Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch sanctioned by the Obama administration for his direct and malign influence in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, is back in the news, with Bloomberg reporting that documents filed in a court in the U.K. show U.S. prosecutors are still on his case, seeking records from one of his companies "as part of a previously unreported investigation."
U.S. investigators, following up on an offshoot of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation in a "live and ongoing" probe, have gone to the U.K. courts to seek evidence of "money laundering, tax offenses and fraud offenses" by 18 individuals and companies, including at least one controlled by Deripaska.
That would be the same Deripaska whose companies Moscow Mitch McConnell helped the Trump administration get sanctions relief for with a Senate vote. One of those, the Rusal aluminum company, is the one that's now spending a couple hundred million on an aluminum mill in Moscow Mitch's home state of Kentucky. That sanctions relief came after a supposed "deal with the company that reduced the ownership interest of its Kremlin-linked founder, Oleg Deripaska." Which of course everyone believes, right?
In actual fact, while the administration said that "[Deripaska] had to make painful concessions to get the sanctions lifted," it lifted "hundreds of millions of dollars in debt" from Deripaska, "while leaving him and his allies with majority ownership" of EN+, a parent company of Rusal. Oh, and allowing him to transfer more than $10 million shares of EN+, more than $78 million worth, to his children. But he was totally sanctioned.
The sanctions, remember, were levied against him because of his direct interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—the interference that the Obama administration knew was happening before the election and that Moscow Mitch threatened to go to war over if it tried to tell the American people about. With Deripaska still very much in the sights of U.S. prosecutors, Moscow Mitch and his aluminum mill are right back in the picture.
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