Viktor Vekselberg, Russian Billionaire, Was Questioned by Mueller’s Investigators

[ad_1]<br/><br><div><p class="css-1psrv1x e2kc3sl0">And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Russian-American joint venture, according to an archived version of the <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170917110631/http://www.renova.ru/en/about/management/detail/vekselberg_v_f_en" target="_blank" title="">company’s website</a><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="http://www.renova.ru/en/about/management/detail/vekselberg_v_f_en" target="_blank" title="">.</a></p><p class="css-1psrv1x e2kc3sl0">And during a thaw in United States-Russian relations — the so-called reset orchestrated by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state — Mr. Vekselberg was appointed to help attract Silicon Valley investors to the technology park outside Moscow, known as Skolkovo.</p><p class="css-1psrv1x e2kc3sl0">“The whole country needs some sort of breakthrough,” he <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/business/global/11russia.html" target="_blank" title="">told The New York Times</a> in a 2010 interview about the effort.</p><p class="css-1psrv1x e2kc3sl0">Mr. Vekselberg also donated to Fort Ross, a state park in California that is the site of a 19th-century Russian settlement, to keep it open during the state’s financial crunch in the recession.</p><p class="css-1psrv1x e2kc3sl0">After making his fortune in aluminum and oil in Siberia in the 1990s, Mr. Vekselberg, together with partners, closed in 2003 what was at the time the largest private transaction in Russian history by forming a joint oil-pumping venture with the British company BP, called TNK-BP.</p><p class="css-1psrv1x e2kc3sl0">But soon, BP executives came to suspect the Russian partners had close ties to the F.S.B., the main successor intelligence agency to the K.G.B., and other Russian security services. The F.S.B. classified oil field maps and closely tailed British employees. Once, during a business dispute with the Russians, BP’s office in Moscow was raided by police officers armed with assault rifles.</p><p class="css-1psrv1x e2kc3sl0">Amid this conflict with BP, one of Mr. Vekselberg’s partners, German Khan, turned up for a dinner with a BP executive at a remote hunting lodge in Russia with a chrome-plated pistol, according to a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks. Mr. Khan confided to the executive that he considered the 1972 film “The Godfather” a “manual for life.”</p><p class="css-1psrv1x e2kc3sl0">Mr. Khan, too, has crossed paths with the special counsel investigation: Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch lawyer <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/us/alex-van-der-zwaan-sentencing-russia-investigation-mueller.html" target="_blank" title="">sentenced</a> to 30 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I., is his son-in-law.</p></div><br/><br>[ad_2]<br/><br><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/viktor-vekselberg-mueller-investigation.html?partner=rss&emc=rss">Source link </a>

Viktor Vekselberg, Russian Billionaire, Was Questioned by Mueller’s Investigators

[ad_1] And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Rus...

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