IONDON – A company recently sanctioned by the U.S. because of Alexei Navalny’s poisoning attack is linked to the money laundering network that Natalia Veselnitskaya tried to cover up at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in 2016, according to financial records obtained by The Daily Beast.
We now know why Vladimir Putin was so desperate to minimize the international corruption investigations that started when Sergei Magnitsky discovered a $ 230 million fraud against the Russian people. For the first time, this network of dark money can be linked to the killer chemical weapons program run by Russia’s notorious intelligence services.
After exposing the massive theft of state money, Magnitsky ended up dead in a Russian prison cell. Legislation in his name has been enacted worldwide by governments seeking to crack down on corruption, including the United States’ Magnitsky Act. Despite interventions by Veselnitskaya – a Russian lawyer who was sent to the United States to persuade Trump’s campaign to annul the law – investigations that track stolen money continue to expose an international network of bank accounts linked to alleged irregularities.
This month, the Biden government said it was sanctioning a German chemical company called Riol-Chemie because of its “activities in support of Russia’s weapons of mass destruction programs”.
It was part of the government’s response to the assassination attempt on Putin’s Navalny nemesis. The anti-corruption activist narrowly survived a chemical weapon attack after a plane carrying him on a long flight back to Moscow was diverted and he was able to receive emergency medical care – first at a Siberian hospital and then in Germany, where was transported by plane for further treatment.
After waking up from a coma for weeks, Navalny cheated a member of the murder team by posing as a senior FSB officer and cheating on his alleged killer by having him explain over the phone how the death squad rubbed nervous agent Novichok at the seams of Navalny’s underwear.
President Trump ignored the attack, but Biden’s team announced sanctions against seven top Russian officials and 14 other entities involved in the production of chemical and biological weapons on March 2.
One of the entities pointed out by the US government as a cog in the Russian weapons of mass destruction program was Riol-Chemie. Investigative files compiled by the Lithuanian authorities – and reviewed by The Daily Beast – show that Riol-Chemie received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a British Virgin Islands company accused of laundering part of the stolen money discovered by Magnitsky.
According to sources close to a separate investigation by French authorities, financial records show that two companies registered in New Zealand, which also received funds from the $ 230 million fraud, transferred more than $ 1 million to Riol-Chemie.
Riol-Chemie did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
The formal US designation of Riol-Chemie as a sanctioned entity does not give details of its role in Russia’s weapons program, but purchase orders and invoices seen by The Daily Beast show that the company received components from an American manufacturer now extinct. called Aeroflex. Records show that Aeroflex, then headquartered in New York, received orders for radiation-hardened semiconductors and regulators in 2007. These components are often used to build missiles and satellites.
Orders were to be sent to Riol-Chemie in northern Germany, but records show that the tightly controlled radiation chips were paid for by another entity accused of laundering stolen Russian money. According to the paperwork, the invoice went to Tolbrist Alliance Inc, a front company listed on the Offshore Leaks Database by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as being registered in a mailbox in the British Virgin Islands.
According to the bank records analyzed by The Daily Beast, the Lithuanian authorities found that Tolbrist Alliance Inc had received about $ 50 million from companies linked to the fraud discovered by Magnitsky.
“This clearly shows why Putin was disturbed because of Magnitsky’s investigation.“
– Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, who was searched for a $ 230 million scam.
Financial records show that Tolbrist spent at least $ 1.5 million on Aeroflex.
Aeroflex, which is no longer negotiating, has been detained by the State Department for hundreds of violations of the International Arms Traffic Regulations (ITAR), “consisting largely of unauthorized exports”. There is no indication that the company broke the law by handing the rad-chips to Riol-Chemie – the transactions took place years before the United States government announced that the German company was a secret part of Putin’s smuggling operation. .
The repeated links between the companies accused of laundering the $ 230 million and Riol-Chemie may point to a broader and more calculated scheme with far-reaching political implications. The money stolen from the Russian people – although the authorities turned a blind eye – was apparently channeled into a black market weapons program. Whoever directed the dispersal of the stolen funds also played a top secret role in Russian national security.
“This clearly shows why Putin was upset over Magnitsky’s investigation,” said Bill Browder, who led the anti-corruption campaign on behalf of his former lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. “Each layer of this onion that is peeled, more and more dirty and dangerous information emerges.”
Previous reports have also said that part of the stolen funds ended up in the hands of people linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program.
The man charged with ending the Magnitsky-inspired investigations that were flourishing around the world was Yury Chaika, one of Putin’s leading advocates and Russia’s attorney general until last year. President Obama signed the Magnitsky Anti-Corruption Act in 2012, and Chaika’s protégé, Veselnitskaya, was sent to make the case against the law at the famous Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and the former campaign manager for Trump, Paul Manafort in 2016.
Putin himself brought the matter up to Trump himself at the Helsinki summit in 2018. The former president listened, agreeing to a litany of distortions about electoral interference, Crimea and Browder during a joint news conference.
Veselnitskaya also joined the legal defense team at Prevezon, another company accused of laundering stolen money, which was under investigation in the Southern District of New York. The case was eventually settled out of court with Prevezon paying $ 6 million. Velselnitskaya was accused of obstructing justice by collusion with Chaika’s Moscow office for medical evidence presented to the court.
While Trump-Russia speculation was at its height, Veselnitskaya always insisted that she was not at the Trump Tower to try to help influence the election; she was there to present the case against the Magnitsky investigation.
“To sum up, those were not the happiest days of my life,” Velselnitskaya told NBC amid the reaction surrounding the Trump Tower meeting.
Despite personal costs, it appears that Putin and his cronies will do nothing to prevent the fraud investigations they face. But the U.S. government’s sanction of Riol-Chemie may offer an important lesson for the Kremlin: even dark money can be followed.