General Discussion

A: The Carlyle Group and Friends.

Who’s Enabling Putin’s Enablers?

BY SAM PIZZIGATI
CounterPunch, March 29, 2022

Where would Vladimir Putin be without the Russian oligarchy? Without Russia’s oligarchs, political leaders of the Western world have concluded, Putin would be tottering. Western leaders have made squeezing Russia’s richest a central piece of their strategy to end Putin’s Ukraine cross-border assault.

These same Western leaders, unfortunately, have failed to take seriously what ought to be an equally pressing question: Where would Russia’s oligarchs be without the West, without the Wall Streeters, wealth managers, and assorted other high-finance riff-raff “paid millions,” as Institute for Policy Studies analyst Chuck Collins puts it, “to help billionaires sequester trillions”?

Western leaders have essentially been ignoring this question almost ever since the old Soviet Union collapsed. And now we’re paying the price. Those Ukraine sanctions against Russia’s oligarchs? They come with a huge loophole. The Western world’s opaque web of tax havens and anonymous corporations is essentially rendering much of those sanctions ineffective.

Snippe…

The U.S. wealth defense industry, we need to remember, hasn’t just been helping Russian oligarchs hide their fortunes. America’s money-handlers have for years been helping them pile up ever grander fortunes. They’ve steered the illicit funds of Russian oligarchs into U.S. real estate, investment funds, and “even factories,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein, a senior reporter on the 2016 bombshell “Panama Papers” tax avoidance exposé.

The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has used “a network of banks, law firms and advisers in multiple countries,” the New York Times just reported, to invest “billions in American hedge funds.” Along the way, he tapped the expertise and contacts of U.S. high-finance giants ranging from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to BlackRock and the Carlyle Group.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/29/whos-enabling-putins-enablers/

How Billionaires Picked Putin as "Russia’s Pinochet"

By Greg Palast
BuzzFlash, March 16, 2022

Vladimir Putin did not arrive from outer space on an abalone shell.

Putin went from the virtually unknown Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg to Russia’s President and potentate by winning a weird competition organized by Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky who sought a "Russian Pinochet" to succeed Boris Yeltsin as President.

The competition, dubbed "Operation Successor," went so far as to send Russia’s "Larry King," Mikhail Leontyev, to interview General Pinochet for Russian TV while Pinochet was under indictment in Chile on murder charges. Russians were treated to the old dictator’s advice on choosing a leader who could imitate Pinochet’s "strong hand," a police state, while promoting a hyper-capitalist economy.

And Putin fit the Pinochet profile.

Continues…

https://www.gregpalast.com/how-billionaires-picked-putin-as-russias-pinochet/