The new US anti-Russian sanctions promise to unveil and target Russian Putinist oligarchy and its corruption with an intelligence report to be released a month before the Russian presidential elections. Many, if not all, of these oligarchs have been till now cultivated not only by Putin and his regime, but also by the West, the US, Great Britain, Israel ... some of them will seek bargain deals with the US and its agencies in the meantime with new wealth transfers such as the Putin-lauded "privatization" of Rosneft last December; others will be thrown under the bus or serve as sacrificial victims.
The Empire does have an established record of using and then purging from time to time its local "junkyard dogs." And Russia has been ripe and almost overdue for this--despite Trump's apparent reluctance to oblige, although, remember, it was him who said that the US should have seized Iraqi oil in exchange of its uninvited invasion.
A key provision (section 241) of the new Russian sanctions law mandates applying stronger pressure on Russian oligarchs.The law states that an interagency report, compiled by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of State, will identify the major Russian oligarchs, "as determined by their closeness to the Russian regime and their net worth" (including that of their spouses, children, parents, and siblings), and their connection to Russian president Vladimir Putin.[2]Section 241 also specifies that the report should include the role of Russian parastatal entities in the Russian economy, their leadership, beneficial ownership, and any of their existing non-Russian business affiliations (i.e. assets and investments abroad).Additionally, the law requires an assessment of the exposure of key U.S. economic sectors – with special attention devoted to the banking, securities, insurance and real estate sectors – to Russian politically exposed persons (PEPs, i.e. people who have been entrusted with a prominent public function) and parastatal organizations,.The report will also assess the effects of secondary sanctions on Russian oligarchs, state-owned and parastatal entities, and their consequences for the economies of Russia, the U.S. and its allies. ...Previously, the sanctions targeted only a handful of oligarchs, including Gennady Timchenko, the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, and Yury Kovalchuk.
The U.S. interagency report will be suspiciously published on January 29, 2018, just a month ahead of the Russian presidential elections.
