Thread by @StringwallApp

August 2, 2000

CHENEY LED HALLIBURTON TO FEAST AT FEDERAL TROUGH

➡️ State Department Questioned Deal With Firm Linked to Russian Mob 🔥🔥

publicintegrity.org/politics/chene…

Under the guidance of Richard Cheney, a get-the-government-out-of-my-face conservative, Halliburton Company over the past five years has emerged as a corporate welfare hog, benefiting from at least $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans.

One of these loans was approved in April by the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

*The Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) is the official export credit agency of the United States. EXIM is an independent Executive Branch agency with a mission of supporting American jobs by facilitating the export of U.S. goods & services.

exim.gov/about

It guaranteed $489 million in credits to a Russian oil company whose roots are imbedded in a legacy of KGB and Communist Party corruption, as well as drug trafficking and organized crime funds, according to Russian and U.S. sources and documents.

Those claims are hotly disputed by the Russian oil firm’s holding company.

*Side Note: This is the same Russian company who also threw a tantrum, when data researchers discovered in 2016 that they were exchanging prepaid gift card data with the Trump campaign in order to enable illegal micro donations using Saudi & Egyptian funds.

Halliburton, which lobbied for the Ex-Im loan after the State Department initially asserted that the deal would run counter to the “national interest,”…

*Side Note: ⬆️⬆️ Did you catch that part? The State Department initially asserted that the deal would run counter to the national interest. 🤔

…will receive $292 million of those funds to refurbish a massive Siberian oil field owned by the Russian company, the Tyumen Oil Co., which is controlled by a conglomerate called the Alfa Group.

The April Ex-Im taxpayer-insured loan, which has the effect of reducing the borrowers interest rate and extending its repayment term, is but the latest of a series of government bank guarantees from which Halliburton has benefited under Cheney,…

…who joined the company as chairman and chief executive officer in 1995.

Since then Halliburton and its subsidiaries have undertaken foreign projects in which Ex-Im and its sister U.S. bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corp., have guaranteed or made direct loans totaling $1.5 billion, mostly over the last two years.

That compares with a total of about $100 million the government banks insured and loaned in the five years before Cheney joined the company.

*Side Note: Are you following so far? Under Cheney, US taxpayer funding for Halliburton’s risky foreign projects increased 15x from $100 million to $1.5 billion.

Under Cheney, Halliburton—largely through its Brown & Root subsidiary—has garnered $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts.

*Side Note: You remember Brown & Root aka Kellogg Brown & Root aka KBR?

You know, the former Halliburton subsidiary that pleaded guilty to bribing officials in Nigeria.

And then turned right around and did it again in Kazakhstan!

Hey wait a minute here now…weren’t we just talking recently about corruption in Kazakhstan?? 😉

This is almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five years before he arrived. Most of the contracts have been with the U.S. Army for engineering work in a variety of hot spots, including Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo and Haiti.

Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall issued this statement:
“The Ex-Im Bank loan to Tyumen Oil Co. was carefully investigated by the Ex-Im Bank and approved by its governing body.”

“Halliburton’s participation in the loan complies with all applicable United States law and Ex-Im Bank regulation. The loan proceeds will be used to export millions of dollars of goods and services from the U.S. to Russia for much needed oil field improvements.”

“These exports will create many jobs in the U.S.”
“Any innuendo that Halliburton or Dick Cheney has acted improperly in connection with the Ex-Im Bank loan is false and misleading.”

Though there is no evidence that Cheney has espoused business dealings with criminal organizations, Cheney has said publicly that the government should lift restrictions on U.S. corporations in countries that the U.S. government says have sponsored terrorism, such as Libya & Iran

Wall Street analysts praise Cheney’s stewardship of the company and attribute his ability to attract government contracts and grants to his high-level access to the corridors of power that stems from his days as defense secretary under President George Bush.

If he becomes vice president, according to a Halliburton official who admires Cheney but asked to remain anonymous, “the company’s government contracts would obviously go through the roof.”

Obviously…

If Halliburton has benefited from government generosity, it also has reciprocated with substantial political contributions, largely to Republicans.

During Cheney’s five years at the helm, the company has donated $1,212,000 in soft and hard money to candidates and parties, according to numbers compiled by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. In the five years prior to his arrival, the company had given $534,750.

*Side Note: Well that’s reassuring, considering that this company has a history of bribing public officials. 🤦‍♂️

➡️➡️ Though the White House has been Democratic during those years, Congress, which appropriates funds for OPIC and the Ex-Im bank, has been controlled by Republicans.

*Moment of Foreshadowing: Ya’ know, if these guys partnered with Russian organized crime to cover up a terror attack organized by their Saudi friends in order to get us involved with a war in Central Asia against Chechen rebels so that Putin could control the smuggling routes…

…then they’re probably going to want to shut down Ex-Im Bank in a few years after this story was published (2000) and burn the evidence.

The goodwill generated by those political contributions & extensive lobbying by Halliburton & its allies on the Tyumen project helped save the day after the White House & State Department in December directed the Ex-Im Bank to delay approval of the $489 million credit guarantee.

The administration wanted the breathing space after complaints by Western investors and companies that they had been defrauded by Tyumen in an unrelated dispute.

One of the aggrieved firms was BP-Amoco, the largest oil and gas producer in the United States.

It and the others claimed that through fraud and other unsavory practices in a Russian bankruptcy proceeding, Tyumen had effectively “stolen” a vast oil field in which they held substantial equity.

BP-Amoco commissioned a private investigative report on Tyumen, which was slipped to the CIA through an intermediary.

That report, a CIA official confirmed, contained 2 1/2 pages labeled “criminal situation. The CIA promptly classified the report “secret and passed it along to the Ex-Im Bank.

➡️➡️ Further, the CIA briefed Ex-Im about its own material on Tyumen in December and told the bank that the BP-Amoco investigative report “tracked” with its own information.

The CIA declined to discuss with The Public i what was contained in the brief section labeled “criminal situation.”

Marsha E. Berry, vice president of communications for the Ex-Im Bank, said that the bank was “not aware of Tyumen’s connections to the mob. We take all due diligence in researching our partners and making sure that they are legitimate.”

*Side Note: Hey, didn’t Halliburton have some sort of bribery problem relating to Nigeria? 🤔🤔

justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…

An Ex-Im attorney who worked on the Tyumen account said that the bank checked with both the CIA & the U.S. Embassy in Moscow & concluded that there was “no evidence to support the allegations” raised in the BP-Amoco report, which he said included links to Russian organized crime.

*Reminder: Ex-Im here is denying that they could confirm the BP report. But the CIA says that the BP report was consistent with their own information and that they shared this with Ex-Im. 🔥

He would not further discuss the allegations. He said that the CIA had rated Tyumen in the upper quartile of Russian oil companies in above-board business practices. 🤣

*⬆️ The upper quartile of Russian oil companies in terms of their business practices. Well there’s a glowing recommendation for ya! 🤣🤣🤣

🔥🔥🔥 Some allegations of organized crime and drug activities involving Tyumen’s parent company, the Alfa Group, had been made public in Russia last year (1999).

🔥🔥➡️➡️ The allegations were contained in a report delivered in 1997 by anonymous officials from the FSB (the Russian equivalent of the FBI) to the national security committee of the Duma, or lower house of parliament.

*Side Note: ⬆️ The anonymous FSB official referred to above is Alexander Litvinenko. He was later poisoned for exposing the connections between Putin’s government and organized crime.

A Russian-American specialist on business practices in the former Soviet Union who has worked with the White House and Pentagon told The Public i that the allegations contained in the 1997 report have been the subject of an investigation by the FSB…

…but that the probe, for unexplained reasons, had been “put away for a better day.” 😉

Some of the key elements in the FSB report, a translation of which was obtained by The Public i, are virtually identical to those provided to a former senior American intelligence officer two years earlier by a former KGB major…

…who had been part of the Soviet spy agencys ideological counterintelligence branch.

*Side Note: Again, this is referring to Litvinenko. See:

bbc.com/news/uk-196472…

Not to get too sidetracked here, but this is important: Litvinenko asserted that the FSB had bombed the Moscow apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechen rebels as pretext for the Russian military invasion of Chechnya.

At the time of his poisoning, he had been looking into the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in her Moscow apartment building because she was reportedly about to expose the real reasons behind the war in Chechnya.

And what were the real reasons for the war in Chechnya? We can only speculate. Maybe it was because Chechen rebels had recently gained control over the narcotics trade in the region.

Maybe it was because the Chechen rebels were standing in the way of plans for Alfa Group and Halliburton to develop the Chechen oil fields? 🤷‍♂️

I don’t know. But one of Anna Politkovskaya’s colleagues at Novaya Gazeta, Oleg Lurje, reported that Falkon Capital was connected to the bin Ladin family. This assertion has since been disputed, but Oleg says that he is “dead certain”.

You remember Falkon Capital, right? The mysterious private equity firm for whom Putin made special secret arrangements in the fall of 2001 to buy Russian govt debt at a discount from the Czech Republic and essentially made $770 million from the deal.

Whatever happened there, the eventual outcome was that Dick Cheney and Dubya rushed us into a 20 year war in Afghanistan, where…SURPRISE…we ended up fighting Chechen rebels.

Anyway, sorry for the diversion. Let’s get back to the story of Halliburton working with Alfa Group and Alfa Group’s involvement with global organized crime. ⬇️

The former U.S. intelligence officer, who asked not to be further identified, wrote a contemporaneous report of what the former KGB major, at the time working for two banks formed by the KGB, told him in 1995.

The intelligence specialist provided a copy of his report to The Public i.

*Side Note: Something tells me that this next part is going to be lit!

That document & the FSB report claim that Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest & most profitable, as well as Alfa Eko, a trading company, had been deeply involved in the early 1990s in laundering of Russian & Colombian drug money & in trafficking drugs from the Far East to Europe.

⬆️⬆️⬆️ Did you catch that? Reports from both the CIA and Litvinenko’s FSB work suggest that Alfa Bank and their sister company Alfa Eko (trading company) worked with the Colombians in the 1990s to traffic drugs and launder money. 🔥🔥🔥🔥

*Side Note: This is supported by other reporting of Russian criminal networks working with Latin American drug cartels in the 1990s.

The former KGB major, who with the fall of communism in the late 1980s had himself been involved in the plan by the KGB and Communist Party to loot state enterprises,…

…said that Alfa Bank was founded with party and KGB funds, and quickly attracted rogue agents who had served in anti-organized-crime units.
🔥🔥🔥⬆️⬆️⬆️🔥🔥🔥

“They (the rogue agents on the banks payroll) quickly determined that dealing in drugs would bring the highest profits with literally no risk in Russia,” according to the former KGB officer.

He claimed that a “large channel of heroin transit was established from Burma through Laos, Vietnam, to the Far East [Siberia].”

🔥🔥🔥From there the drugs were camouflaged as flour and sugar shipments and forwarded on to Germany. The drug operation was controlled by a Chechen mob family, he said.

*Side Note: So Dick Cheney’s friends at Alfa Group were trafficking narcotics with a traditional Chechen crime family. Interesting. I suppose maybe they weren’t too happy, when Chechen rebels took over their operation. 🤔

🔥🔥🔥➡️➡️ The FSB report, too, claimed that the Alfa Groups top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, “allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe.”

*Side Note: Let’s revisit a few points about Fridman & Aven. First of all, they sued The Center for Public Integrity for reporting on this story. They lost.

Aven told Robert Mueller that he meets with Putin on a quarterly basis, at which time, he receives “implicit directives”.

And that there would be “consequences”, if/when Aven failed to follow through with these directives.

The infamous Steele dossier alleged that Fridman & Aven have been close associates of Putin, ever since Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg in the 1990s. And that they sent Putin “large amounts of illicit cash”.

So then Fridman and Aven sued Steele and Fusion GPS for including this information in the dossier. And they sued Buzzfeed for publishing the dossier.

It was Aven who hosted & funded Carter Page’s trip to Moscow in 2016, through his New Economic School.

It was a gala honoring Aven for which Mikhail Lesin, the founder of Russia Today (RT), had traveled from California to DC to attend, when he was mysterious beaten to death in 2015. (What were we saying about “consequences” earlier?)

voanews.com/a/fbi-lesin-in…

Mysteriously. I hate typos! 🤬🤬

Fridman, Aven, & Alfa Bank have also sued data researchers who discovered that Alfa Bank was apparently performing database replication processes with computer servers belonging to Trump Org and two other entities linked to Alfa Bank (Heartland Payment Systems & Spectrum Health)

…during the run up to the 2016 election between May and September of 2016.

Not everyone realizes that Spectrum Health and Amway are closely related. Amway heir Dick DeVos (aka Betsy’s husband hence Erik Prince’s brother-in-law) is chairman of the board at Spectrum Health. And Amway vice chairman Bill Payne is also on the Spectrum Health board.

Amway opened up its own Russia division, in 2005.

And in 2014, Amway partnered with Alfa Bank to launch their own prepaid payment cards (aka “Loyalty Cards”).

One last thing here, and then we’ll get back to the Alfa Group/Halliburton story. In the 1990s, Amway was sued by Proctor & Gamble. P&G hired an expert witness who assessed that Amway is run in a manner parallel to organized crime and the mafia. 🤔

Reached by telephone, Alexander Tolchinskiy, an officer of Alfa Bank in Moscow, described as “nonsense” the reports that Alfa or its bosses had been involved in the trafficking of drugs or the laundering of drug profits.

Another Alfa official said that the reports were planted by representatives of a competing company, whom he would not identify, which wanted to take over the commodities trade.

A lawyer at the blue-chip Washington law firm of Akin, Gump, which represents Tyumen, said that the claims that the company’s top officers had been involved in narcotics trafficking and money laundering were “way off the mark.” The lawyer declined to be further identified.

Rory Davenport of Fleischman Hillard, which handles Tyumen’s public relations in Washington, said that his firm had performed a background check on Tyumen and “there was no concern” about Tyumen’s alleged mob connection.

😵😵 Both the FSB and KGB reports cite an event in 1995 in which residents of a Siberian town became “intoxicated,” according to the Americans report, and “poisoned,” according to the FSB report, after they had eaten heroin-laced sugar…

…that had been shipped in a rail car container leased to Alfa Eko, which specializes in the shipment of foodstuffs.

The account from the former KGB officer was that a railroad worker had stolen a sack of sugar from the container and sold it to the persons who became ill.

The FSB document said that the incident occurred in Khabarovsk, a large city in Siberia. The former KGB officer only described the location as Siberia.

The FSB report said that within days of the incident, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) agents conducted raids of Alfa Eko buildings and found “drugs and other compromising documentation.”

Both reports claim that Alfa Bank has laundered drug funds from Russian and Colombian drug cartels.

The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now-imprisoned financial mastermind of Colombia’s notorious Cali cartel,…

…“to conclude an agreement about the transfer of money into Alfa Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas, Gibraltar and others.

The plan was to insert it back into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock in Russian companies.”

*Side Note: Have you ever looked into the investment banking firm called Allen & Company?

The account from the former KGB officer is unclear about Alfas alleged role with Rodriguez, but apparently confirms that “in 1993-94 there were attempts of the so-called Chess Player [Rodriguez’s nickname] to launder and legalize large amounts of criminal money in Russia.

🔥🔥🔥 He reported that there was evidence “regarding [Alfa Banks] involvement with the money laundering of . . . Latin American drug cartels.”

The former KGB officer claimed that the Alfa empire had its roots in a cooperative formed by KGB officers in 1987 to import computers. It would profit by avoiding import duties & launder funds by creating phony invoices to themselves reflecting 500 percent markups in their cost.

The FSB document said that in the 1980s, Alfas Fridman “secretly cooperated with operatives of the KGB,” was active in the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and established the cooperatives Gelios and Orsk to purchase computers from abroad.

The former U.S. intelligence officer who interviewed the ex-KGB major said that such a pattern was not unusual.

He said that the KGB and Komsomol often teamed up with bright young entrepreneurs like Fridman in the late 1980s and early 1990s and provided seed money to launch private ventures, often involving the importing of computers or the formation of banks.

He said that Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose reputedly heavily mobbed-up Menatep bank folded in 1998, also got his seed money from the Komsomol & also initially dealt in computers. He said that 47% of the KGB agents in the Soviet Union had been groomed by Komsomol.

The FSB report also claims that top officials of the Alfa Group “cooperated” with a number of Russian crime organizations, notably the notorious Solntsevo mob family in Moscow.

Mob Bank ➡️ The Russian-American specialist on business practices in Russia, who has a wide array of contacts inside Russia’s law enforcement and intelligence communities, agreed that Alfa Bank, as well as others, are used by the Solntsevo crime family.

As with most of Russia’s post-Soviet privatization efforts, Alfa Groups takeover of Tyumen Oil was complicated and fraught with allegations of impropriety.

In July of 1997, Novy Holdings, a joint venture involving Alfa and a New York-based Russian-American firm, Access Industries, purchased a 40 percent stake in Tyumen Oil from the Russian government for roughly $810 million.

The sale, however, was not without controversy. Russian President Boris Yeltsin himself instructed his privatization czar, Deputy Prime Minister Alfred Kokh, to “personally control the investment tender of the TNK company [Tyumen Oil]”…

…because he was concerned that Tyumen’s worth might have been grossly undervalued due to Alfas improper influence on the audit of the oil giant.

A second cash auction for the remainder of the oil company was scheduled for later that year, with most analysts predicting that Alfa would seek to increase its stake to a majority position.

But the auction was suspended in November of 1997, drawing criticism that the government was deliberately delaying the sale of Tyumen in order to give Alfa additional time to raise the necessary funds it needed to take control of the company.

The most outspoken critic of Alfas attempt to wrest control of Tyumen was Viktor Paly, general director of Nizhnevartovskneftegaz, Tyumen Oil’s production subsidiary. Paly held a 9% stake in Tyumen Oil through an off-shore company Cadet Establishment.

By February of 1998, however, following meetings at Alfas offices in Moscow, Paly agreed to divest his stake in Tyumen Oil to Alfa.

One month later, Alfa bought an additional 1.17 percent of Tyumen Oil as part of the long-delayed second auction, raising its total stake in the oil company to a 51 percent controlling position.

Tyumen [*and thus Alfa Group & their Russian mob associates*] could have significant access to the White House, should the Bush-Cheney ticket win in the November presidential elections.

Tyumen’s lead attorney at Akin Gump is James C. Langdon Jr., a managing partner at the firm. He is also one of George W. Bush’s “Pioneers,” one of the elite fund raisers who have brought in at least $100,000 for the Republican presidential hopeful.

*Reminder: Putin’s oligarchs hire the best lawyers, auditors, bankers, and lobbyists to help them develop the legal means to conceal and launder their funds.

Last June [1999] in Washington, Langdon helped coordinate a $2.2 million fund raiser for Bush, and agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers and lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each.

*Side Note: They’ve been selling public policy to hostile foreign adversaries and global organized crime for decades.

Langdon’s secretary told The Public i that he was away on travel this week and could not be immediately reached.

Tyumen could also look to one of Cheney’s deputies for access should the Republicans triumph in November.

One of Halliburton’s top lobbyists, Dave Gribbin, was Cheney’s chief of staff at the Defense Department during the Bush administration, and his lobbying activities have borne fruit for Halliburton over the last several years.

*Side Note: All of this talk about Dick Cheney’s staff has reminded me about former Cheney aide Leandro Aragoncillo who took top secret documents from U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's office and gave them to opposition figures in the Philippines.

reuters.com/article/amp/id…

*Seems as though this might be a concern, considering that the plot to crash airplanes into buildings was originally hatched by Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) in The Philippines and later shared with Osama bin Ladin.

*And all that was happening while Cheney’s associates at Alfa Group were trafficking narcotics with Chechen crime families?

*But Alfa Group’s narcotics trafficking operation was being upended by Chechen rebels?

*Which inspired Putin to stage a terror attack against his own citizens as pretext to justify a military campaign in Chechnya?

*And then in 2001, Putin made a $770 million financial deal with a secret private equity firm reportedly connected to the bin Ladin family?

*And then we invaded Afghanistan to fight Chechen rebels? I’m sorry if this all sounds nuts, but I have questions.

As with Halliburton’s campaign donations, the company’s lobbying expenditures increased under Cheney’s watch. In 1996, the company spent $280,000 on lobbying. In 1997, the company increased those expenditures to $360,000, to $540,000 in 1998, and to $600,000 in 1999.

That upward trend parallels the increasing success Halliburton has had in winning government contracts, loans, and guarantees under Cheney’s direction.

Not surprisingly, several key issues relating to Halliburton’s success in securing government largesse appear frequently on the company’s lobbying reports.

Among them are “OPIC Reauthorization,” Defense Appropriations Bills,” and “Foreign Operations Appropriations Bills Funding EXIM, OPIC, and TDA” [the Trade and Development Agency, a government agency similar to Ex-Im and one that also funds Halliburton projects around the world].

Gribbin also lists “EXIM,” “OPIC,” and “TDA” as federal agencies that were contacted as part of the company’s lobbying activities. Gribbin did not return repeated calls from The Public i.

In no small irony, the official Bush Web site, recently revamped to accommodate the addition of Cheney to the ticket, notes in the “Foreign Policy” section that the duo supports “redirecting American assistance, investment and loans to the Russian people,…

…not to the bank accounts of corrupt officials.”