First charges filed in Mueller investigation

[JRPGfan]

http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/05/news/paradise-papers-trump-twitter-facebook/index.html

Wilbur Ross = Trump's Pick for commerce secretary. His economic adviser.

A trove of leaked documents made public Sunday purport to show financial ties between Russia and a member of President Trump's cabinet.

They also reportedly show how state-run Russian companies funded large investments in Twitter and Facebook.

The leak, called the Paradise Papers, was revealed when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and its dozens of collaborating news outlets on Sunday published investigations related to them. The reporting partners included the New York Times, the Guardian and the BBC.

The project, which is based on more than 13.4 million documents dated from 1950 to 2016, covers a large number of global corporations, government leaders, and prominent people and their use of offshore accounts to avoid taxes or otherwise hide ownership of assets.

The reporting is similar to the Panama Papers, which in 2016 exposed cases involving celebrities and business executives who reportedly moved large chunks of their wealth into offshore tax havens.


Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross :

The New York Times reported that Trump's commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, has retained a multimillion-dollar stake in Navigator, a shipping company whose top customers include the Russian energy firm Sibur.

Sibur's owners include a member of Russian President Vladimir Putin's family and a Russian oligarch, according to the Times, which also says the firm itself was created by the Russian government.

Another of Navigator's clients is PDVSA, Venezuela's state-run oil company, which Trump targeted with sanctions this year.

The Times reports that Ross held his stake in Navigator through a "chain of companies in the Cayman Islands."

The Times also says "much" of Ross's wealth, which is estimated to total around $2 billion, is tied up in secretive offshore investments.

When Ross disclosed his finances earlier this year, he included Navigator as a company he intended to retain an interest in. But that document did not disclose how large his stake was because it was not required.

But that won't help Ross escape political controversy.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Commerce Committee that questioned Ross before his appointment, accused Ross of misleading the committee and the public by "concealing an ongoing financial relationship" with Russians.

"Inexcusable and intolerable," Blumenthal said in a series of tweets Sunday. "Americans are owed answers on this Cabinet's troubling failure to disclose links to Russian interests."