L.ONDON – A company recently sanctioned by the US for Alexei Navalny’s poisoning attack is linked to the money laundering network that tried to cover up Natalia Veselnitskaya during the infamous Trump Tower rally in 2016, according to financial data obtained by The Daily Beast.
Now we know why Vladimir Putin was so desperate to downplay the international corruption investigations that began when Sergei Magnitsky discovered a $ 230 million fraud against the Russian people. For the first time, that dark money network can be linked to the murderous chemical weapons program of the notorious Russian 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 around the world by governments trying to fight corruption, including the US Magnitsky Act. Despite the intervention of Veselnitskaya – a Russian lawyer sent to the US to convince the Trump campaign to reverse the law – investigations continue to reveal that stolen money is exposing an international web of bank accounts linked to alleged misconduct.
This month, the Biden government said it was sanctioning a German chemical company called Riol-Chemie for its “activities in support of Russian weapons of mass destruction”.
It was part of the government’s response to the attempted murder of Putin nemesis Navalny. The anti-corruption activist narrowly survived a chemical weapons attack after a plane with him was diverted on a long flight home to Moscow and he was able to receive urgent medical care – first in a Siberian hospital and then in Germany, where he used to be. air flown for further treatment.
After waking up from a week-long coma, Navalny outwitted a member of the assassination team by posing as a senior FSB official and tricked his potential killer by explaining over the phone how the homicide squad put the Novichok nerve gas into the seams. from Navalny’s underpants.
President Trump shrugged off the attack, but the Biden team announced sanctions on March 2 against seven senior Russian officials and 14 other entities involved in chemical and biological weapons production.
One of the entities designated by the US government as a cog in Russia’s mass destruction program was Riol-Chemie. Investigative files compiled by authorities in Lithuania – and reviewed by The Daily Beast – show that Riol-Chemie received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a British Virgin Islands registered company accused of laundering some of the stolen money Magnitsky had been discovered.
According to sources close to a separate investigation by the French authorities, financial records show that two New Zealand registered companies, which also received money 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 United States’ formal designation of Riol-Chemie as a sanctioned entity does not detail its role in the Russian weapons program, but purchase orders and invoices seen by The Daily Beast show that the company received components from a now-defunct American manufacturer named Aeroflex. Records show that Aeroflex, then based in New York, took orders in 2007 for radiation-hardened semiconductors and regulators. These components are often used to build missiles and satellites.
The orders were supposed to be sent to Riol-Chemie in Northern Germany, but the records show that the tightly controlled radiation chips were paid for by yet another entity accused of laundering the stolen Russian money. According to the paperwork, the bill went to Tolbrist Alliance Inc., an empty corporation listed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in the Offshore Leaks Database as registered with a PO Box in the British Virgin Islands.
According to bank records checked by The Daily Beast, Lithuanian authorities found that Tolbrist Alliance Inc. received approximately $ 50 million from companies related to the fraud discovered by Magnitsky.
This clearly shows why Putin went wild because of the Magnitsky investigation.
Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, who was raided for $ 230 million in fraud.
Financial records show that Tolbrist spent at least $ 1.5 million with Aeroflex.
Aeroflex, which is no longer trading, was arrested by the State Department for hundreds of violations of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) “largely consisting of unauthorized exports”. There is no indication that the company was breaking the law by supplying the rad chips to Riol-Chemie – the transactions took place years before the US government announced that the German company was a secret part of Putin’s illegal arms-smuggling operation.
The repeated ties between companies accused of laundering the $ 230 million and Riol-Chemie may point to a broader, calculated plan with far-reaching political implications. Money stolen from the Russian people – while authorities turned a blind eye – was apparently diverted to a black market weapons program. The person who directed the distribution of the stolen funds also played a top-secret role in Russian national security.
“This clearly shows why Putin has gone wild with the Magnitsky investigation,” said Bill Browder, who led the anti-corruption campaign on behalf of his former lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. “Every layer of this onion that is peeled brings out increasingly dirty and more dangerous information.”
Previous reports also claimed that some of the stolen money fell into the hands of people involved in the Syrian chemical weapons program.
The man tasked with closing the Magnitsky-inspired investigations that flourished around the world was Yury Chaika, one of Putin’s chief fixers and, until last year, the Russian Prosecutor General. President Obama signed the Magnitsky anti-corruption bill in 2012 and Chaika’s protégé, Veselnitskaya, was sent to file the case against the law during the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2016 .
Putin himself brought up Trump at the Helsinki summit in 2018. The former president listened, nodded along with a litany of bias over electoral interference, Crimea and Browder at a joint press conference.
Veselnitskaya was also part of the legal team defending Prevezon, another company accused of laundering the stolen money, which was being investigated by the Southern District of New York. The case was eventually settled out of court, and Prevezon paid $ 6 million. Veselnitskaya was charged with obstruction of justice for colluding with Chaika’s Moscow office over evidence from a doctor presented to the court.
While Trump-Russia speculation was at its peak, Veselnitskaya always insisted she was not in the Trump Tower trying to influence the election; she was there to take the case against the Magnitsky investigation.
“To summarize, those weren’t the happiest days of my life,” Veselnitskaya told NBC News amid the backlash surrounding the Trump Tower rally.
Despite the personal expense, it seems that Putin and his cronies will stop at nothing to obstruct the fraud investigations they are facing. But the US government’s approval of Riol-Chemie could be an important lesson to the Kremlin: Even dark money can be tracked.