaign for president. There is no evidence anything came of the meeting, though it became a liability for Mr. McCain’s campaign.
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Deripaska eventually fired Mr. Manafort and his partner. He later sued them after a dispute over a telecommunications deal they had pursued together.
Image
The Krasnoyarsk aluminum smelter, operated by Mr. Deripaska’s company Rusal in Krasnoyarsk, Russia.CreditAndrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
Mr. Deripaska’s troubled reputation derives in large part from what was also his greatest triumph: his bare-knuckled victory over rivals and partners during the 1990s, when well-connected Russians were competing to win control of state assets after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That competition, the so-called aluminum wars, was a corpse-filled struggle for control of Siberian smelters and other state-owned Soviet assets that was so violent that even some of Russia’s toughest tyc00ns gave it a wide berth.
“There were so many murders that I refused to go into this business,” recalled Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a billionaire former oil magnate who now lives in self-exile in London and who during the 1990s forbade his associates from pursuing a smelter deal.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I told them: ‘Don’t go out there. I need you to stay alive.’”
Mr. Deripaska, who once studied physics at Moscow State University, became a billionaire. But he was left with a ruthless image, especially as claims later emerged in legal battles in London and the United States that he engaged in theft, intimidation, bribery and even murder, notably of a Russian banker in 1995. (None of the accusations have been substantiated.)
One complaint filed in Delaware cast Mr. Deripaska as a member of a criminal gang that seized control of an iron-ore mining complex in the Ural Mountains in the late 1990s. The previous manager claimed that at a meeting attended by Mr. Deripaska, a mafia leader and five armed thugs, he was told to transfer a majority share or “this is the last time you will leave here alive.”
The case was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, and Mr. Deripaska’s lawyers have routinely responded to lawsuits with counterclaims that his accusers were themselves crooks and lacked credibility. (A London arbitration tribunal did order him to pay $95 million in 2017 for knowingly lying to the tribunal while finding he had “acted oppressively” to his former partner in a Moscow property venture.)
His dominance of the Russian metals markets gave him the resources to look abroad. By 2000, he commenced a decade of overseas expansion, buying a smelter in Montenegro, an aluminum factory in Ireland and bauxite mines in Africa.
ADVERTISEMENT
Then he turned his eyes to London.
Image
Mr. Deripaska’s home in Belgravia, one of London’s most expensive areas.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times
Mr. Deripaska was now a global figure, and London was becoming the money-soaked fulcrum for a glitzy, international business and the social elite. He bought a six-story mansion on Belgrave Square, as well as a country house in Surrey. He married Polina Yumasheva, a British-educated daughter of the chief of staff of Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia’s former president. (The couple has since divorced.)
Ensconced in society, Mr. Deripaska befriended Nathaniel Rothschild, a British-born financier whose father is a British peer, and through him met the Conservative Party politician George Osborne, a future chancellor of the Exchequer, as well as Lord Peter Mandelson, a leading figure in the Labour Party.
Mr. Deripaska reveled among global movers and shakers, and he remains a regular figure at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He has always argued that these relationships were simply friendships, but soon questions would arise about whether he was really trying to buy influence.
ADVERTISEMENT
The British news media revealed that the oligarch had flown Mr. Rothschild and Lord Mandelson on his private jet in 2005 for a jaunt in Siberia. At the time, Lord Mandelson was the European Union’s trade commissioner, and in this role, he oversaw a cut in tariffs on aluminum imports from Russia requested by Poland and other members of the bloc. It was a boon to Rusal. (The European Commission has denied that Mr. Mandelson personally intervened in the matter.)
Mr. Rothschild sued a British newspaper for libel for suggesting that the trip was anything more than an act of friendship, but the judge ruled against him. In the summer of 2008, Mr. Deripaska again played host, this time on his yacht, Queen K, off the Greek island of Corfu. Onboard were Mr. Osborne, Lord Mandelson and Andrew Feldman, a Conservative Party fund-raiser.
The yacht meeting caused a media and political storm in Britain, after claims in a letter to The Times of London by Mr. Rothschild, who was also in Corfu, that Mr. Osborne had sought a contribution from Mr. Deripaska to the Conservative Party. Mr. Osborne denied requesting what would have been an illegal donation.
“Deripaska does not hang around with people like this for social reasons,” said Mark Hollingsworth, an author of “Londongrad,” a book about Russian oligarchs in the British capital. “He is not mesmerized by the historical legacy of the British elite. He is not really interested in high society and parties. It is much more hard-nosed commercial calculation: ‘Who are the big names, who has the power and who can help me?’”
ADVERTISEMENT
And London unquestionably had lawyers, bankers, consultants and former politicians willing to earn generous fees by working in the service of Russian oligarchs with unseemly pasts.
“To outsiders, it seems extraordinary that reputable banks and people would ever get involved,” said Tom Keatinge, a former banker with J. P. Morgan who now directs the Center for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a British research organization. “But when there are big fees on the table, people’s point of view is not the same.”
A Chill in Washington
Image
Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, was an adviser to Mr. Deripaska. He is cooperating in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times
Mr. Deripaska also had his eyes on the United States, where he had acquired property and had business links with Alcoa, the world’s sixth-largest aluminum producer. But in Washington, the reception was much chillier.
ADVERTISEMENT
The State Department, worried that he had connections to Russian organized crime, has restricted his travel to the United States for years, mostly forcing him to rely on occasional American visas or a Russian diplomatic passport. Despite the barriers, he has managed visits to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii, people familiar with his travel said.
Annoyed, and cognizant of the potential effect on his business, Mr. Deripaska has pursued winning easier and more regular access to the United States with near-obsessive zeal. One moment of success came in 2005, when he was given a multiple-entry American visa, after hiring Mr. Dole, the former presidential nominee who had gone into lobbying.
Mr. Dole’s firm, Alston & Bird, reported receivingan upfront lobbying fee of $300,000 from Mr. Deripaska, followed by at least $270,000 in additional payments over the next few years, according to congressional lobbying reports. In the end, the victory was short-lived: The visa was revoked not long after being granted at the request of the F.B.I., a person briefed on the process said.
Around the time his visa was being revoked, Mr. Deripaska hired Mr. Manafort and signed his firm to a $10 million-a-year contract in 2006 to advise him.
ADVERTISEMENT
One of Mr. Manafort’s associates lobbied President George W. Bush’s administration to reconsider the visa issue, but the efforts went nowhere, according to David Merkel, who worked on Russia-related issues in Mr. Bush’s White House and State Department.
“Deripaska has spent years trying to mainstream himself into the political and financial elite,” Mr. Merkel said.
Mr. Manafort and his business partner at the time, Rick Davis, arranged a meeting in 2006 on the sidelines of the Davos forum between Mr. Deripaska and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who was preparing a campaign for president. There is no evidence anything came of the meeting, though it became a liability for Mr. McCain’s campaign.
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Deripaska eventually fired Mr. Manafort and his partner. He later sued them after a dispute over a telecommunications deal they had pursued together.
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A Lobbying Machine in Trump’s Washington
Image
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in January. He has said that the aim of the sanctions was to “change the behavior of the oligarch,” not to punish Mr. Deripaska’s aluminum business.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times
In Washington, Lord Barker turned to Mercury Public Affairs. Only a few weeks after the sanctions were announced, Bryan Lanza, a former Trump campaign and transition aide who is now a Mercury lobbyist, contacted top officials at the Treasury and State Departments and at the White House.
At that point, Mercury was in the final stages of signing a $108,500-a-month contract to represent the board of directors of EN+. Mercury registered with the Justice Department as a “foreign agent” working on behalf of “Lord Gregory Barker of Battle,” not for Mr. Deripaska or his companies, which might have been prohibited under the sanctions.
ADVERTISEMENT
Since then, according to lobbying filings, Mr. Lanza has been busy texting, emailing, calling and sometimes meeting with influential White House appointees, including Justin Clark, the director of the Office of Public Liaison, and Mercedes Schlapp, the director of strategic communications.
At the State and Treasury Departments, Mr. Lanza and his associates at Mercury corresponded with or met with officials involved in sanctions policy, such as David Meale, the acting deputy assistant secretary of state overseeing sanctions, and Seth Bridge, a top Treasury sanctions policy adviser.
Mr. Lanza shared talking points with some administration officials about how Mr. Trump could claim a victory if the sanctions forced Mr. Deripaska to relinquish control of his companies, but allowed the companies — which are hugely important to the global aluminum market — to stay in business, according to people familiar with the effort.
Coincidentally or not, Mr. Mnuchin made statements that sounded similar themes, signaling that the United States might be open to a deal that would spare Mr. Deripaska’s companies from the sanctions.
ADVERTISEMENT
Speaking to reporters at the White House in late July, Mr. Mnuchin said the aim of sanctions was to “change the behavior of the oligarch,” not to punish his aluminum business.
That line of argument has now been seized on by both Lord Barker and Mr. Deripaska as they await announcement of the administration’s decision.
Lord Barker’s office issued a statement saying he was “increasingly optimistic” that a deal would be struck. Lord Barker declined repeated requests to be interviewed.
On Saturday, an associate of Mr. Deripaska relayed an offer to arrange an interview with the oligarch if The New York Times refrained from publishing this story until after Treasury decides on the sanctions. The Times declined the offer.
ADVERTISEMENT
In a separate statement issued through Rusal’s press office, which was similar in wording to Lord Barker’s statement, Mr. Deripaska said, “To protect the dedicated employees of EN+ and Rusal, and to preserve the rights of all global stakeholders of both companies, I have chosen to relinquish any remaining management or control of both EN+ and Rusal.”
A Treasury spokesman disputed any suggestion that Mr. Mnuchin’s approach to sanctions has been shaped by Mercury’s efforts, or that the department has changed its position.
If nothing else, the lobbying effort is notable for its scale. Lord Barker’s team and Mr. Deripaska’s companies have also turned to a trio of high-powered law firms to make their case to Treasury. Latham & Watkins is representing Lord Barker; Dentons is handling negotiations for Rusal; and Steptoe & Johnson is working for EN+, according to people familiar with the effort.
Another Mercury lobbyist, the former Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, led an effort to rally foreign ambassadors in Washington against sanctions, working to convince them that hurting Mr. Deripaska’s business will hurt manufacturing in their own countries by disrupting the supply of aluminum.
ADVERTISEMENT
While awaiting the Trump administration’s decision, Mr. Deripaska has lowered his public profile since announcing his resignation from the EN+ board in May. His wealth on paper has fallen by $4 billion since April because of the sharp fall in the company’s stock price.
He and his family now control a 77 percent stake in EN+ and, as yet, have not sold any their shares.
No matter what happens, K Street is profiting. In fact, Mr. Deripaska’s team has approached still more lawyers and public relations consultants in recent weeks about joining an effort to try to remove the personal sanctions against him, too, describing it as a long-term campaign.
Image
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in January. He has said that the aim of the sanctions was to “change the behavior of the oligarch,” not to punish Mr. Deripaska’s aluminum business.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times
In Washington, Lord Barker turned to Mercury Public Affairs. Only a few weeks after the sanctions were announced, Bryan Lanza, a former Trump campaign and transition aide who is now a Mercury lobbyist, contacted top officials at the Treasury and State Departments and at the White House.
At that point, Mercury was in the final stages of signing a $108,500-a-month contract to represent the board of directors of EN+. Mercury registered with the Justice Department as a “foreign agent” working on behalf of “Lord Gregory Barker of Battle,” not for Mr. Deripaska or his companies, which might have been prohibited under the sanctions.
ADVERTISEMENT
Since then, according to lobbying filings, Mr. Lanza has been busy texting, emailing, calling and sometimes meeting with influential White House appointees, including Justin Clark, the director of the Office of Public Liaison, and Mercedes Schlapp, the director of strategic communications.
At the State and Treasury Departments, Mr. Lanza and his associates at Mercury corresponded with or met with officials involved in sanctions policy, such as David Meale, the acting deputy assistant secretary of state overseeing sanctions, and Seth Bridge, a top Treasury sanctions policy adviser.
Mr. Lanza shared talking points with some administration officials about how Mr. Trump could claim a victory if the sanctions forced Mr. Deripaska to relinquish control of his companies, but allowed the companies — which are hugely important to the global aluminum market — to stay in business, according to people familiar with the effort.
Coincidentally or not, Mr. Mnuchin made statements that sounded similar themes, signaling that the United States might be open to a deal that would spare Mr. Deripaska’s companies from the sanctions.
ADVERTISEMENT
Speaking to reporters at the White House in late July, Mr. Mnuchin said the aim of sanctions was to “change the behavior of the oligarch,” not to punish his aluminum business.
That line of argument has now been seized on by both Lord Barker and Mr. Deripaska as they await announcement of the administration’s decision.
Lord Barker’s office issued a statement saying he was “increasingly optimistic” that a deal would be struck. Lord Barker declined repeated requests to be interviewed.
On Saturday, an associate of Mr. Deripaska relayed an offer to arrange an interview with the oligarch if The New York Times refrained from publishing this story until after Treasury decides on the sanctions. The Times declined the offer.
ADVERTISEMENT
In a separate statement issued through Rusal’s press office, which was similar in wording to Lord Barker’s statement, Mr. Deripaska said, “To protect the dedicated employees of EN+ and Rusal, and to preserve the rights of all global stakeholders of both companies, I have chosen to relinquish any remaining management or control of both EN+ and Rusal.”
A Treasury spokesman disputed any suggestion that Mr. Mnuchin’s approach to sanctions has been shaped by Mercury’s efforts, or that the department has changed its position.
If nothing else, the lobbying effort is notable for its scale. Lord Barker’s team and Mr. Deripaska’s companies have also turned to a trio of high-powered law firms to make their case to Treasury. Latham & Watkins is representing Lord Barker; Dentons is handling negotiations for Rusal; and Steptoe & Johnson is working for EN+, according to people familiar with the effort.
Another Mercury lobbyist, the former Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, led an effort to rally foreign ambassadors in Washington against sanctions, working to convince them that hurting Mr. Deripaska’s business will hurt manufacturing in their own countries by disrupting the supply of aluminum.
ADVERTISEMENT
While awaiting the Trump administration’s decision, Mr. Deripaska has lowered his public profile since announcing his resignation from the EN+ board in May. His wealth on paper has fallen by $4 billion since April because of the sharp fall in the company’s stock price.
He and his family now control a 77 percent stake in EN+ and, as yet, have not sold any their shares.
No matter what happens, K Street is profiting. In fact, Mr. Deripaska’s team has approached still more lawyers and public relations consultants in recent weeks about joining an effort to try to remove the personal sanctions against him, too, describing it as a long-term campaign.
Last edited:
Maddow is the best of the best. No other commentator follows the up-to-the-minute information of various issues around the country. Says a lot about her team as well.
