AP Reports Trump Cronies Tried To Shakedown Ukrainian State Owned Gas Firm
October 7th 2019
Rick Perry (Gage Skidmore)
By Merline1963 (of the Daily Kos community)
The AP is reporting that some wealthy Trump and Guiliani political donors were trying to shakedown the Ukrainian state owned firm Naftogazt. The story is a bit complex, but Energy Secretary Perry and four American businessmen were pressuring Ukrainian President Zelensky to replace Nfotgazt’s management board with men who would then OK contracts of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the U.S.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — As Rudy Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials last spring to investigate one of Donald Trump’s main political rivals, a group of individuals with ties to the president and his personal lawyer were also active in the former Soviet republic.
Their aims were profit, not politics. This circle of businessmen and Republican donors touted connections to Giuliani and Trump while trying to install new management at the top of Ukraine’s massive state gas company. Their plan was to then steer lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies, according to two people with knowledge of their plans.
The business players:
At the center of the Naftogaz plan, according to three individuals familiar with the details, were three such businessmen: two Soviet-born Florida real estate entrepreneurs, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and an oil magnate from Boca Raton, Florida, named Harry Sargeant III.
Parnas and Fruman have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations to Republicans, including $325,000 to a Trump-allied political action committee in 2018. This helped the relatively unknown entrepreneurs gain access to top levels of the Republican Party — including meetings with Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
The two have also faced lawsuits from disgruntled investors over unpaid debts. During the same period they were pursuing the Naftogaz deal, the two were coordinating with Giuliani to set up meetings with Ukrainian government officials and push for an investigation of the Bidens.
Sargeant, his wife and corporate entities tied to the family have donated at least $1.2 million to Republican campaigns and PACs over the last 20 years, including $100,000 in June to the Trump Victory Fund, according to federal and state campaign finance records. He has also served as finance chair of the Florida state GOP, and gave nearly $14,000 to Giuliani’s failed 2008 presidential campaign.
Emboldened is mine.
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The fourth businessman is unnamed because he fears retaliation, according to the AP.
The businessmen’s goal:
In early March, Fruman, Parnas and Sargeant were touting a plan to replace Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev with another senior executive at the company, Andrew Favorov, according to two individuals who spoke to the AP as well as a memorandum about the meeting that was later submitted to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev…
The three approached Favorov with the idea while the Ukrainian executive was attending an energy industry conference in Texas. Parnas and Fruman told him they had flown in from Florida on a private jet to recruit him to be their partner in a new venture to export up to 100 tanker shipments a year of U.S. liquefied gas into Ukraine, where Naftogaz is the largest distributor, according to two people briefed on the details.
Sargeant told Favorov that he regularly meets with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and that the gas-sales plan had the president’s full support, according to the two people who said Favorov recounted the discussion to them.
Emboldened and italics is mine.
Favorov’s reaction to their “proposal”:
These conversations were recounted to AP by Dale W. Perry, an American who is a former business partner of Favorov. He told AP in an interview that Favorov described the meeting to him soon after it happened and that Favorov perceived it to be a shakedown. Perry, who is no relation to the energy secretary, is the managing partner of Energy Resources of Ukraine, which currently has business agreements to import natural gas and electricity to Ukraine.
A second person who spoke on condition of anonymity also confirmed to the AP that Favorov had recounted details of the Houston meeting to him.
It gets worse. Favorov was informed that Trump planned on ditching Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and find someone more intuned with their business interests. This so alarmed Mr. Dale Perry that he wrote a memo about this and forwarded it to a foreign service officer and the State Department. The memo was written and sent on April 12th.
The political players:
Rudy Guiliani was in on meetings to discuss this gas deal.
Energy Secetary Rick Perry who in a private meeting with Zelensky, “Perry pressed the Ukrainian president to fire members of the Naftogaz advisory board.” Also, Perry wanted the following:
Perry again referenced the list of advisers that he had given Zelenskiy, and it was widely interpreted that he wanted Robert Bleyzer, a Ukrainian-American businessman from Texas, to join the newly formed board, the person said. Also on the list was Robert Bensh, another Texan who frequently works in Ukraine, the Energy Department confirmed.
And guess who was at this meeting?
Gordon D. Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt D. Volker, then the State Department’s special envoy to Ukraine, were also in the room, according to photographs reviewed by AP. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said he was floored by the American requests because the person had always viewed the U.S. government “as having a higher ethical standard.”
You knew money had to be involved here, especially when it comes to Trump and Republicans
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