Mr. Sechin is not just the chief executive of Rosneft, he is also one of the heroes of contemporary Russian politics. He is believed to have served as a K.G.B. agent in Africa and had no real experience in the business world until he was over 40. He didn’t come to lead the state oil company because of his business acumen; he earned his position through his loyalty to Mr. Putin.
.. Mr. Sechin was working as Mr. Putin’s deputy chief of staff, and though he had no formal judicial or investigatory authority, Mr. Khodorkovsky accused him of initiating his arrest — and the campaign that followed to nationalize Yukos. It’s impossible to know, but it seems likely. Following Mr. Khodorkovsky’s arrest, Rosneft absorbed Yukos’s assets. In 2004, Mr. Sechin was appointed to head Rosneft’s board.
.. The arrest last month of Aleksei Ulyukayev, the minister of economic development, on charges of bribery was widely viewed as an act of revenge by Mr. Sechin. With the arrest, the first of an active government minister in post-Soviet Russia, he again confirmed his image as the most sinister man in the president’s inner circle.
Romney Was Right About Russia
In 2012 he called the Kremlin our ‘No. 1 geopolitical foe.’ Why can’t Trump see it?
President Obama owes Mitt Romney an apology. And so does President-elect Trump.
In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on March 26, 2012, Mr. Romney said that Russia is “without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.” He went on to explain: When countries such as Iran and North Korea cross the line, “when Assad . . . is murdering his own people” and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, “Who is it that always stands up with the world’s worst actors? It’s always Russia.”
.. Mr. Putin’s toxic blend of authoritarianism and assertive nationalism is gaining adherents across Europe and inspiring autocrats around the world. If he can distort democratic politics in the United States and get away with it, he can do so anywhere.
Leak reveals Rex Tillerson is director of Bahamas-based US-Russian oil company
Documents from tax haven will raise more questions over suitability of Donald Trump’s pick for US secretary of state
Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next US secretary of state, is the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, leaked documents show.Tillerson – the chief executive of ExxonMobil – has been a director of the oil company’s Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, since 1998. His name – RW Tillerson – appears next to other officers who are based at Houston, Texas; Moscow; and Sakhalin, in Russia’s far east.
ExxonMobil’s use of offshore regimes – while legal – may also jar with Trump’s avowal to put “America first”.
.. It is widely assumed by investors that the new Trump administration will drop sanctions. This would allow the Kara joint venture to resume, boosting Exxon’s share price and yielding potential profits in the tens of billions of dollars. According to company records, Tillerson currently owns $218m of stock. His Exxon pension is worth about $70m.
.. Rubio praised him as a “respected businessman” but said that the next secretary of state “must be someone who views the world with moral clarity [and who] has a clear sense of America’s interests”.
.. The Bahamas is notorious for secrecy and has a corporate tax rate of zero.
.. The Bahamas is notorious for secrecy and has a corporate tax rate of zero.
.. The firm was one of the largest taxpayers in the world, with an effective global tax rate in 2015 of 34%, it said. Its effective tax rate over the past three years – 2013, 2014, 2015 – was 43%, it added. This compared favourably with other Fortune 100 companies, which “have substantially lower effective tax rates than ExxonMobil”.
Donald Trump: The Russian Poodle
Both Nixon and Trump responded badly to the revelations, Nixon by ordering a cover-up and Trump by denouncing the C.I.A. and, incredibly, defending Russia from the charges that it tried to subvert our election. I never thought I would see a dispute between America’s intelligence community and a murderous foreign dictator in which an American leader sided with the dictator.
.. Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its attack on the United States.
.. Maybe all this from Russia to Angola was just Tillerson trying to maximize his company’s revenue, and he will act differently as secretary of state. Maybe. But I’m skeptical that his ideology would change in fundamental ways.