Secret World of Trump and Putin
by PANKAJ SHARMA
Is it really so difficult to know the real intent behind American President Donald Trump’s open attempt to humiliate President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy? It was more than the politics. It was for personally pleasing Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now Trump is openly showing his preference to Putin, but he has years old history of secret understanding with Putin. During his first term as the President from 2017 to 2021, when he has been formally positioning USA in a face-to-face confrontationsl situation with Russia, Trump
was personally having a hand in gloves relationship with Putin.
A trove of 13.4 million records exposed in 2017 revealed the strong ties between Russia and Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary. The documents had disclosed the secret dealings of the chief fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the offshore interests of the queen of England and more than 120 other politicians around the world.
The leaked documents, dubbed the Paradise Papers, had shown how deeply the offshore financial system is entangled with the overlapping worlds of political players, private wealth and corporate giants, including Apple, Nike, Uber and other global companies that avoid taxes through increasingly imaginative bookkeeping manoeuvres.
One offshore web led to Trump’s commerce secretary, private equity tycoon Wilbur Ross, who had a stake in a shipping company that has received more than $68 million in revenue from a Russian energy company co-owned by the son-in-law of Putin. In all, the offshore ties of more than a dozen Trump advisers, Cabinet members and major donors appeared that time in the leaked data.
The new files came from two offshore services firms as well as from 19 corporate registries maintained by governments in jurisdictions that serve as waystations in the global shadow economy. The leaks were obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a network of more than 380 journalists in 67 countries.
The leaked cache of documents also included more than half a million files from Asiaciti Trust, a family-run offshore specialist that is headquartered in Singapore and has satellite offices from Samoa in the South Pacific to Nevis in the Caribbean.
The leaked files also contained documents from government business registries in some of the world’s most secretive corporate havens in the Caribbean, the Pacific and Europe, such as Antigua and Barbuda, the Cook Islands and Malta. One-fifth of the world’s busiest secrecy jurisdictions are represented in these databases.
Taken as a whole, the leaks had revealed offshore traces of spy planes purchased by the United Arab Emirates, the Barbados explosives company of a Canadian engineer who tried to build a “super gun” for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Bermuda company of the late Marcial Maciel Degollado, the influential Mexican priest who founded the Catholic religious order the Legionaries of Christ and whose legacy was marred by allegations of child sexual abuse.
The documents gave out the details of how Queen Elizabeth II had invested millions of dollars in medical and consumer loan companies. The records showed that as of 2007, the queen’s private estate invested in a Cayman Islands fund that in turn invested in a private equity company that controlled BrightHouse, a U.K. rent-to-own firm criticized by consumer watchdogs and members of Parliament for selling household goods to cash- strapped Britons on payment plans with interest rates as high as 99.9 percent.
Other royals and politicians with newly disclosed offshore ties included Queen Noor of Jordan, who was listed as the beneficiary of two trusts on the island of Jersey, including one that held her sprawling British estate; Sam Kutesa, Uganda’s foreign minister and a former U.N. General Assembly president, who set up an offshore trust in the Seychelles to manage his personal wealth; Brazil’s finance minister, Henrique de Campos Meirelles, who created a foundation in Bermuda “for charitable purposes”; and Antanas Guoga, a Lithuanian member of the European Parliament and professional poker player, who held a stake in an Isle of Man company whose other shareholders included a gambling mogul who settled a fraud lawsuit in the United States.
The documents exposed that Wesley Clark, a one-time Democratic presidential hopeful and a retired four-star U.S. Army general who served as NATO’s supreme commander in Europe, was a director of an online gambling company with offshore subsidiaries.
In addition to disclosures about politicians and corporations, the files had revealed details about the financial lives of the rich and famous – and the unknown. They include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s yacht and submarines, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Cayman Island investment vehicle, and music star Madonna’s shares in a medical supplies company. Pop singer and social justice activist Bono – listed under his full name, Paul Hewson – owned shares in a company registered in Malta that invested in shopping centre in Lithuania. Other clients listed their occupations as dog groomer, plumber and wakeboard instructor.
The files had revealed that Stephen Bronfman, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s adviser and close friend, teamed up with Liberal Party stalwart Leo Kolber and Kolber’s son to quietly move millions of dollars to a Cayman trust. The offshore manoeuvres may have avoided taxes in Canada, the United States and Israel.
The most detailed revelations emerged in decades of corporate records from the white-shoe offshore law firm Appleby and corporate services provider Estera, two businesses that operated together under the Appleby name until Estera became independent in 2016.
At least 31,000 of the individual and corporate clients included in Appleby’s records were U.S. citizens or have U.S. addresses, more than from any other country. Appleby also counted clients from the United Kingdom, China and Canada among its biggest sources of business.
Nearly 7 million records from Appleby and affiliates covered the period from 1950 to 2016 and include emails, billion-dollar loan agreements and bank statements involving at least 25,000 entities connected to people in 180 countries. Appleby is a member of the “Offshore Magic Circle,” an informal clique of the planet’s leading offshore law practices. The firm was founded in
Bermuda and has offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and other offshore centres.
Appleby has a well-guarded 100-year reputation and has avoided public scrapes through a mixture of discretion and expensive client monitoring. But in contrast to Appleby’s public image, the files exposed it as a company that has provided services to risky clients from Iran, Russia and Libya, failed government audits that identified gaps in anti-money-laundering procedures and been fined in secret by the Bermuda financial regulator.
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