Spanish court probe Russian tycoon's bid for DIA supermarket

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Spanish court probe Russian tycoon's bid for DIA supermarket

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 23, 2019 7:56 am

Spanish court to probe Russian tycoon's bid for DIA supermarket chain: document
Tuesday, October 22, 2019 10:59 a.m. CDT

FILE PHOTO: Russian businessman, co-founder of Alfa-Group Mikhail Fridman attends a conference of the Israeli foundation Keren Hayesod in Mo
MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's High Court will investigate allegations that Russian tycoon Mikhail Fridman acted to depress the share price of DIA when trying to take control of the supermarket chain, a court document seen by Reuters showed.

Fridman's LetterOne fund denied the allegations on Tuesday, saying in a statement they were "untrue and defamatory".

LetterOne rescued DIA from the brink of insolvency this year after the retailer's market value fell by 90% in 2018 as it lost out to rising competition.

Spain's Supreme Court gave the High Court a mandate to investigate anonymous accusations which it said indicated Fridman may have acted to manipulate prices, engaged in insider trading and damaged the interests of minority shareholders, the court document seen by Reuters showed.

"The reality is that DIA has suffered from mismanagement and previously disclosed accounting irregularities that have negatively impacted all shareholders, including LetterOne," LetterOne said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

The court document cites a police report alleging that Fridman acted in a coordinated and concerted way through a network of corporations to create short-term illiquidity in the company and lower the share price before launching his takeover.

"According to the accusation, LetterOne Investment Holdings (directed by Fridman), shareholder in DIA, maintained a heightened financial tension to lower the share price before buying the company," said the court document, dated Sept. 18.

As part of the bid, which raised its stake to 70%, LetterOne loaned DIA 490 million euros ($546 million) and struck deals to extend debt agreements and set up new credit lines with banks.

"We have backed DIA and have committed to invest 1.6 billion euros to protect jobs and suppliers, keep stores open, and rescue this Spanish retailer," LetterOne said.

DIA shareholders met on Tuesday and approved a capital hike, the proceeds of which will be partially used to pay back LetterOne's loan.

Fridman appeared in court in Madrid on Monday as part of a separate case, in which judges are investigating the bankruptcy of digital entertainment firm Zed Worldwide. He denied all charges in that case in a statement on Monday.

(Reporting by Emma Pinedo and Isla Binnie; Editing by Ingrid Melander, Jan Harvey and Alexander Smith)
https://kfgo.com/news/articles/2019/oct ... n=business
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Re: Spanish court probe Russian tycoon's bid for DIA superma

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 23, 2019 8:01 am

Russia: Digital Incendiaries
15. Mai 2019, 19:02 Uhr
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You could easily mistake this particular Twitter user as a European Union citizen with a wide range of interests. He posts up to 60 times a day, in Dutch, German, English and Spanish. And he comments on rulings from the European Court of Human Rights as well as the Crimea crisis and the issue of Catalan. But there's still something a bit fishy about his account. He's constantly seeking to sow discord. He is sometimes belligerent, frequently twists facts and also targets Muslims and the EU while supporting Brexit and Trump. "The EU court is the new Nazi court," he recently wrote.

Even stranger than all this is the fact that, over the last four weeks, more than 800 accounts temporarily shared the same name as this single Twitter user – all very briefly. What was going on?

This game of tag jibes neatly with the strategies of Russian trolls. The supposed EU citizen appears to be a kind of virtual name tag that is simply passed along on the internet. Ultimately, though, the trail leads to St. Petersburg, to a troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). A few years ago, a number of accounts held by the IRA were exposed and blocked – and this user was linked conspicuously closely to some of them.

Nobody knows how many trolls there are or how many people they are able to deceive on the internet. But there's no denying their existence. And the upcoming European Parliament elections, to be held later this month, are on their radar.

International cooperation

This article is the result of the first international investigation and call for information made by the media partners of The Signals Network, including Die Zeit (Germany), El Mundo (Spain), Mediapart (France), Republik (Switzerland) and The Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom). In this investigation, they co-operated with the investigative platform Bellingcat.
The Signals Network is a European-American foundation dedicated to working with top tier medias launching international investigations. The Signals Network also provides support to selected whistleblowers.
For countries like Russia, the internet is like a gift that keeps on giving: It enables opinions and elections to be manipulated in other countries without having to fire a single shot, spend a lot of money or unnecessarily endanger any of your own people. It makes it possible to undermine and destabilize democracies from the comfort of a desk.

The Kremlin recognized that potential early on. Specialists with the Russian secret service agencies GRU and SWR even form policies on the basis of the data they capture. And then there are the trolls on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, controlled by opinion factories like the IRA in St. Petersburg. They foment conflict and fuel campaigns in Germany, Great Britain and the United States. The influence Moscow had on Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency in fall 2016 underscored just how successful these efforts can be.

In the grand game of geopolitics, the Russian government exploits this gray area between war and peace as an elegant way to expand its influence. But how did it all get started – and where? It is a search that must also look at the software the trolls have at their disposal. And on that search, the journey starts in a rather unexpected place.

The Perfect Curve

In the Spanish capital of Madrid, Javier Perez Dolset, a tall, soft-spoken 49-year-old, is sitting at a conference table and smiling as he recalls those two bars that could be moved up and down with a controller to hit a pixel ball back and forth. He was 6 years old, he says, when his father gave him a Pong console – and he's been obsessed with video games and programming ever since. "I was the biggest nerd in school," he says.

In 1998, when he was in his late 20s, he developed the successful video game "Commandos." Today, his empire includes the private U-tad technical university on the outskirts of Madrid, with a modern campus, complete with roads that are named after European cities, where students learn to program. His animation studio, which produces films for U.S. studios, is also located on campus. His passion for all things digital has been a constant throughout his life, even though it has also got Perez Dolset into trouble, including legal disputes and the loss of control over his most important company. It has also led to his entanglement in the digital conflict zone of troll wars.

The story begins around 2010, a time when Perez Dolset's company ZED had already been making a mint for years with mobile communications products like ring tones, music and games. But as the importance of social networks grew, Perez Dolset quickly recognized what it could mean for his clients – mobile operators who in turn had hundreds of thousands of customers of their own – if dissatisfied consumers were to join forces there to complain about products or services.

Perez Dolset decided to develop software that could serve as an early warning system to detect such brewing storms and neutralize the bad PR. He pumped millions of euros into the project – including funds from government loans, leading to subsequent claims that Perez Dolset misused those funds. By 2013, the project resulted in a program called the Social Networks Analysis Platform, or SNAP.

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The Spanish entrepreneur Javier Perez Dolset, who had the SNAP software developed. © Sergio Gonzalez Valero /​ EL MUNDO
SNAP is made up of three components. Perez Dolset and Juan Carlos Gonzalvez, the program's architect, explained how SNAP works over the course of several meetings in Madrid. ZEIT and its partners were also able to view elements of the source code.

The first component is a data rake that collects as much of the current data stream on Twitter as possible. The second component analyzes the data and converts it into graphics that help show such information as: What discussions are starting to form around what hashtags? Who are the most important participants, based on how much they are writing, how many followers they have and how often their posts are shared? SNAP can visualize links that might otherwise remain hidden. Who's connected to whom, for example. Or when very different hashtags attract the interest of a surprisingly large mix of users. Depending on the question asked, points and connecting lines are arranged on the monitor and form complex webs of relationships. But without the third component, the attack tool, it would all be little more than a gimmick. Perez Dolset named that tool the Social Baton because, just as a conductor conducts an orchestra using a baton, the customer should also be able to steer Twitter accounts using SNAP. "Orchestrated campaigns through tweets and retweets," an advertising brochure promises.

Twitter is a so-called micro-blogging platform – a real-world analogy might be a crowded pedestrian zone with everyone babbling their thoughts to themselves. At times, though, some pedestrians pick up what others are saying, and suddenly you have a choir of people shouting things like, "Company X makes bad products." The choir grows into a cacophony, and the hashtag becomes a trending topic, and the whole world begins talking about the content in question.

When a hashtag goes viral in this way, the attention it generates grows in the form of a particular curve. And this is where SNAP goes on the attack: The program is designed to simulate this curve – all it needs is control over a certain number of Twitter accounts. SNAP's algorithm then calculates how to behave to create a fake attention curve that can outwit Twitter. "In this way, you can generate millions of content views out of 20 tweets," claims Perez Dolset.

The idea behind SNAP isn't all that original, but it did take time and money to understand Twitter and to learn how to get around its mechanisms for combating manipulation. Gonzalvez, the head of development, says one of the challenges was storing the large quantities of tweets needed for real-time analysis in a powerful database. The source code indicates that an initial version of SNAP existed in 2012 – and it is likely that it was ahead of the game from a technical standpoint.

Perez Dolset initially pitched the program to a telecommunications company in Panama. But a strange thing happened before he managed to land a commercial client. A man named Pedro Arriola, an adviser to Spain's conservative party Partido Popular (PP), which led the country's government at the time, also happened to be a member of the supervisory board of Perez Dolset's university. And, says Perez Dolset, Arriola recognized that SNAP could also be useful in the political arena.

The conservatives deployed SNAP in the next general election, in December 2015, and again when Spain held new elections in June 2016. Perez Dolset's developers even programmed a special app, which hundreds of activists handpicked by the party loaded onto their smartphones. To make something go viral, all party leaders had to do was to enter the desired hashtag into an interface. SNAP's algorithm would then calculate the perfect curve – and send instructions to the mobile phones of the party activists, who basically just had to push a button for SNAP to generate what seemed like a natural flood of interest.

"It was the first tool that tried to do something like that," says Juan Corro, who was the head of communications at Partido Popular at the time. "The good thing about it was ... it would maximize the impact of the network." Partido Popular paid a symbolic price of 6,000 euros to use it. The Andalusian regional chapter of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, the country's other major party, also had access to SNAP.

Looking back, Juan Corro of Partido Popular claims that SNAP wasn't as effective as had been hoped and the party didn't deploy it again in 2019 general election campaign. Nevertheless, it doesn't change the fact that the first targeted manipulation on a social network for the purposes of an election campaign appears to have happened in the EU. "In these elections," says Perez Dolset, "we ran a troll factory."

The Trolls of St. Petersburg

By then, though, what seems to be the largest internet manipulator of all had already been active for some time: a troll factory in St. Petersburg. The Russian media had been writing for years about the "Trolls of Olgino," named after the suburb from which they flooded the internet. The organization officially registered itself as a company in 2013 under the name Internet Research Agency.

Its hundreds of workers tended to be young and earned good money by Russian standards, around $1,000 a month. But people who left the company early on described the work they did there as simplistic and repetitive. They said they were required to meet a certain quota of government-friendly posts on blogs, in forums and on websites – and that the tenor of those posts was dictated to them. At times, they would target Ukraine, at others they would paint a more flattering picture of the Russian economy than the reality. The former trolls also described being active on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr and the Russian social media network Vkontakte. "It was an idiotic job," the Economist quoted one ex-troll as saying. "Copy and paste."

There is no doubt the IRA is towing the government line, but is it an instrument of the Kremlin? A classified report from Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the country's domestic intelligence agency – which ZEIT has seen – states that the troll factory is financed "by Yevgeny Prigozhin," a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The intelligence services prepared the report for Chancellor Angela Merkel's Chancellery in 2016.

The extremely wealthy entrepreneur is occasionally called the "Kremlin chef" because his catering companies receive highly paid government contracts. Prigozhin publicly denies any connection to the trolls, and didn’t answer a number of detailed questions submitted by ZEIT. The Kremlin has also consistently denied it exerts control over the IRA. But the classified analysis from the BND and BfV explicitly names Prigozhin as one of the oligarchs who provide support for the Kremlin and "are utilized for the open and covert financing of influence activities."

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In the early years, the IRA trolls' messages were in Russian, their task that of portraying the country as a bastion of stability that was standing up to the West. Their approach tended to emphasize quantity over quality and the trolls still retweeted their tweets by hand. But the IRA began to transform in early 2014 and the organization established an English-language department. The first posts from the unit were still clumsily formulated and sometimes contained errors, but they had already tightened their focus on issues highly sensitive to Americans, like gun laws and immigration.

And the closer the fall 2016 U.S. presidential elections drew, the more active the trolls became. They began impersonating Americans, inciting against Hillary Clinton and praising Donald Trump – and they intentionally sought out every controversial issue in the U.S. to deepen societal divisions.

By September 2017, when Russian meddling became public knowledge, Trump had already long since won the election. And more and more information began to emerge. Such as the fact that the cyber-offensive had been boosted by Russian women who traveled throughout the U.S. to gather information for the IRA. They took photos in states like Louisiana and Georgia to make their subsequent tweets look as convincing as possible. In January 2018, Twitter warned up to 677,000 users that they had come into contact with accounts it believed were associated with the IRA. An indictment from a U.S. District Court spoke of "information warfare."

In Madrid, Javier Perez Dolset also read the news about the IRA's activities on Twitter. "Whoa, this looks very familiar to me," he thought to himself, he says. He began to wonder if the Russians may have got their hands on SNAP.

The Russian Connection

There's a reason Perez Dolset believes his software may have fallen into IRA hands: He has been doing business in Russia since 2007. He recalls a visit to a restaurant where the hosts served wine for 60,000 euros; and a dinner where the fish was flown in by private jet from Tunisia. They were golden years – initially, at least. In 2009, his company ZED acquired a 50.1 percent stake in the Moscow communications company Temafon. With the move, Perez Dolset had entered into an opaque tangle of companies where oligarchs close to the Kremlin seem to have been among those pulling the strings. One of the companies had closed a corrupt deal in Uzbekistan. Perez Dolset claims he didn't know anything about it.

At first, he even deepened the relationship further. In 2013, his company ZED joined forces with a number of companies, including the Russian communications firm TEMA. The new company, called ZED+, was based in the Netherlands. But just as everything was supposed to really take off, the whole thing suddenly collapsed. According to Spanish police files, some of his partners had allegedly funneled money into hidden subsidiaries. Perez Dolset claims he didn't know anything about it. ZED+ fell into difficulties, and investigations were also opened into the Uzbekistan deal. ZED+'s bank, ING, the largest in the Netherlands, also got caught up in the scandal and was eventually forced to pay hundreds of millions of euros in fines for not properly vetting its customers' accounts. Perez Dolset found himself in the crosshairs too for failing to live up to his supervisory duties. There was even talk of falsified documents, a claim he denies. ZED+ was then placed under external control in a bitter dispute that is still ongoing today. Perez Dolset is demanding 750 million euros in damages from ING.

But there's another interesting aspect of this story: Perez Dolset claims that his Russian partners blocked him from accessing Temafon during the dispute – a version of events that is corroborated by the Spanish files. Perez Dolset says the Russian partners were dismissive when he tried to phone them, and they failed to report on their activities to the Spaniards. From that point on, he says he had no control over what happened with the software.

So, did the Trolls of Olgino get a significant upgrade in the form of the Spanish software? ZEIT and its partners have taken a closer look at Perez Dolset's allegation. The fact that Temafon had access to the software was contractually established and ZEIT is in possession of a copy of the shareholder agreement. On page 24, it states: "ZED will ensure that all members of the ZED Group offer all new products and all new versions and updates, etc., of any existing or new product to the companies within the group." Perez Dolset adds that, "The code was on our server in Madrid, the partners had access."

It is also likely that SNAP would have been of interest to the IRA. Even if the software was less powerful than Perez Dolset and Gonzalvez claimed, it probably would have given the trolls a significant technological leap. "We always assumed the IRA software came from outside of Russia," says Clint Watts, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI investigator. "Around that time, the IRA was significantly expanding their capacities, and it would make sense to look for more advanced."

Watts, who provided expert testimony in March 2017 before the U.S. Senate about Russian interference, also says that when he analyzed the behavior of IRA Twitter accounts together with colleagues, they realized that even though they were run by real persons, they behaved almost as coordinated as bots (which Twitter frequently discovers and deletes). According to Perez Dolset and Gonzalvez, the programmers behind SNAP, this pattern of behaviour is what SNAP’s algorithm would direct the accounts to do. Clint Watts says: "It does seem very consistent."

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How, though, did the connection between Temafon and the IRA come to pass? This is the point where a critical meeting comes into play that Perez Dolset claims took place on Dec. 16, 2013: a working meal at a posh Moscow restaurant at which, according to Perez Dolset, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin "chef," was also present. Perez Dolset says he presented SNAP during this meeting – in Prigozhin's presence.

A presentation about SNAP for the alleged lord of the trolls? That, Western intelligence analysts believe, would further substantiate the suspicion. Perez Dolset has documentation of his Moscow trip, but nothing to verify Prigozhin's presence. He says his meetings had been organized by his local partners and that he often didn't know who he was going to meet with or the reason for the meeting. "That's why I don't have records of every meeting I took," he says. "But I know I met Prigozhin. He has a face you don't forget."

In response to a request for comment from ZEIT, Prigozhin's company responded as one might expect from a troll: Of course, he founded the Irish Republican Army (which shares the abbreviation IRA). And he lived for years on a Thai island together with Perez Dolset – and the ZEIT reporter also ought to seek psychiatric care.

From the U.S. to Europe?

Today, the IRA has long since moved on. And although we may have little knowledge of the Russian trolls' software of choice, it is obvious that they continue to learn and evolve. The times when you could recognize trolls by the fact that they stopped tweeting during lunchtime in St. Petersburg have passed. And as a result of the U.S. investigations, the world now knows what it looks like when the IRA deploys all its fire power for months on end. Although it will never be possible to determine with certainty whether the IRA helped to sway the U.S. election, we do know with certainty that it promoted divisions within the country.

But what have the IRA accounts been doing in the time since then?

To find out, ZEIT has examined the activities of as many IRA-controlled Twitter accounts as possible. In October 2018, Twitter released around 9 million Russian troll tweets from 3,841 accounts that Twitter believes were controlled by the IRA.

Our analysis shows that Germany and Europe are also targets. Of those messages, Twitter identified around 100,000 tweets that were in German. The largest number, just under 15,000, were published by the troll army in September 2017, the same month as Germany's last general election. Surely no coincidence.

Activities of Russian Trolls

How German language tweets considered by Twitter to be IRA-controlled are distributed over time

Sources: Twitter/Own analysis © Graphic: Doreen Borsutzki
The most common topics are revealed by the hashtags used by the trolls: #Merkel (2,243 times), #Erdogan (1,185), #refugees ("#Flüchtlinge" in the German original; 1,182) and #stopTerror ("#stopptTerror"; 971). The hashtag #AfD, standing for Germany's right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party, is also among the Top 10 (627). Interestingly, the tweets from fall 2017 aren't exclusively directed against the government: The hashtag #merkelmuststay ("#Merkelmussbleiben) also was used 508 times.

It's not possible to determine how many people read these tweets or were influenced by them. By German standards, though, these are relevant orders of magnitude. The trolls were determined to foment discord. Often, they used opinionated tweets to feed both sides of a conflict. In addition, the IRA tweeters often chose elections and terrorist attacks as the occasions for their meddling. They used anti-Islam hashtags following terrorist attacks and pro-Brexit hashtags on the day of the British EU referendum as well as against French President Emmanuel Macron before his election.

The most successful German tweet in our sample, with around 1,000 likes and retweets, provides a good example because it brings together two issues that tend to be quite controversial: cars and Muslims. The tweet went out on July 28, 2017, the same day an asylum-seeker in Hamburg's Barmbek neighborhood stabbed a customer in a supermarket. The tweet read: "#Diesel cars are #banned to protect the population. But the borders are kept open for Islamic threats. #Barmbek."

Is there anything that can be done to counter these attempts at influence? A degree of defeatism seems to be gaining traction in expert circles. The very existence of trolls is accepted by many as irreversible.

Even prosecutors and investigators seem helpless. U.S. prosecutors are seeking to prosecute 14 people from Russia, including Prigozhin, but the chances are essentially zero that they will ever succeed in getting hold of them.

There's a similar situation in the Netherlands, where prosecutors are reportedly mulling whether to extend their investigation into the case of the MH17 passenger flight, which is believed to have been shot down by a Russian missile system in 2014, to include the IRA. Of the 298 casualties, 190 were Dutch citizens, and Russian trolls launched an extremely effective disinformation campaign aimed at muddling the origins of the strike that brought down the jet. It's unclear if there will ever be any charges.

Garvan Walshe, head of election analysis at the London Institute for Strategic Dialogue, says, "We can no longer view social media as a mirror of society." Twitter, for example, is by no means an authentic reflection of what the populace is thinking, he says. The opposite tends to be true.

And that can also be seen as evidence for the effectiveness of the propaganda distributed by the trolls. Social media platforms were once regarded as places of lively exchange, where everyone could participate in the major debates of the day. Do we now have to bury that hope?

Javier Perez Dolset, of all people, claims that his latest project is the development of software that can detect attempts to exert influence.

Translated by Daryl Lindsey

International cooperation

This article is the result of the first international investigation and call for information made by the media partners of The Signals Network, including Die Zeit (Germany), El Mundo (Spain), Mediapart (France), Republik (Switzerland) and The Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom). In this investigation, they co-operated with the investigative platform Bellingcat.

The Signals Network is a European-American foundation dedicated to working with top tier medias launching international investigations. The Signals Network also provides support to selected whistleblowers.
https://www.zeit.de/digital/2019-05/rus ... on-english
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Re: Spanish court probe Russian tycoon's bid for DIA superma

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 23, 2019 8:07 am

Wendy Siegelman

News from Spain: Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman LetterOne (& Alfa Bank) founder is being probed in 2 company takeover cases

The CEO of one company claims Kremlin-linked Mueller-indicted Internet Research Agency stole code his co created then Russia accused him of fraud, thread

7:33 PM - 22 Oct 2019

Yesterday Mikhail Fridman appeared in court where Spanish prosecutor José Grinda is investigating him and his co LetterOne for depressing the price (using his companies Vimpelcom (VEON) & Amstedram Trade Bank) to bankrupt Spanish co Zed Worldwide & raid it


The founder & chief executive of Zed Group, Javier Pérez Dolset, claims his code was stolen by Russia's troll factory & used in Brexit and US election, HT @brazencapital

UK-taught developer 'devised software Russia used to try to sway Brexit vote'

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/0 ... ay-brexit/

A detailed account of Dolset's story - Russia: Digital Incendiaries - was published by The Signals network that includes media partners Die Zeit (Germany), ElMundo (Spain), Mediapart (France), Republik (Switzerland) The Daily Telegraph (UK) with Bellingcat


Dolset's co created program Social Networks Analysis Platform/SNAP

In 2009 Dolset company ZED bought 50.1% of Moscow co Temafon & in 2013 ZED & Russian firm TEMA created ZED+

Dolset said he met Prigozhin in 2013

Later Dolset claims Russia stole his code


In 2017 Spanish Prosecutors searched Zed Worldwide & detained Dolset for fraud & bribing Russia, Uzekistan politicans. Peter Wakkie who ran Zed+ was detained. Auditors claimed $30mil was sent to son of Head of Russian Interior Ministry Vladimir Kolokoltsev

Spanish company Zed searched, son of Interior Minister and Russian oligarch involved
8:45 / 30.06.2017
Spanish company Zed searched, son of Interior Minister and Russian oligarch involved
Detained founder of Zed Javier Pérez Dolceet⁠
Law enforcers paid a visit to the offices of Zed Worldwide.⁠

Employees of the anti-corruption department of the Spanish Prosecutor's Office conducted searches in the offices of the Zed Worldwide group on Thursday, June 29. In the framework of the raid of law enforcement officers, founder of the company Javier Perez Dolset was detained; he is suspected of fraud with subsidies of the company for giving bribes to politicians in Russia and Uzbekistan, the Spanish edition El Mundo writes.

In addition, the police conducted searches in the newspaper La Razón, which in 2009-2012 had a sponsorship agreement with Zed. The Anti-Corruption Department believes that this agreement was used for fraud with public funds. The total amount of damage, according to the investigation, exceeds € 67 million.

As the CrimeRussia wrote, earlier in Madrid Dutch lawyer Peter Wakkie, who was also a temporary manager of the technological holding company Zed+, was detained. Wakkie is suspected of withdrawing $30 million from the assets of Grupo Zed to give bribes to Russian officials.

As for the person involved in bribes in Russia, the Spanish investigators point to Russian-Israeli oligarch, the founder and shareholder of Alfa Group Mikhail Fridman (according to TAdviser, today he owns only 18% of the financial consortium). And detainee in Madrid, Peter Wakkie, considers him a confidant and even a "right-hand man." The reasons for believing this to Spanish law enforcement officers were the participation of Peter Wakkie in the work of the Highland Marine Stichting Foundation.

According to UCDEF, the missing money was withdrawn from Zed+ according to the following scheme: the Russian branch of the company, Temafon CJSC (in Spanish documents - Grupo Temafon) established Vstrecha without the sanction of the members of the management board of the holding. In 2013-2014 money of Zed+ flowed away there.

Then, as the PwC auditors later calculated, $30 million was transferred to the accounts of the Russian company FunBox, which belongs to entrepreneur Alexander Vladimirovich Kolokoltsev, the son of Head of the Interior Ministry Vladimir Kolokoltsev.
https://en.crimerussia.com/corruption/a ... -searched/




Today news broke that in addition to the investigation by Spanish prosecutors into Fridman's takeover of ZED, the Spanish court is probing a separate case of Fridman's bid for Spanish supermarket chain DIA


Wendy Siegelman Retweeted Zarina Zabrisky
More on Fridman and his business partner Petr Aven

Fridman and Aven are some of the most important names in Trump-Putin puzzle (@WendySiegelman you know it :) but for your followers) Here are just a few facts: Aven/Fridman have been backing…

Replying to @WendySiegelman
Look at BB

Image
Fridman and Aven are some of the most important names in Trump-Putin puzzle (@WendySiegelman you know it :) but for your followers) Here are just a few facts: Aven/Fridman have been backing Putin since the 90s.


In 2014, Alfa Bank formed a partnership with Amway, owned by DeVos family...In 2016, Alfa Bank was involved in the scandal with Trump’s server.

A look back before 2016: Friedman. Blavatnik. Kahn. Vekelsberg. Nameless, faceless in 2015. How about now?


The Four Horsemen Of Russia's Economic Apocalypse
Nathan Vardi
IN MARCH 2013 a group of bankers and lawyers gathered in the Frankfurt offices of Deutsche Bank to monitor the transfer of nearly $28 billion in U.S. currency from an account controlled by Russia's state-owned oil giant, Rosneft , to one controlled by four billionaire Russian tycoons: Mikhail Fridman, Viktor Vekselberg, Len Blavatnik and German Khan.

The closing of the sale of TNK-BP, Russia's third-biggest oil company, 50% owned by British Petroleum and 50% by the Russian billionaires, marked another move by Vladimir Putin to centralize power. Rosneft Chief Executive Igor Sechin, often described as Russia's second-most-powerful man behind Putin and sometimes called Darth Vader, was the central figure behind the deal. He sometimes seemed to want to remind the oligarchs of their rank by tormenting them during the negotiations, arriving late to their Moscow meetings.

As if it were being played out in a James Bond thriller, a neutral location was selected for the closing: Frankfurt, Germany, continental Europe's financial capital. Shareholder representatives insisted that they be able to immediately verify, in real time, the transfer of cash and stock certificates into an escrow account controlled by the billionaires, says a person familiar with the events . Only after a screenshot was taken showing the new balance of $27,778,900,132.16 was the transaction considered final.

Mikhail Fridman
Mikhail Fridman
Putin was ecstatic. "This is a good big deal, which is important not only for Russia's energy sector but for the entire Russian economy," he said as the deal was being announced. Rosneft's $55 billion TNK-BP purchase transformed it into the world's biggest publicly traded oil company and cemented Sechin's position as a global energy czar, with Putin presumably pulling the strings.

Sechin and Putin's mega-energy merger may have seemed like a "good" strategic deal for Russia, but for Fridman, Vekselberg, Blavatnik and Khan, whose combined net worth now hovers around $55 billion, cashing out of Russia's most oil-dependent company in the spring of 2013, with West Texas Crude selling at $92 per barrel and Western banks pumping loans into Russia, may go down as the most brilliantly timed profit-taking of the decade. It also may have set off a chain of events in global financial markets that has contributed to the collapse of Russia's currency, which plummeted 40% against the dollar in 2014. Putin's state has been thrown into recession.

In 2003 British Petroleum started working with Fridman, his other billionaire partners and their TNK oil company, creating a 50-50 joint venture called TNK-BP. It would reach $60 billion in annual revenues and pay its owners dividends in the tens of billions over a decade. In fact the cash being generated by TNK-BP helped make the four Russians some of the richest men in the world and kept BP secure as an oil power, accounting for 27% of its reserves.

German Khan
German Khan
But it was a rocky partnership. The Russian billionaires felt that BP was treating TNK-BP as a foreign subsidiary, pursuing capital expenditures that would build reserves as opposed to other things like paying extra dividends. At the same time, BP's staff in Russia became embroiled in police actions, and its then Russia chief, Robert Dudley, left the country at one point and ran TNK-BP from a secret outpost after he and other BP employees could not renew their visas. Dudley is currently BP's chief executive officer.

After several other setbacks, including losing a deal to drill in the Kara Sea to Exxon Mobil in 2011, BP entered into a transaction with Sechin to sell its TNK-BP stake to Rosneft. In return BP got $12.5 billion and a 19.75% stake in Rosneft, which was important to BP because the structure allowed BP to continue including some of Rosneft's reserves on BP's books.

For BP's billionaire partners the best option was to sell their entire 50% stake to Sechin, a close Putin ally and former Russian deputy prime minister eager to build a massive national oil company. A cash buyout was key because the Russian billionaires did not want to become minority shareholders in a Sechin-controlled Rosneft. Likewise Sechin didn't want to risk diluting control through the issuance of more shares to this shrewd investor quartet. Sechin's big problem was that he didn't actually have the money to buy them out. So he borrowed about $40 billion in cash to close the deal, partly by using short-term foreign-denominated bridge loans. Banks from all over the world participated in the financings, including JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, BNP Paribas and Unicredit.

Viktor Vekselberg
Viktor Vekselberg
But little more than a year later, in the fall of 2014, Rosneft was suddenly in a pickle. It needed to meet payments related to the bridge loans, but by then Putin's invasion of Crimea brought on crippling economic sanctions, and Saudi Arabia's decision to take on U.S. shale producers and discipline OPEC members like Iran and other producers like Russia had pushed oil prices into a free fall. Sechin and Rosneft were effectively cut off from Western banks, and there was no easy way for Sechin to roll over $7 billion of foreign currency-denominated deal loans that were coming due in December. So Sechin got backing from Russia's central bank and orchestrated a bond sale to raise rubles.

Rosneft placed $10.8 billion worth of ruble-denominated bonds in December, carrying rates below yields on similarly dated Russian government bonds. It was a mysterious transaction with almost no disclosures to date. The Russian central bank said it would accept the bonds as collateral from Russian banks seeking to borrow at preferential rates, essentially providing commercial banks a window of liquidity. No bond buyers were ever disclosed, and it's not yet clear how much money was raised. Rosneft has yet to make significant disclosures, and now Sechin has taken the position that "the ruble bond option was not exercised."

Still the murky bond issue took market players by surprise, causing speculation that Rosneft would sell the rubles it had just raised in the open market to buy up U.S. dollars to pay back its debt. The ruble plunged to record lows in response, even while oil prices appeared to be firming up.

"There was suspicion that those rubles could go to the foreign exchange market," says Sergey Romanchuk, head of forex at Metallinvestbank in Moscow. "This trade was like a trigger because people were scared that this would be a new instrument that would be used for other companies."

Len Blavatnik
Len Blavatnik
Putin's critics called the Rosneft bond issue a bailout. Sechin described the attack as a "provocation." Rosneft went on record stating that not a single ruble raised in the bond issue would be used to buy foreign currencies. Its revenues mostly come from exports denominated in foreign currencies, and in a statement Rosneft says it "generates enough cash flow in foreign currencies in order to meet its loan repayment obligations." Where were the rubles going? Rosneft would only say the proceeds would be used for "financing its project in the Russian Federation."

Few dispute Rosneft's role in roiling the already skittish global market for rubles. At 19% of Russia's $2 trillion GDP, oil is Russia's biggest cash cow, and oil exports are heavily taxed. At $100 an exported barrel, some $70 would go to the government. At $50 a barrel, about $22. Rosneft presumably hoarded foreign currency this fall to make its debt payments. Industry analysts assert that it would have likely withheld dollars from the currency market that Rosneft would normally have used to purchase rubles to meet its tax obligations. Rosneft also has a big cap-ex program in Russia funded by rubles. "They were using the proceeds of the bond issue to cover their ruble costs," says Kirill Tachennikov, an analyst at BCS Financial.

Rosneft repaid its $7 billion loan in late December. A few days later the Russian government directed Russia's big exporters to support the ruble in currency markets. Rosneft may have complied, but with about $20 billion of debt coming due in 2015 (mostly in dollars and euros) and capital expenditure plans of $20 billion, Rosneft has a $40 billion headache that worsens with every tick down in the price of oil. According to its financial statements, Rosneft has $20 billion or so in cash and is on record asking the Russian government to tap its National Wellbeing Fund for assistance. Sechin wants help from Putin, but another bond bailout would be disastrous for the ruble.

nathan document

Screenshot of 2013 transfer by Rosneft of $27,778,900,132.16 to account controlled by four Russian billionaires (Click to enlarge)

Russia's economy may be sinking into crisis, but flush billionaires Fridman, Khan, Vekselberg and Blavatnik have shown few signs of rushing to Mother Russia's aid with significant investments or capital expenditures despite pleas from Putin.

Fridman, 50, Russia's third-richest man, collected $5.1 billion from the TNK-BP deal. His college buddy Khan, 53, got $3.3 billion. The duo set up a Luxembourg company, LetterOne, with the TNK-BP cash and are trying to buy an oil and gas unit of a German utility for $6 billion. Says a spokesperson, "We are committed to reinvesting a significant portion of the proceeds in Russia and hope to identify attractive opportunities in the near future."

Ukraine-born Blavatnik, a U.S. citizen since 1984 and worth $18 billion, reaped $7 billion from the TNK-BP sale. His biggest assets: a stake in Houston chemicals producer LyondellBasell and Warner Music. In 2014 he celebrated his Rosneft triumph by purchasing Damien Hirst's gilded sculpture of a woolly mammoth for $14 million. Blavatnik declined to comment.

Vekselberg, 57, known for his art collection, including a new museum in St. Petersburg featuring his Fabergé eggs, is now Russia's second richest, worth $14 billion. He reaped $7 billion from the deal and used some of it to buy into Schmolz+Bickenbach, a Swiss steel company. "Most of the money Renova [Vekselberg] received from the deal was invested in Russia," insists spokesperson Andrey Shtorkh.

Putin is standing by his man Sechin, despite the 50% decline (in U.S. dollars) in Rosneft's stock price during 2014. He is a "good manager," says Putin. BP, which still owns 20% of Rosneft, is bracing itself for a fourth-quarter earnings hit and may be forced to write down its Rosneft equity.

"The TNK-BP deal has been an expensive decision [for Russia]," says Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist who fled to France in 2013. "TNK's owners did a very good deal."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvard ... 12a2de1542


https://twitter.com/WendySiegelman/stat ... 2582786048
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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