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Oleg Deripaska

Oleg Deripaska is widely known as ‘Putin’s oligarch,’ and has boasted to reporters: "I don’t separate myself from the state." He has also acknowledged possessing a Russian diplomatic passport, and claims to have represented the Russian government in other countries. Deripaska has been investigated for money laundering, and has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering. There are also allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman, and had links to a Russian organized crime group.

Deripaska is the chairman of the supervisory board of one of Russia's largest diversified industrial groups, Basic Element. Until 2018, Deripaska was the main shareholder and president of En + Group and Rusal. In 2008, he was named the richest Russian. In the same year in the world ranking of billionaires, according to Forbes magazine, it took the 9th place (with a fortune of 28 billion US dollars). According to the data of 2018, he occupied the 19th place among the billionaires of Russia and the 248th place in the list of billionaires according to Forbes magazine (the state for the summer of 2018 was 3.3 billion dollars).

In 2001, he married Polina Yumasheva, a daughter of Valentin Yumashev - former adviser to the President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin and the head of his presidential administration. Today, his wife is the chairman of the board of directors of Forward Media Group. There are two children - a son, Peter, 2001, b. and daughter, Maria, 2003 b. In 2017, the couple divorced.

Oleg Deripaska was born on January 2, 1968 in the city of Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod Region (previously called Gorky), RSFSR. His ancestors - the inhabitants of the Kuban. Great-grandfathers Oleg Vladimirovich both fought in the Great Patriotic War. His father, Vladimir Deripaska, died when the boy was a year old. Up to 11 years old, Oleg was brought up by his grandmother and grandfather, who lived in Kuban, near Ust-Labinsk. As an elementary school student, he lived with his mother’s parents, who had their own farm in the Krasnodar Territory. Here he was taught not only discipline, but also the basics of agriculture. Later, the boy moved to his mother, Valentina Petrovna Deripaska, directly in Ust-Labinsk.

In 1986, he went to military service in Transbaikalia - two years in the missile forces were not in vain: he returned home as a senior sergeant. Then came the move to the capital. In 1988, he entered the Moscow State University named after MV Lomonosov, where he graduated with honors in 1993. He then began to study at the Plekhanov Academy of Economics.

In 1990, together with fellow students from Moscow State University, he organized the “Military Investment and Trading Company”, which specialized in the sale of metals and had broker places on the Moscow Commodity Exchange and the Russian Commodity Exchange. He began to export metal abroad, while at home he bought it much cheaper. He spent almost all of his proceeds on shares of the Sayanogorsk Aluminum Smelter.

Already in 1994, he took the post of director general of this company, where he worked until 1997. It was he who initiated the creation of the first vertically integrated industrial organization in Russia - the Siberian Aluminum group (nowadays the Basic Element). In 2000, it was in the top ten world manufacturers in this area.

From 2000 to 2003, he was the CEO of Russian Aluminum, which combined the aluminum and alumina assets of Sibaluminium and Sibneft. In 2007, the merger of these enterprises with similar assets of the Swiss Glencore created the United Company RUSAL, which became the leader in its industry. Then Basel Aero, managed by the airports of Krasnodar, Sochi, Gelendzhik, Anapa and Yeisk, appeared. In 2008, RUSAL acquired the blocking stake of MMC Norilsk Nickel and, after all the deals, became the largest aluminum producer in the world until 2015.

Deripaska incurred losses in the 2008 global financial crisis and was forced to sell off assets.

In January 2009, he was again appointed as the General Director of Basic Element, and was engaged in the formation and implementation of a development strategy. In November 2014, he headed the group as president.

Since 2012, he has been the chairman of the Basic Elections Supervisory Board. The following year, the construction of Olympic facilities in Sochi, which was carried out on the investment of its structures, was completed. It is known that their total amount was more than 45 billion rubles.

Oleg Deripaska, a self-described private investor and industrialist, sued the Associated Press (“AP”), claiming defamation by direct statements and by implication. He argued that the AP falsely accused him of “involvement in criminal activities and other improprieties.” The United States District Court found that Deripaska failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted and therefore granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss October 17, 2017.

On March 22, 2017, the AP separately published an article and online video discussing the relationship between Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and Russia. The article opens with the sentence, “Before signing up with Donald Trump, former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly worked for a Russian billionaire with a plan to ‘greatly benefit the Putin Government,’ The Associated Press has learned.” The article goes on to explain that “Manafort proposed a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005” to Deripaska, who was described as an “aluminum magnate” and “a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006.”

Deripaska alleged that the article contained three defamatory statements and that it defamed him when read as a whole. The three alleged defamatory “statements” were each comprised of between two and four non-consecutive sentences pulled from the article. The first statement includes a sequence of alleged falsehoods that Deripaska claims inculpate him in criminal activity.

Deripaska alleged that the following three sentences made up the first statement: 1) “Manafort worked for Deripaska pursuant to a 2005 strategy plan that was to ‘greatly benefit the Putin Government’” “The federal Foreign Agents Registration Act requires that ‘people who lobby in the U.S. on behalf of foreign political leaders or political parties must provide detailed reports about their actions to the department,” and “[w]illfully failing to register [under FARA] is a felony” and 3) “Manafort did not disclose details about the lobbying work to the Justice Department during the period the contract was in place.”

Deripaska argued that by “express[ing] certainty about the connection between the plans set forth in the 2005 Manafort Memo and funds paid by Mr. Deripaska to Mr. Manafort”, alongside the assertion that the memo proposed a “model [to] greatly benefit the Putin Government,”, the AP made “a false and defamatory statement.” Specifically, Deripaska alleged that the AP “assert[ed] in substance that Mr. Deripaska paid Mr. Manafort to act as an unregistered foreign agent,” and thus made “him appear to have been engaged in criminal conduct.”

As for the second allegedly defamatory statement, Deripaska turns to a quote from United States Senator Lindsey Graham and a statement summarizing the view of the House Intelligence Committee Democrats. He alleges that the following two sentences makes up the second statement: 1) “Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a frequent Trump critic, said of Manafort: ‘Clearly if he’s getting millions of dollars from a billionaire close to Putin, to basically undermine democratic movements, that’s something I’d want to know about”; and 2) “Democrats on the House intelligence committee said the new revelations will feature in their investigations.” Deripaska claimed the second statement “strongly and falsely conveys that Mr. Deripaska’s contracts with Mr. Manafort had criminal implications and merit a congressional investigation.”

The third allegedly defamatory statement strings together several sentences discussing Manafort’s involvement in events in the Ukraine in 2014. Deripaska alleged that the following language makes up the third defamatory statement: 1) “Deripaska became one of Russia’s wealthiest men under Putin, buying assets abroad in ways widely perceived to benefit the Kremlin’s interests”; “Manafort worked as Trump’s unpaid campaign chairman last year from March until August, a period that included the Republican National Convention that nominated Trump in July”; and 3) “The newly obtained business records link Manafort more directly to Putin’s interests in the region. According to those records and people with direct knowledge of Manafort’s work for Deripaska, Manafort made plans to open an office in Moscow, and at least some of his work in Ukraine was directed by Deripaska, not local political interests there,”; and 4) “[F]ederal criminal prosecutors became interested in Manafort’s activities years ago as part of a broad investigation to recover stolen Ukraine assets after the ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych there in early 2014.”

Deripaska argued that their “juxtaposition . . . reasonably conveys that Mr. Deripaska stole Ukrainian assets in 2014, and that he is implicated in federal prosecutors’ investigation of that theft . . . [and] that the alleged theft of assets from Ukraine is somehow tied to the Trump Campaign Controversy.” As a result, Deripaska alleges that “[r]eaders of the Article and of its numerous republications by news outlets around the world have been left with the impression that Mr. Deripaska’s private, commercial dealings were—and still may be deeply intertwined with the Trump Campaign Controversy.”

The AP argued that Deripaska is a limited-purpose public figure “who has fairly exposed himself to public discussion through his activities.” Defamatory speech must rise to the level of making the plaintiff appear “odious, infamous, or ridiculous”––it cannot be merely unpleasant or offensive. Liability for a statement on a matter of public concern “may be imposed only if the statement is provably false.” If it is plain that a speaker is expressing a subjective view, an interpretation, a theory, conjecture, or surmise, rather than claiming to be in possession of objectively verifiable facts, the statement is not actionable. The kinds of evidence that would “likely support a finding of actual malice” include evidence of fabrication, or evidence that the story was “so inherently improbable that only a reckless man would have put [it] in circulation”.

Congress overwhelmingly passed the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, CAATSA, in August of 2017, to hold Putin and his cronies accountable for Russian interference in the 2016 election, Russian invasions of sovereign territories of other nations, and its other malign behavior. Under that authority, the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally, and several of his companies, including United Company RUSAL, EN+ Group, and JSC EuroSibEnergo. In doing so, the Trump Treasury Department stated Deripaska has said he does not separate himself from the Russian state.

On 19 December 2018, the Treasury Department notified Congress of its intention to relax sanctions against three corporations tied to Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch and close associate of Vladimir Putin. The Trump administration announced its plans to ease these sanctions in the middle of the holidays, just before the President shut the government down, at the end of the last Congress, and before committees in this Congress had a chance to organize and look into this very serious issue. The administration was trying to jam this decision through so Congress would not be able to act.

The Russian aluminum company Rusal was barred from doing business in the United States in part because of its ties to Deripaska. The Trump administration lifted the sanctions in January 2019 after Deripaska agreed to reduce his ownership stake in the Moscow-based company, the world’s second-largest aluminum manufacturer, from 70% to less than 45%. the Trump administration agreed to lift sanctions on three of his companies in exchange for Deripaska dropping his ownership stake from 70% to 44.95%, never mind that the new chairman of United Company RUSAL's board, Jean-Pierre Thomas, had himself defended the Russian illegal occupation, condemned by the world, of Crimea, part of sovereign Ukraine.

Some still had questions about whether moving some of the oligarch shares to a family charity and to a sanctioned Russian bank will sufficiently sever the control and enrichment that he enjoyed, and whether it can adequately be monitored with transparency. This came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell backed the decision despite large numbers of Republicans and Democrats who objected to allowing Rusal and its parent company En+ Group into the United States. The House voted to keep the sanctions 362-53, but the Senate fell three votes short of the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. McConnell, along with Sen. Rand Paul, voted against the resolution.

Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on 31 July 2019 released a statement in reaction to Politico reporting that former staffers for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lobbied for a Kentucky rolling mill supported by the Russian company Rusal: “Rusal’s proposed investment in a Kentucky rolling mill is deeply concerning. The deal was announced just three months after the Senate voted to lift sanctions on Rusal, and now we learn that Majority Leader McConnell’s former staff have been lobbying for the project. The American people need to have confidence that this deal is in the country’s best interest. That is why a CFIUS review of the deal’s national security implications is so important. I was encouraged by the Treasury Department’s June response to my request. The department needs to take potential harm to national security from Rusal’s proposed investment seriously.”

Rusal in April 2019 announced its intent to invest in Braidy Atlas, a Kentucky aluminum rolling mill. Rusal will invest $200 million in Braidy Atlas for a 40-percent stake in the project, with the remaining ownership held by Braidy. Braidy announced that it is applying to the U.S. Department of Energy and the German National equipment finance programs to fund the debt portion of its capital structure. Public reports indicate the plant will make “unspecified materials for the Department of Defense,” among other products. The letter of intent signed between En+ and Braidy specifies that Rusal will serve as Braidy’s exclusive supplier of imported aluminum, providing close to two million metric tons over ten years. Braidy’s press release states that this will be “the world’s largest order for one mill of high-quality, pre-alloyed and low-carbon primary aluminum slabs.”

Times Simon Shuster and Vera Bergengruen report on the saga of the investment by Russian aluminum giant Rusal in a Kentucky mill, the largest to be built in the US in nearly four decades. The story is one of how Russian investment in Appalachia gives the Kremlin a foothold in U.S. politics. Braidy Industries CEO Craig Bouchard told TIME he grew desperate enough to accept help from just about anyone, : "If they're running a whorehouse, I wouldn't say yes, but literally any upstanding businessman from any country, any nationality, any religion, I'd welcome them. Help me rebuild Appalachia."� No U.S. producer of prime aluminum is able to supply the huge quantities required. Outside the U.S., only Rusal can supply low-carbon, high-quality aluminum at this scale. McConnell took to the Senate floor to rebut accusations that he’s kowtowing to Russia, prompting the hashtag #MoscowMitch to begin trending on Twitter. Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, one of Rusal’s longtime major shareholders, Len Blavatnik, contributed more than $1 million through his companies to a GOP campaign fund tied to McConnell.