Ukrainian Squillionare Victor Pinchuk and His Clinton, Brookings, and Peterson Connections

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Lambert Strether

Lambert here: This is gloriously seamy. The true greatness of the American political class is that they’ll all take money from anybody, so you get stories like this one, where the Clintons, Brookings, and Pete Peterson’s talking shop all cheerfully rake in the dough from an innocent Ukrainian pipemaker and art collector whose $700 million new plant produces steel for seamless pipes used in a wide range of products sold in 80 countries, including pipelines. So one can only wonder what he thought he was buying with his money. I mean, besides art.

By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

What do Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton, Anders Aslund, Steven Pifer, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the Brookings Institution have in common? Answer: they drink unpasteurised milk from the Ukraine. Lots of it.

How damaging this may be for the health depends on how Victor Pinchuk (image left, right), the Ukrainian pipemaker, responds to filings in the Moscow Arbitrazh Court. Reported publicly this week, the court papers suggest that through companies registered in Cyprus, Pinchuk milked about $200 million from the Rossiya Insurance Company in Moscow. For the time being, the Russian court action is a civil one, and seeks repayment by Pinchuk’s East One holding and related companies. If Pinchuk doesn’t repay, Cyprus, European Union, and US court action, alleging conspiracy to defraud, is likely to follow. Pinchuk’s innocence should be assumed in the meantime. Drinking raw milk, however, carries a contamination risk.