EXCLUSIVE: American banker Robert Foresman, now vice chairman at UBS, once secretly awarded one of Vladimir Putin’s closest friends a shareholding in a powerful investment bank and brokered meetings for him with a top U.S. foreign policy official
LONDON - A senior American banker once secretly awarded a shareholding in powerful Moscow investment bank Renaissance Capital to one of Vladimir Putin’s closest friends and brokered meetings for the friend with top U.S. foreign policy officials a decade ago, emails show.
Now, a cache of Renaissance Capital emails from 2007 to 2011 reveal new details about the close relationship Foresman cultivated within Putin’s circle over the years and how he leveraged these ties to win deals. The emails, which were reviewed by Reuters, also shine a light on the part played by Western bankers in the heady days of Moscow’s 2007 economic boom, when the Kremlin was moving to take over ever greater swathes of the Russian economy.
Foresman’s Moscow connections gained fresh attention recently when the banker was named in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. According to the report, Foresman was among the many influential people who reached out to Donald Trump when the future American leader’s campaign was building momentum.
From 2001 to 2006, Foresman worked side by side with Warnig as head of Dresdner’s investment banking arm in Moscow, while Warnig was Dresdner Bank’s president for Russia. Instead, the lawsuit alleges, Foresman and Jennings sought to benefit from Kremlin abuses of the market system and the rule of law. They acted, the suit claims, together with the two other main Western investors in the consortium: Stephen Lynch, a former U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, and Richard Deitz, the wiry founder of hedge fund VR Capital, which has offices in New York, London and Moscow.
In an email dated Feb. 21, 2007, Foresman wrote to three senior executives at “RC” - Renaissance Capital - pointing to the Kremlin-run Yukos asset auctions as an opportunity. The U.S. government was watching proceedings closely because of the strategic importance of the pipeline network Transpetrol operated. Foresman told an unidentified U.S. embassy official in Moscow in October that year that the consortium “had not been acting as a proxy for Rosneft” in the auction and said there was no prearranged deal with Rosneft over the Transpetrol stake, according to a diplomatic cable about the conversation later leaked by Wikileaks.
In the second, also reviewed by Reuters and dated Aug. 15, 2007, the state oil champion agreed to delay repayment of a $60 million loan it had extended to Promneftstroy, the bidding vehicle, until the consortium arranged to sell Yukos’s Slovak pipeline to a company nominated by Rosneft. A month later, the consortium agreed to sell the pipeline stake to a Cyprus-registered firm for $105 million - less than half the price it fetched two years later.
Two months later, in late 2007, the consortium’s hopes of making profits began to unravel when an Amsterdam court ruled that the auction violated Dutch law, and therefore the consortium owners didn’t have title to any of the assets of Yukos Finance BV.In emails dated Oct. 11, 2007, a few months after the consortium won the auction, Foresman and his colleagues at Renaissance Capital began discussing the drafting of a secret “phantom share agreement” for an unnamed “prospective new shareholder.
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