Trump russian dossier oil company6/29/2023 The Rosneft deal, Page added, was "a good example of how American private companies are unfortunately limited to a great degree due to the influence of sanctions." He said the US and Russia had entered "a new era" of relations but that it was still "too early" to discuss whether Trump would be easing or lifting sanctions on Moscow. Page denied meeting with Sechin, Rosneft's CEO, during that trip but said it would have been "a great honor" if he had. But he was back in Moscow on December 8 - one day after the deal was signed - to "meet with some of the top managers" of Rosneft, he told reporters at the time. There is no evidence that Carter played any role in the Rosneft deal. The "11th hour deal" was "so last minute," Reuters reported, "that it appeared it would not close in time to meet the government's deadline for booking money in the budget from the sale." Qatar's sovereign wealth fund is Glencore's largest shareholder. The company signed a deal on December 7 to sell 19.5% of shares, or roughly $11 billion, to the multinational commodity trader Glencore Plc and Qatar's state-owned wealth fund. Rosneft then scrambled to find a foreign investor, holding talks with more than 30 potential buyers from Europe, the US, Asia, and the Middle East. A scramble for a foreign investorĪfter mid-October, the dossier said, Sechin predicted that it would no longer be possible for Trump to win the presidency, so he "put feelers out to other business and political contacts" to purchase a stake in Rosneft. It is unclear whether Isikoff's reporting is related to the dossier, which has been circulating among top intelligence officials, lawmakers, and journalists since mid-2016. The dossier separately claimed that Diveykin - whom US officials believe was responsible for the intelligence collected by Russia about the US election - met with Page and hinted that the Kremlin possessed compromising information about Trump. Page is also believed to have met with senior Kremlin internal affairs official Igor Diveykin while he was in Moscow last July, according to Isikoff's intelligence sources. A US official serving in Russia while Page worked at Merrill Lynch in Moscow told Isikoff that Page "was pretty much a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did." Page has criticized the US sanctions on Russia as " sanctimonious expressions of moral superiority." He praised Sechin in a May 2014 blog post for his "accomplishments" in advancing US-Russia relations. "If you get along and if Russia is really helping us," Trump asked, "why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?” In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump suggested the sanctions could be lifted if Moscow proved to be a useful ally. But he signaled that doing so would be Trump's intention if he won the election, and he expressed interest in Sechin's offer, according to the document. Page, for his part, was "noncommittal" in his response to Sechin's requests that the US lift the sanctions, the dossier said. He took a " leave of absence" in September after news broke of his July trip to Moscow, and the campaign later denied that he had ever worked with it. Page was an early foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Sechin, the source told Yahoo, raised the issue of the US lifting sanctions on Russia under Trump. "In return, Page had expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted."įour months before the intelligence community briefed Trump, then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and the nation's top lawmakers on the dossier's claims - most of which have not been independently verified but are being investigated by US intelligence agencies - a US intelligence source told Yahoo's Michael Isikoff that Sechin met with Page during Page's three-day trip to Moscow. "Sechin's associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page and his associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft," the dossier said. The claim was sourced to "a trusted compatriot and close associate" of Sechin, according to the dossier's author, former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier says the offer was made in July, when Page was in Moscow giving a speech at the Higher Economic School. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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