Thread by @ZarinaZabrisky

🔥💥⚡️⚡️🎟‼️🃏🔻#MichaelCaputo thread: a Russian partner working for Alfa Bank and oligarchs, pro-Russian Ukrainian connections and more fun facts and pictures, or the Songs of Hell and Damnation. @WendySiegelman @grantstern @peterjukes @dcpoll @brexit_sham @TrickFreee

1. #MichaelCaputo served as a communications adviser to the Trump campaign in New York and the director of the New York primary in 2016. linkedin.com/in/michael-cap…

2. In 1994 to 1999, Caputo, who is a fluent Russian speaker, lived and worked in Moscow where he says he “worked very closely with Yeltsin's Kremlin and the Duma.”

3. He is self-described on his current website as “the only executive in history who has worked for both the White House and the Kremlin.” caputopr.com/bios.php

4. In Moscow, he worked for The Florence Group, a PR firm that helped Western companies to do business in Russia, where he provided government relations, media liaison, message development, and executive communications services.

5. NOTE: I worked in Moscow in 1994-1998 and provided Western companies with the government liaison, too. That meant: bribes to pension funds and tax inspectors, negotiations with the organized crime groups about "krysha," a protection money, etc.

6. After Caputo moved to the US in 1999, he co-founded Rainmaker, a PR firm based in Washington, D.C., but working for Russians as well. Rainmaker Interactive has been doing PR work for Alfred Kokh, CEO of Gazprom Media.

7. Gazprom, a large investor in the Russian network NTV, is nearly 40 percent owned by the Kremlin. Putin seized NTV channel in 2000 when he first came to power. theatlantic.com/international/…

8. Rainmaker was to "represent a Russian media company, perhaps ensuring the agency's role in a future project shining the tarnished image of the Kremlin."
webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache…

9. In 2003, Caputo founded Michael Caputo Public Relations (CPR). His partner of 30 years, Sergey (aka George aka Zhora) Petrushin, is based in Moscow and Miami and operates Zeppelin Production.

10. Caputo is also a Managing Director of ZeppCom, of which Petrushin is CEO.

11. 🔥💥Zeppelin “has close ties” with Mikhail Fridman and Alfa Bank and worked on the biggest music festivals for Alfa Bank. The webiste is gone but here are the archive screenshots with marketing goals. rbc.ru/magazine/2016/…

12. ⚡️⚡️Petrushin managed a nightclub in Moscow, funded by Alexander Mamut, “a leading censor of the Russian mass media AND cinema” according to a Russian publication New Times newtimes.ru/articles/detai…

13. ...and "probably the most powerful oligarch you have never heard of," according to Telegraph.

telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsby…

14. ...close to Putin...

15. ...and, previously, to Yeltsin's administration (and, through marriage, related to the former USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev)

16. The club managed by Petrushin, The Most, was a gathering place for all Russian oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich (Mamut's close friend), Mikhail Fridman of Alfa Bank, and many more. webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache…

17. NOTE: Nightclubs in the 90s were known to be used for money-laundering and had to have a strong "krysha" (protection, usually provided by combined forces of the KGB/FSB, organized crime group and the government officials.)

18. ‼️🔻 In 2007, Caputo consulted on a parliamentary campaign in Ukraine, working for Volodymyr Lytvyn, the former parliament speaker and former chief of staff to Putin-supported ex-President Leonid Kuchma.

19. IMPORTANT NOTE: 🔻DO NOT CONFUSE PRO-RUSSIAN UKRAINIAN POLITICIANS AND OLIGARCHS WITH UKRAINIANS. Post-Soviet space is an ethnically and politically complex zone.

20. Caputo worked for Lytvyn who later supported Putin’s puppet regime of Yanukovich. kremlin.ru/events/preside… Photos: Lytvyn and Putin.

21. According to US—Ukraine Business Council, Caputo did not work as an independent consultant but “ worked
in the past with representatives of Davis, Manafort & Freeman” usubc.org/AUR/aur870.php

22. In 2017, Caputo also appeared on a panel “From Russia with Business” with the Russian American Chamber of South Florida. Read on the ties to the Russian organized crime and Trump at this thread by @JamesFourM

https://twitter.com/jamesfourm/status/872984834225963008

23. *I am not covering the known and more obvious connections with Roger Stone, Manafort, etc. but lesser known Russian/Ukrainian sources and nuances lost due to the cultural misunderstanding. I quote open sources material.

24. Please share. Oil/gas monopoly, #moneylaundering, #oligarchs, puppet-regimes installment, suppression of mass media are a repeated pattern of the mafia state. The depth of this network needs to be exposed and explained for the sake of protecting our liberal democracies.

ps. You don't say! cnn.com/2018/05/02/pol…

Did an article on that: medium.com/@ZarinaZabrisk…