Trump secretary of state pick Rex Tillerson isn't fond of U.S. sanctions against Russia, going so far as to attend a top Russian business forum last June even as the State Department chastised him for doing so. He's not a fan of sanctions against any other nation either, not even those that support terrorism.
And in his position as head of Exxon, it turns out, the company made good on Tillerson's beliefs.
ExxonMobil did business with Iran, Syria and Sudan through a European subsidiary while President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of State was a top executive of the oil giant and those countries were under U.S. sanctions as state sponsors of terrorism, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show. [...]
ExxonMobil told USA TODAY the transactions were legal because Infineum, a joint venture with Shell Corporation, was based in Europe and the transactions did not involve any U.S. employees.
The SEC had written to ExxonMobil over the company's failure to disclose the dealings with the three sanctioned nations to their investors; Exxon apparently blew those complaints off by arguing that the transactions, amounting to about $55 million, were too small to be "material." And yes, it was done via a European subsidiary in order to dodge American sanctions against the nations at the time.
Democratic Sen. Bob Melendez will be bringing it up at Tillerson's hearing. You know, the hearing that Republicans have hastily scheduled alongside multiple others in order to flood out negative discoveries about any single nominee?
"Finding loopholes to make lucrative business deals with geo-political adversaries, while showing no clear regard for U.S. national interests, is not a resume builder for a prospective diplomat-in-chief," Menendez said in a statement to USA TODAY.
Tillerson himself blasted U.S. sanctions in 2014, telling the audience at Exxon's annual meeting that “We do not support sanctions, generally, because we don’t find them to be effective unless they are very well implemented comprehensibly and that’s a very hard thing to do.”
Why is it "a very hard thing to do?" Because oil company CEOs like Rex Tillerson are using every legal trick they can to get around their nation’s sanctions. Oh, he's a great businessman. No doubt about it. We're just not sure Rex Tillerson knows or cares which country he's just signed up to work for.