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Feds Freeze Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s Assets, Upper East Side Mansion
US officials have frozen the US assets of the curious Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, The New York Post reports, including his sprawling mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Deripaska bought the East Side property for $42.5 million in 2008, property records show.
FBI agents tried unsuccessfully to flip Deripaska in exchange for information on Russian organized crime — and Russia’s aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, the New York Times reported last month.
Deripaska previously had worked on a “thwarted effort” to rescue an FBI agent who had been captured in Iran, the Times reported.
But get this, according to the Post:
[A]lthough the US government has frozen Deripaska’s US assets, including his property, Deripaska has arranged to have the children and ex-wife of his business partner, the oligarch Roman Abramovich, live within its secure walls, The Post has learned.
According to Treasury officials, when the government freezes assets, that means anyone who does business with a sanctioned person, and sanctioned companies, could be subject to sanctions themselves.
Abramovich recently transferred $92 million worth of property to his ex-wife, Dasha Zhukova, an editor and patron of the arts who listed her current address as 11 E. 64th St., according to property records.
One of Zhukova’s good friends is Ivanka Trump. The two are so close that Zhukova and Abramovich often traveled and socialized with Trump and her husband, presidential son-in-law/adviser Jared Kushner, all over the world — from jet-setting hot spots in Russia and Croatia to Aspen and New York.
Zhukova is dating Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos, while Abramovich reportedly is dating Deripaska’s estranged wife, Polina Deripaska.
-RW
In the estimation of American officials, Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin, has faced credible accusations of extortion, bribery and even murder.
In a Daily Caller op-ed calling the Russian meddling narrative a "false public manipulation," Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska claims that Daniel Jones - a former FBI investigator, Feinstein staffer and now a Fusion GPS operative - told the Russian Oligarch's lawyer in March, 2017 that Fusion GPS was funded by "a group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros."
Former Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort sent an e-mail on July 7, 2016, intended for Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, offering to provide private briefings on the presidential race. The e-mails were sent to an overseas intermediary with a request to forward them to Deripaska. “If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the e-mail, portions of which were read to the Washington Post, which broke this story. As we shall discuss later, however, Special Counsel Robert Mueller does not seem to be sufficiently objective to lead the investigation into Manafort’s activities.
Following the unexpected death of 65-year-old Russian ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin, conspiracy theorists were stirred up as the ongoing Russophobic Deep State war combined with the deaths of nine Russian diplomats in the last year raised many coincident-questioning eyebrows. Now, as The Hill reports, pouring further fuel on that fire, the State Department asked the New York Medical Examiner not to publicly release information about Churkin's cause of death.
Six Russian diplomats have died in the last 60 days. As Axios notes, all but one died on foreign soil. Some were shot, while other causes of death are unknown. Note that a few deaths have been labeled "heart attacks" or "brief illnesses."
