Putin awards medals to buyers of Rosneft stake
Source: Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded state medals to executives with the Qatari investment fund, Swiss-based commodities trading firm Glencore and Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo, according to a decree published on Monday.
The Qatar Investment Authority and Glencore bought a 19.5 stake in Russian oil giant Rosneft for more than 10 billion euros in December, and Intesa bank was involved in organizing the deal.
The executives were awarded the medals for their "contribution to strengthening cooperation with Russia," according to the text of the decree.
The Rosneft stake sale was the biggest privatization deal in Russia since the 1990s. But a range of offshore companies was used in the transaction, the full identities of the stake's beneficial owners remain unknown, and the source of 2.2 billion euros in funding for the deal is unclear.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-oil-rosneft-sale-idUSKBN17C1RO
19.5% stake, but 0.5% of that was to be commission for Carter Page to "broker" the deal (according to earlier reports from elsewhere):
http://www.businessinsider.com/carter-page-trump-russia-igor-sechin-dossier-2017-1
The dossier says the offer was made in July, when Page was in Moscow giving a speech at the Higher Economic School. The claim was sourced to "a trusted compatriot and close associate" of Sechin, according to the dossier's author, former British spy Christopher Steele.
"Sechin's associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page and his associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft," the dossier said. "In return, Page had expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted."
Four months before the intelligence community briefed Trump, then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and the nation's top lawmakers on the dossier's claims — most of which have not been independently verified but are being investigated by US intelligence agencies — a US intelligence source told Yahoo's Michael Isikoff that Sechin met with Page during Page's three-day trip to Moscow. Sechin, the source told Yahoo, raised the issue of the US lifting sanctions on Russia under Trump.
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