Another link has been forged in the Trump Russia chain and that is that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is doing business with Russian billionaire Kirill Shamanov who is married to rock-n-roll acrobatic dancer Katerina Tikhonova and she is the secret daughter (now revealed) of Vladimir Putin.
Newsweek:
The Paradise Papers already revealed that Ross has earned a substantial sum of money from his dealings with Russia. One of the companies he owned a stake in, a shipping company called Navigator, had a long history of deals with a Russian gas and petrochemicals company co-owned by Shamanov, the Paradise papers revealed.
Shamanov’s petrochemical company is one of the largest in Russia and has reportedly benefited from government favoritism. For example, Shamanov's brother allegedly received a $1.75 billion state loan for the company at one third the rate paid by everyone else in Russia.
Ross’s company Navigator has made at least $68 million in revenue due to its partnership with Shamanov’s company, the Guardian reported. Navigator’s revenue from Shamanov’s company almost doubled between 2014 and 2015, at time when some of the company’s other owners were under US sanctions.
The pesky business of Russian sanctions and Russian connections keeps coming up.
These aren’t the only connections Ross has had with Russian elites. In 2014, Ross led a takeover of the Bank of Cyprus, whose biggest shareholder at the time was the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev. Some years earlier, Rybolovlev had purchased a Florida mansion from Trump for $95 million.
Meanwhile, Ross maintained his holdings in Shamanov’s company even after taking a position in the Trump administration, which some experts believe is a conflict of interest because the Commerce Secretary is consulted on which Russians to sanction.
Interesting how more and more dots connect and they all form an arrow leading straight to Donald Trump.