Who is Prasenjit Singh Kumar.? How is he connected to #Russia and #BorisJohnson is he a #RussianAsset .? What does he have to do with the #russianreport .? | Thread 🧵
While Parliament’s Intelligence Security Committee report into Russian influence on British public life remains suppressed by the PM and his advisor Dominic Cummings, Byline Times has uncovered concerning new connections between Boris Johnson and a network of wealthy oligarchs.
Johnson argued that the proposal for the new festival – from a UK-registered company called Ensemble Productions – was already supported by Moscow’s city government, the Russian Embassy, the Russian culture charity Pushkin House and the Russian Speaking Community Council (RSCC). 
The executive director of Pushkin House was Julian Gallant – a Conservative Party activist and the main shareholder in Ensemble Productions. Meanwhile, the CEO of Ensemble Productions was Olga Balakleets – the culture secretary of the RSCC and the wife of Gallant.
Although the new event was still under the auspices of the Mayor of London’s office at City Hall, Russia would provide the majority of support and funding for it. According to a Freedom of Information request,
Johnson annually requested this support from high-ranking #Russian officials and instructed them to follow-up with Ensemble Productions directly. This included Russian #President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov
the architect of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election – and Yury Lushkov, the long-term Mayor of Moscow.
In 2013, corporate sponsorship for the Maslentisa Festival appears to have gone directly to Ensemble Productions. That year, the company also helped run the Days of Ukraine Festival in London, which was supported by Boris Johnson and organised by the Firtash Foundation.
Dmitri Firtash, under US indictment and awaiting extradition from Austria, is pro-Putin oligarch a close supporter of the former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, ousted in a uprising in 2013, after backtracked on a pledge to tie the country closely to Europe than Russia.
The CEO of Ensemble Productions, Olga Balakleets, controls several active companies with variants of the name ‘Ensemble Productions’ or ‘Maslenitsa Festival’. In 2016, she set up two companies called ‘Exclusive Club No 5 Ltd’ and ‘Private Club No 5 Ltd’.
A shareholder in Private Club No 5 was Janna Malevskaya, the widow of Anton Malevsky. In a court case against Oleg Deripaska – another powerful Russian oligarch and Putin ally – Malevskaya testified that she and her husband had been close friends with Deripaska since 1995.
One of the other officers of Private Club No 5 was the Swedish-born Stefani Gorbounva, who was also the relationship manager for Ensemble Productions. In 2016, during the EU Referendum campaign,.
Gorbounova attended a Conservative Party fundraiser arranged by the controlling shareholder in Ensemble Productions. She was seated beside Boris Johnson for the evening and was photographed with him
and the EU’s pretensions to running a defence policy that have caused real trouble, then look at what has happened in Ukraine,” he said.
ourth shareholder in Private Club No 5 was Zhanna Safina, who also owned an offshore company with her husband called ‘MTA Securities and Investments’ which was alleged to have received $1.75 million as part of a money laundering scandal around BTA, a Kazakh Bank.
Its former CEO, Mukhtar Ablyazov, was accused of laundering up to £10 billion – much of it in the UK. As revealed recently by Buzzfeed News, dozens of offshore companies that are alleged to have ultimately belonged to Ablyazov were controlled by a Swiss lawyer, Stephan Roh.
Roh became known as the lawyer of Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor who – according to early indictments in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller
approached Trump aide George Papadopolous in London to offer “dirt on Hillary”. The FBI’s former director James Comey described Mifsud as a Russian agent. Mifsud has since disappeared.
Stephan Roh’s wife at the time, Olga, runs a fashion company, Rohmir, that has enjoyed multiple contracts with Ensemble Productions. According to a Facebook post, she is now a personal friend of Olga Balakleets who described her last year as her “dear partner in crime”.
In late 2017, just before he went missing over allegations that he was a Russian agent, Mifsud was photographed at a dinner in Reading with Boris Johnson. As exclusively revealed by Byline.com and the Observer,
Mifsud had told colleagues he was going to talk to the then Foreign Secretary about Brexit. At the time, Johnson dismissed any allegations of Russian interference in British politics by saying he’d seen “not a sausage” of evidence.
Since then, evidence of Russian interference in British politics has accumulated – both through online influence operations, high-level meetings with the main figures in Leave.EU, and the nerve agent attack on the town of Salisbury.
For Boris Johnson, what seemed like a one-off chance meeting with Mifsud now fits into a wider circle of Russian influence around Britain’s Prime Minister over a period of years.
Beyond the public domain information on substantial donations to the Conservative Party by Russian-born oligarchs, and Johnson’s parties with The Independent and London Evening Standard owner
Evgeny Lebedev and his former KGB father, we cannot begin to assess the full impact of foreign influence on British politics until we see the publication of the long-awaited Russia Report.
Even that might be the tip of the iceberg.
Even that might be the tip of the iceberg.
This now brings us on to “ Prasenjit Singh Kumar “
One interesting name on the list is Prasenjit Kumar (aka Prasenjit Kumar Singh), the owner of LSET. His biographical note says:
An Engineer by profession, Prasenjit Kumar is the think tank [sic] behind the success of a group of Colleges for the last 14 years. He has also served as the President and Chancellor of a US based University for eight years.
The undivided devotion and effort he has put into the group has resulted in some well-established Colleges and numerous companies internationally. He is a devotee of Anandamurtijee, who dedicated his life to the upliftment of human society.”
The first part of this is rubbish. As reported yesterday, before launching LSET in December 2013, Kumar was involved in a succession of failed educational businesses.
He also seems reluctant to name the “US based university” of which he is president and chancellor but it may be one of these. “Anandamurtijee” in the last sentence refers to Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, founder of the Indian Ananda Marga movement.
Yet another interesting governor of LSET is Prem Sharma who, as Robert Mackey points out in an article for The Intercept, is the father of Alok Sharma, Conservative member of parliament for Reading West.
In 2009, one of Kumar’s educational ventures, Halifax College (UK) Limited, donated £5,000 to the Conservative party in Reading West — money which presumably helped Alok Sharma to capture the seat from Labour a few months later.
Last month Kumar and Mifsud both attended a Conservative fundraising dinner in Sharma’s constituency where they were photographed alongside foreign secretary Boris Johnson.
In a post on Facebook last year, Kumar described Mifsud as one of his “good old friends”. Even more intriguingly, he is also a friend of the Russian woman who was initially alleged to be Putin’s niece.
The woman, later identified as Olga Polonskaya and unrelated to Putin, was present at a key meeting between Mifsud and Papadopoulos in London on March 24 last year
Polonskaya is a Facebook friend of Kumar but they have also met in person on at least two occasions. Kumar told The Observer he had initially met her at Link Campus University in Rome (also visited by Papadopoulos and Nagi Idris of LCILP) where Mifsud held an academic post.
Kumar also met her at a shopping centre in London “about two and a half months ago”. He told The Observer:
“I was with my family and we were going to the Westfield shopping centre I said: ‘Yes, come meet me there.’ She was going to translate my website for the London Executive School from English into Russian so I could try attract more Russian students.
Kumar’s description of Polonskaya as a translator conflicts with a story in the New York Times on Friday suggesting she could barely speak English:
Politico identified her on Thursday by her maiden name, Vinogradova, her brother, Sergei Vinogradov, spoke to The Times on her behalf. He said she was in London discussing a possible internship with Mr Mifsud, a friend of hers, morning before the meeting with Mr Papadopoulos
He said that she only exchanged pleasantries with Mr Papadopoulos, and that she understood only about half of the discussion between Mr Mifsud and Mr Papadopoulos. He shared a text message from her in which she explained to him the reason: “Because my English was bad,” it read.
It’s totally ridiculous,” Mr Vinogradov said. “She’s not interested in politics. She can barely tell the difference between Lenin and Stalin.”
This also begs the question why, if Polonskaya was not interested in politics, she would seek an internship with Mifsud, whose main interest was politics.
#Boris #Johnson met with Maltese professor linked to US Russia investigation #josephmifsud #prasenjitsinghkumar #Russia #ReleaseTheRussianReport
Mifsud, who once served as personal assistant to then foreign minister Michael Frendo, is believed to have introduced former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos to a Russian who said he was close to officials at the Russian foreign affairs ministry.
Mifsud had once addressed a news conference with Labour leader Joseph Muscat about an initiative to bring more tertiary education pluralism to Malta.
Johnson and Mifsud did meet. The photograph was posted by Conservative supporter Prasenjit Kumar Singh (who appears on the right in the picture).
Mifsud in Albania with Kumar and Albanian politicians
Threat of court action to owner of colleges | A leading UK university consider legal action against the owner of a group of private colleges which has a centre in Edinburgh. Who was that ? “ Prasenjit Singh Kumar “ #RussianAsset
The director of Albert College is Prasenjit Kumar Singh, an Indian national who lives in Hayes, Middlesex, and is also director of Halifax College in London and the ICOS. He is also director of Halifax Travels Ltd, in Hayes.
The college has chosen to register its internet site, icos.ac, in the Ascension Islands, rather than the UK, in order to take advantage of the country code "ac". This suffix is easily confused with that used by all officially recognised colleges and uni in the UK
Its crest is also identical to one sported by Halifax University in Wyoming, which is on an official list of unauthorised colleges, maintained by Oregon's office of degree authorisation "for the protection of the citizens of Oregon". There is a pattern of #corruption here #fraud
Bogus Colleges – Bogus Student’s – Bogus Diploma’s – Bogus Directors – Backdoor Immigration on an Industrial Scale – Need to Undo the Gordian Knot #prasenjitsinghkumar #RussianAsset
07 Jul 2004: Shadow Foreign Secretary – Michael Ancram in ‘University’ Dispute With Prasenjit Kumar Singh
The History of Dr Prasenjit Kumar Singh’s Educational Enterprises
Albert College Limited: 39 Welbeck Street, W1G 8DR London (18 October 2005-13 January 2012). Compulsory Wound up: Court Order.
Albert College Limited: 39 Welbeck Street, W1G 8DR London (18 October 2005-13 January 2012). Compulsory Wound up: Court Order.
In 2007, London University complained that Albert College was offering its students some of the university’s external courses, but had not asked for up-to-date study materials and had never put forward any candidates for examination.
Northumbria University also complained that Albert College was advertising the university’s distance-learning law course in its prospectus without the right to do so and threatened legal action.
12 Nov 2017: College chums: another academic link in the Mifsud puzzle
The London School of Executive Training (LSET) is a dynamic institution located in the heart of London with a “world-renowned” teaching faculty…..or so its website says. #prasenjitsinghkumar #RussianAsset
The London School of Executive Training (LSET) is a dynamic institution located in the heart of London with a “world-renowned” teaching faculty…..or so its website says. #prasenjitsinghkumar #RussianAsset
LSET is the latest in a series of academic or fringe-academic institutions with links to Joseph Mifsud, the now-vanished professor at the centre of the Trump/Russia affair.
In 2014 LSET told inspectors it was “working in partnership” with the London Academy of Diplomacy where Mifsud was director until the academy’s recent closure.
The owner of LSET is Prasenjit Kumar Singh, a donor to the British Conservative party who, in a post on Facebook, has described Mifsud as one of his “good old friends”.
Mifsud and Singh both attended a Conservative party fundraising dinner where they were photographed with foreign secretary Boris Johnson. Singh posted the photo on Facebook, where it was “liked” by Ms Polonskaya.
LSET was inspected in 2014 by the British Accreditation Council which gave it a broadly favourable report while noting that at the time it had a total of
only five students.
Before launching LSET in Dec 2013, Singh was involved in a succession of failed educational businesses:
only five students.
Before launching LSET in Dec 2013, Singh was involved in a succession of failed educational businesses:
13 November 2017: London School Of Executive Training Ltd – linked to Trump/Russia affair covers its tracks
Exposure of Singh’s relations with vanished professor Joseph Mifsud and with a Russian woman who posed as Putin’s niece and with British foreign secretary Boris Johnson, has resulted in the deletion of all mention of its board of governors from its website.
Dr Prem Sharma, OBE FRSA Chairman Board of Governors: Sharma is the father of Alok Sharma, Conservative MP. He has held senior positions within the Conservative Party for decades. He is also the founder Patron of Conservative Parliamentary Friends of India was awarded an OBE
Mr K.V. Rajan: Chairperson LSET Advisory Council Asia Pacific: a former member of the Indian Foreign Service. He has served in many senior diplomatic assignments, including the rank of Ambassador, in France, USA, UK, Zambia, Algeria Nepal. He holds positions Gov Higher Learning.
Dr Charles Chatterjee who studied law at the University of Cambridge and the University of London held several professorial positions in international commercial and criminal law at UK Universities
Marie Haughey, MBE: Owner, Work Permit Experts Ltd: Worked for over 40 years in the Civil Service. Served the UK Border Agency as Regional Head of the Passport Agency in Northern Ireland Later served Assistant Director in the UK Border Agency, and for her exemplary public service
11 Nov 2017: Putin’s niece – Russian Honey Trap and Brexit Activist Dr Prasenjit Kumar Singh
On Friday, the New York Times identified a woman in the documents whom Mifsud introduced to a Trump campaign operative, George Papadopoulos, as “Putin’s niece”.
On Friday, the New York Times identified a woman in the documents whom Mifsud introduced to a Trump campaign operative, George Papadopoulos, as “Putin’s niece”.
The New York Times named her as Olga Polonskaya, 30, from St Petersburg, the former manager of a wine distribution company. The FBI documents state that she has high-level connections to the Russian government.
She had not been in touch since, Singh said. Nor had he heard from Mifsud who appears to have gone to ground. Polonskaya has now changed the privacy settings on her Facebook page, but a freelance investigative journalist,
Gavin Sheridan, had already downloaded her data and discovered she had “liked” the photo of Joseph Mifsud and Boris Johnson and a status update of Prasenjit Kumar Singh that showed him with Theresa May.
Chris Bryant MP, the vice chair of the all-party parliamentary Russia group, said: “It’s all distinctly fishy
The question is what is really going on and why is @10DowningStreet trying to hide information about “ Prasenjit Singh Kumar “..? #russia #ReleaseTheRussiaReport #BorisTheLiar
