The High Court
in London has the duty to set the standard for distinguishing between Russian
honesty and chicanery (the British varieties too). But it lacks the power. If
the court had that, the Prime Minister, the House of Commons, the Secret
Intelligence Service, the BBC, Oxford University Press, and the Royal Institute
of International Affairs would be convicted of lying their heads off, and despatched
from court with damages to pay, plus costs.
So it proved to be last week when the High Court ruled that Russian resident of the UK, Boris Mints, is arguably a grand larcenist whose money and assets, adding up to $570 million, ought to be frozen until there can be a full adjudication of all the evidence. This was the third successive High Court ruling to condemn Mints by three judges in just eight months.
That’s a record for swift unanimity. There’s also a twist in this record, because the High Court has found Mints guilty of running away from the scene of the crime, thereby making near-certain that the part of the case the court has called arguable will be judged to be guilt for the grand larceny itself.
In the politics of the Russian succession, Alexei Kudrin, 59 years of age, has two distinctions. The first is that he is hated by the General Staff, Igor Sechin, and a large number of Russian voters. The second is that he is loved by the US Government, the international banks, the Russian oligarchs, and President Vladimir Putin. He failed once, nine years ago, to replace Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister; Medvedev sacked him. He failed again, in May 2018, to become Putin’s vice president; Putin nominated him to be chairman of the state auditor, the Accounting Chamber, when his parliamentary vote of approval was the lowest ever. Kudrin is trying again, and Moscow sources believe Putin is already advancing him. How far will the two of them get?
Mikhail
Mishustin, the prime minister appointed by President Vladimir Putin on the
evening of January 15, would be disqualified from holding office when the new eligibility
rule which Putin proposed earlier that day becomes law. This is because
Mishustin’s mother is reported to be of Armenian nationality, and under
Armenian law that automatically entitles Mishustin to “live permanently in a
foreign state”.
“State service is to serve the people,” Putin announced in his Federal Assembly speech, launching a set of constitutional proposals now moving to enactment in the State Duma. “Those who enter this path must know that by doing this they inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances. I suggest formalising at the constitutional level the obligatory requirements for those who hold positions of critical significance for national security and sovereignty. More precisely, the heads of the constituent entities, members of the Federation Council, State Duma deputies, the prime minister and his/her deputies, federal ministers, heads of federal agencies and judges should have no foreign citizenship or residence permit or any other document that allows them to live permanently in a foreign state.”
To address widespread reporting of Mishustin’s Armenian connection in the Russian and Armenian press, Mishustin’s spokesman at the Prime Ministry was asked: “What response does the Prime Minister make to press reporting that his mother was of Armenian nationality? What is the maiden name of the Prime Minister’s mother?” The spokesman did not respond on the telephone, and asked for an email. Mishustin refuses to answer.
The first independent national opinion poll to measure Russian interpretations of President Vladimir Putin’s proposals for changing the Constitution has been reported by the Levada Centre in Moscow. The results show a sharp decline in Russian confidence that the Constitution protects their rights and freedoms. On the meaning of Putin’s proposals for the division of power between executive and legislature, the country is split down the middle. Half believe the proposals are a sincere reform; half believe they are a cynical power grab. This has not yet produced a measurable change, up or down, in the national approval rating for the President. That was reported last week by Levada at 68%. The polling was done in mid-December.
The English read
detective stories for the pleasure of unravelling the crime, proving that even if there are perfect
crimes, in the majority of cases the perpetrators don’t get away with them
because the detectives are usually cleverer. That’s fiction.
In real life, Russian crimes are different. In the majority of cases, including less than perfect crimes involving vast sums of money, the majority of the perps get away with them; live richly in the UK, Tuscany, or on the Cote d’Azur; and enjoy promotional publicity in the Financial Times. In the cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and William Browder they have become so famous for their lying, it’s a devil of a job for the truth to prevail against their fictions.
In the minority
of Russian cases, the judgements of the High Court in London are thrillers, though
complicated in the reading. In the majority of these judgements, the guilty are
convicted, and the innocent vindicated.
But that’s a majority of a minority. A rarity in the library of true Russian
crimes.
There have been
many Russian yo-yo loan schemes since commercial banking began in Moscow just
under thirty years ago. The modus
operandi is that the controlling shareholder arranges for his bank to make
large loans to offshore companies he invents and controls; passes the money
from these fronts on to other fronts, and then into his pockets. His plan from the
start is not to repay the loans; the borrowing fronts have no security for
their loans when the bank demands repayment, and there’s no cash. That’s the
big crime.
The scheme
requires dozens of fake entities, thousands of transactions, more than a
handful of banks, and accomplices to manage the operations. Because they are in
the know, they have to be paid well. They, too, grow rich.
They commit the smaller crimes and compound the big one. Even if the big
criminal is caught, and his underlings at the Russian end sent to prison until
they inculpate their bosses, the offshore managers and fixers – those who keep
the yo-yo revolving and the string from breaking – usually get away.
In the case of National Bank Trust versus Ilya Yurov (lead image), his partners and their wives, the High Court published its whodunit last week. The story can be followed from the start in 2015 in this archive; Khodorkovsky makes several crooked cameo appearances. A British national named Benedict Worsley, the most important of Yurov’s managers, changed sides when the yo-yo turned into a boomerang. To save himself, he agreed to take more money from the bank to assemble the evidence in the court case against the defendants. In the new court judgement, he reportedly switched sides again before the trial opened on October 1, 2018. Neither side wanted to call him to testify because they all agreed he was a liar. The Worsley tale can be followed here. In the High Court judgement, Worsley is named 733 times. “It would appear that he was something of a fantasist and prone to exaggerate,” the judge ruled, “and that he was prepared to act dishonestly…”
The Wiltshire Police and Police Commissioner Angus Macpherson have revealed new lawlessness in their investigation of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on March 4, 2018.
The truth is
that Consortium News trusted a
Russian entity named the Strategic Culture Foundation and a Ukrainian reporter called
Arina Tsukanova for a story published on February 27, 2017, about Chrystia
Freeland’s grandfather Mikhail Chomiak, a propagandist and spy for the German
Army who advocated and assisted in the murder of the Jews, Poles and Russians
during World War II, and took his reward by stealing Jewish property –
publishing company, office, apartment, antique furniture, and limousine.
The story about
Freeland and the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine on which Freeland agrees,
still, with Chomiak, was the truth. It’s also a truth she tries to
escape by blaming the Russian state or Kremlin propaganda for repeating. Repeating
doesn’t turn the truth into a lie, though as Joseph Goebbels advised, repeating
the lie helps.
The point isn’t
that Freeland is culpable in her grandfather’s sins. Her sin is hiding them,
and her reason for doing so. She agrees
with Chomiak on turning Ukraine into the Greater Galicia it was Adolf Hitler’s
objective to achieve between 1939 to 1945: that’s to say, cleanse the territory
of Jews, Poles and Russians by killing them all. Chomiak succeeded with the
first two; he was then employed by the US Army on the third. Freeland is keeping
the plan in the family; they now have the Canadian government behind them. Demonizing Russians is part of the same plan as
it was in Chomiak’s day.
The irony is
that the Freeland-Chomiak story was plagiarized from an American reporter who
first published the details on January 19, 2017. At the time, and still, he was
banned from entering Russia by the Kremlin because, according to a senior
official in Moscow, “he writes bad things about our country”; no western
journalist has been banned for as long – since September 27, 2010. The reporter
was me.
There’s another truth wrapped in an irony. Arina Tsukanova, the byline writer of the Strategic Culture Foundation story and the Consortium News story, cannot be found; isn’t known at the media of Kiev and Crimea where her published pieces claim she works; and doesn’t reply to emails and Facebook communications. She is a ghost—a byline invented by the Strategic Culture Foundation in Moscow.
President Donald Trump’s lawyers have presented a 171-page legal brief defending him from impeachment charges in the trial which began this week in Washington. The brief mentions Russia a total of 41 times.
Not counting repetitions, footnotes and references, Trump’s defence accepts as proven that Trump has defended Ukraine against Russian “aggression”; is “stronger in support of Ukraine against Russia than his predecessor [President Barack Obama]; and the Russian military is “scared” of Trump’s weapons.
“We have overcome the situation when certain powers in the government were essentially usurped by oligarch clans,” President Vladimir Putin told the Federal Assembly last week. About the overcoming part, his staff aren’t so sure.
The week before, when asked to identify the guest list at Putin’s annual Christmas reception for the oligarchs on December 25, the president’s spokesman would not acknowledge there was a list, and refused to explain why it hasn’t been published. Publishing the list has been the Kremlin practice since the Christmas-for-oligarch suppers first began five years ago, on December 19, 2014.
In those five years, the President’s efforts to persuade the oligarchs to “de-offshorize” their capital, and repatriate it for reinvestment in Russia, have failed. Follow the details here. The US sanctions against those whom the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has judged to be closest to Putin, along with the US Treasury attack on Russian capital throughout the European banking system, have been more effective to that end. This may be the reason that, not having been overcome, the oligarchs and Putin have agreed that when they keep each other company, it will remain a state secret.
Secret at least from Russians, not from westerners. Between last month’s event and the start this week of the World Economic Forum (WEF) conference in Davos, Switzerland, the oligarchs have been busy advertising themselves in the foreign press. Their message is that they haven’t been overcome, not by the Kremlin and not by OFAC, so it’s back to business as usual.
As usual, the Financial Times is reporting this with the same fervor as has been filling the FT’s coffers and browning the noses of the FT’s Moscow Bureau for almost a quarter of a century. Regime change in the Kremlin, the Japanese-owned London outlet keeps hoping, is still best left to the oligarchs to arrange.
In September of 2018, BBC reporter Mark Urban (lead image, left) ended his book The Skripal Files with a report of the favour MI6 had arranged, so that he could visit Sergei Skripal’s house in Salisbury, and report that a souvenir of British country life which MI6 agent Pablo Miller had presented to Skripal after his recruitment as a double agent, was still on a shelf in the living-room. For a double agent, that was a bad slip – not Skripal’s, Urban’s.
