There has been a very large document dump today of documents from an offshore law firm who handles offshore corporate transactions for the oligarchs of this age. This document dump shows that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was in business with close associates of Vladimir Putin and may not have divested himself of the shell companies he was invested in.
NBC News and the International Center for Investigative Journalism are reporting on a new cache of documents obtained which tie Ross to very close associates of Putin.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. has a stake in a shipping firm that receives millions of dollars a year in revenue from a company whose key owners include Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law and a Russian tycoon sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as a member of Putin’s inner circle.
Ross, a billionaire private equity investor, divested most of his business assets before joining President Donald Trump’s Cabinet in February, but he kept a stake in the shipping firm, Navigator Holdings Ltd., which is incorporated in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. Offshore entities in which Ross and other investors hold a financial stake controlled 31.5 percent of the company in 2016, according to Navigator’s latest annual report.
Among Navigator’s largest customers, contributing more than $68 million in revenue since 2014, is the Moscow-based gas and petrochemicals company Sibur. Two of its key owners are Kirill Shamalov, who is married to Putin’s youngest daughter, and Gennady Timchenko, the sanctioned oligarch whose activities in the energy sector, the Treasury Department said, were “directly linked to Putin.”
Watch Richard Engel explain it in more detail in the video above.
