Former U.S. envoy under scrutiny for links to sanctioned Moldovan oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc
U.S. President Donald Trump’s most senior intelligence
official, Richard Grenell, came under scrutiny last month after it emerged he
had carried out work for sanctioned Moldovan oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc.
Mongabay has since learned that Grenell, the acting director of national
intelligence, is not the only Washington political figure with alleged ties to
the man once dubbed “Moldova’s most-feared figure.”
From 2008 until 2011, Asif Chaudhry was the U.S. ambassador
to Moldova, a former Soviet republic on the Black Sea. For the duration of his
posting he maintained a reputation as an impartial mediator between the
country’s mercurial political parties. In the years since, he appears to have
sided with Plahotniuc, observers say.
In mid-2018, Chaudhry accepted a position as an independent
director on the board of Trans-Oil, a Moldovan agricultural commodities firm. A
recent Mongabay investigation showed how Trans-Oil gained a virtual monopoly
over Moldova’s grain market. It was an achievement aided by multimillion-dollar
U.S. government loans granted to the company while Chaudhry was still
ambassador. The investigation raised questions about overexploitation of Moldova’s
agricultural land and the use of offshore companies to avoid agribusiness firms
paying tax.
Contacted earlier this year, Chaudhry said there was nothing
improper in his working for Trans-Oil: “There is nothing more important for me
than my integrity,” Chaudhry wrote in an email to Mongabay, describing
Trans-Oil as “unusually transparent.”
In Moldova the line between commerce and politics is often
thin, and mutual aid between businessmen and political operators is common.
Trans-Oil’s founder and CEO, Vaja Jhashi, has enjoyed
friendly relations with Plahotniuc and his family since they first met in 2001,
according to company spokeswoman Tatiana Babakova.
“However, due to recent developments and political
complications related to Plahotniuc’s situation and many other related issues
there has been virtually no contact between Vaja [Jhashi] and Plahotniuc since
Plahotniuc left [Moldova] in June 2019,” Babakova wrote in an email. “Trans Oil
never had any business connection to Plahotniuc or any of the Plahotniuc
businesses in Moldova or elsewhere.”
Fall from grace
The highest public office Plahotniuc held was deputy speaker
of the Moldovan parliament. But his behind-the-scenes role in the country’s
business, political and criminal spheres made him the nexus through which all
political power flowed, according to a 2016 analysis by the Carnegie Endowment.
That changed last summer. Following the electoral ouster of the Democratic
Party of Moldova, of which he was leader, Plahotniuc fled the country ahead of
corruption charges being filed against him.
In January 2020, the U.S. State Department issued a visa ban
against Plahotniuc and his family over the oligarch’s “involvement in
significant corruption.” The ban forbids Plahotniuc, his wife, Oxana Childescu,
and their two sons from setting foot on U.S. soil. Yet two months later, in
March 2020, following a flurry of sightings around Miami, the State Department
confirmed to Radio Free Europe that Plahotniuc was indeed in the U.S.
In requests for assistance from U.S. law enforcement to
track down the fugitive tycoon, Moldova’s anti-corruption agency listed two
Miami addresses it believed Plahotniuc to be frequenting. One of them,
Portofino Tower, contains a $2.2 million condo owned by Ukrainian Trans-Oil
executive Dmitriy Kurilo.
Shells and proxies
In 2013, Kurilo bought the apartment from a shell company in
the British Virgin Islands beneficially owned by a Czech real estate tycoon
linked to a Ponzi scheme in the 1990s.
It is not clear whether Kurilo has ever set foot in the
condo. The purchase was conducted by his boss, Jhashi, whom Kurilo had granted
power of attorney.
Less than a month after buying it, Kurilo took the unusual
decision to take out a $700,000 mortgage against the apartment; it was not his
but Jhashi’s signature on the loan agreement. From 2016 until today, Jhashi has
listed the Portofino Tower condo as his contact address and principal place of
business for Energy One International Inc., a company he manages.
Babakova, the Trans-Oil spokeswoman, told Mongabay that
Jhashi was “for sure … not beneficial owner” of the Portofino Tower condo. She
noted that while Jhashi and his family use the apartment three or four times a
year, they pay rent to its owner.
“Plahotniuc was never [a] guest of Vaja [or] our company in
the US,” Babakova added. “He independently arranged for his [lodging] and
traveling.”
Last February, Jhashi established another company in Miami:
Sigmateli Limited LLC. The company shares its name with a Cypriot firm that
investigative reporters from Rise Moldova found to be beneficially owned by
Plahotniuc’s wife, Oxana. Sigmateli in Cyprus received millions of euros in
loans from the oligarch and acts as holding company for a range of luxury
properties associated with the Plahotniuc family across Europe.
The Florida Sigmateli has “no assets and no substance and no
activity at all,” according to Babakova, who added that it has “no links to any
foreign entity.”
Presidential favors
Born in the Soviet republic of Georgia in 1966, Jhashi spent
some of his childhood in New York, where his father was posted as a senior
representative of Intourist, the Soviet Union’s state travel agency. However,
their stay was cut short in 1977 after U.S. authorities suspected the elder
Jhashi was attempting to blackmail U.S. citizens on behalf of the KGB.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jhashi became a
Russian citizen before returning to the U.S. in the early 1990s to marry a U.S.
art history scholar and become a dual national.
On Dec. 29, 2005, a special decree signed by Moldova’s
then-president, Vladimir Voronin, made Jhashi a citizen of that country too.
Speaking to Mongabay last September in his office at the headquarters of the
Moldovan communist party, Voronin said there was nothing untoward in the
decree.
A November 2007 cable sent by the U.S. ambassador to Moldova
at the time, Michael Kirby, suggests that Jhashi’s longtime friend, Plahotniuc,
was politically aligned with Voronin. It notes that Plahotniuc was “a close
business associate” of the president’s son, Oleg.
According to Kirby’s cable, a U.S. director of Moldovan
cable television provider Sun Communications had reported to the embassy that
Plahotniuc had promised he could make Sun’s regulatory issues disappear if it
ceased transmission of channels perceived to be in competition with pro-Voronin
stations.
Voronin was reaching the end of his second term in office
and he no longer enjoyed the levels of popular support he once had. Writing to
Washington, Kirby said the end result of Plahotniuc’s request would be to allow
“President Voronin and his son [to] dominate broadcast media in the run-up to
the 2009 national elections.”
But Sun did not comply, and Voronin would be out of office
by the end of 2009. Half a decade later, Jhashi would, in the eyes of many
observers, appear to replicate this pattern of backroom support to a
controversial political figure.
Backroom favors
At the start of 2016, Plahotniuc’s reputation was in
tatters. The previous summer a leaked report had identified $1 billion as
having been siphoned from and through three major Moldovan banks and into the
accounts of offshore shell companies. While Plahotniuc has consistently denied
involvement in the scheme, his denials did little to quell the suspicions of
ordinary Moldovans — suspicions shared by U.S. congressmen, who, by the end of
the year, would introduce a bill seeking to sanction Plahotniuc for his alleged
role in the heist.
A nationwide poll commissioned by the International
Republican Institute in March 2016 found that 88% of Moldovans viewed the
oligarch unfavorably. Of the 20 prominent politicians the IRI asked respondents
to rate, none managed to match his levels of unlikability.
Given the levels of public distrust and allegations of
impropriety, it came as a surprise to many when, in May 2016, Plahotniuc was
invited to Washington D.C. as a guest of the Atlantic Council, a prestigious
think tank. It was the first of several times Plahotniuc and his colleagues at
the Democratic Party of Moldova would receive invitations to Atlantic Council
events.
According to a report by democratic watchdog Freedom House,
Plahotniuc owned four out of Moldova’s five national television stations, three
radio stations, half a dozen news portals, and advertising agencies “which
control most of the advertising market.” This media stranglehold meant he could
rely on these visits being favorably portrayed domestically.
In 2018, it emerged that the Atlantic Council’s Moldova
program was funded by Jhashi’s Trans-Oil group of companies. Company
spokeswoman Babakova told Mongabay the funding “was not in any form connected
to Plahotniuc or done as a favour to him.”
However, in a recent op-ed, former Moldovan diplomat Vlad
Lupan described the Atlantic Council funding as “payments … on Plahotniuc’s
behalf.” Noting that Plahotniuc has also denied the allegation, Lupan writes
that such denials allow Trans-Oil and Jhashi to avoid “possible accusations of
direct disbursements by a foreign actor.” Under U.S. federal law it is a
criminal offense to fail to notify the U.S. Justice Department of such
disbursements.
‘He had to know’
For many, such as Valeriu Pasa, who leads the Moldovan
accountability NGO WatchDog, it is unlikely Chaudhry, the former U.S.
ambassador, would have been unaware of Jhashi’s and Trans-Oil’s links to
Plahotniuc.
“When he was ambassador, he would have had access to a lot
of information — who’s who and what their connections are,” Pasa said. “To
think the company is not connected to Plahotniuc you would have to not know
Moldova at all.”
Until 2014, Mihail Gofman had been a senior Moldovan
prosecutor investigating money laundering. That year, he fled the country and
went to Washington D.C., where he collaborated with the FBI. In a WhatsApp
exchange with Mongabay, Gofman described Chaudhry as “shady.”
“[He] combined his status as [a former] ambassador with the
activities of an international criminal group,” Gofman wrote.
In an email this week to Mongabay, Chaudhry denied any link
between the disgraced oligarch and Trans-Oil existed.
“Based on the visibility I have about TransOil as a board
member, I have seen no evidence of any sort that Vlad Plahotniuc has any financial/commercial
interest or link with this company,” Chaudhry wrote. “Mr. Vaja Jhas[h]i has
always been open and transparent about his personal relationship with Mr.
Plahotniuc through Moldovan business or social circles in general.”
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