Russia funded Facebook and Twitter investments through Kushner investor
Institutions with close links to Kremlin financed stakes through investor in Trump son-in-law’s venture, leaked files reveal
Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushner venture, leaked documents reveal.
The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.
The discovery is likely to stir concerns over Russian influence in US politics and the role played by social media in last year’s presidential election. It may also raise new questions for the social media companies and for Kushner.
Alexander Vershbow, who was a US ambassador to Russia under George W Bush and to Nato under Bill Clinton, said the Russian state institutions were frequently used as “tools for Putin’s pet political projects”.
Vershbow said the findings were concerning in light of efforts by Moscow to disrupt US democracy and public debate. “There clearly was a wider plan, despite Putin’s protestations to the contrary,” he said.
The investments are detailed in the Paradise Papers, a trove of millions of leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other partners, along with other previously unreported filings.
Facebook and Twitter were not made aware that funding for the investments came from the state-controlled VTB Bank and a financial arm of the state oil and gas firm Gazprom, according to Milner.
The files show that in 2011, VTB funded a $191m investment in Twitter. About the same time, Gazprom Investholding financed an opaque offshore company, which in turn funded a vehicle that held $1bn-worth of Facebook shares.
Milner in 2015 contributed $850,000 from his family trust to a $50m investment in Cadre, a New-York-based company that Kushner co-founded in 2014 with his brother, Joshua, and a friend of theirs from Harvard. The startup, which the Kushners claim is worth $800m, is based around an online marketplace where wealthy financiers can club together to invest in properties.
Cadre has attracted an estimated $133m of venture capital from backers including Peter Thiel, the controversial libertarian billionaire who co-founded PayPal and backed Trump’s campaign for president in 2016.
The company has already caused controversy for Kushner, after he initially failed to detail his stake in Cadre in financial disclosures to the US Office of Government Ethics. Kushner later added Cadre to revised paperwork, saying his stake in the firm was worth up to $25m.
Cadre initially said in a June press release that Milner’s stake in the company was held through his firm DST. A different version of the release on Cadre’s website said, however, that Milner himself was the investor in Cadre. The breakdown of the $50m funding was not made public by Cadre.
Milner said in an interview that he had invested in Cadre based only on the merits of the business. “I just thought it was an attractive opportunity,” he said.
He said he knew Joshua Kushner and had met Jared Kushner once, at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, in autumn 2016. “He was very pleasant and nice, and it was sort of a cocktail-type conversation,” said Milner, adding that politics was not discussed.
Cadre operates from the Puck Building in the Nolita section of Manhattan. The Kushners’ father, Charles, bought the building in the 1980s before being jailed for a string of crimes including 18 counts of tax evasion. The building, a red-brick Romanesque revival, was named after the 19th-century satirical magazine based there. A gilded Puck statue, wearing a top hat and tails, gazes down on staff as they arrive for work.
Mueller’s inquiry is believed to be reviewing Jared Kushner’s finances. Kushner was questioned by US senators in July about his connections to Russia. The closed-door session followed a series of explosive reports, including that Kushner had undisclosed contacts with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the US.
In remarks at the White House in July, Kushner said he had “not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector”.
Kushner attended a meeting at Trump Tower in June last year at which Donald Trump Jr was expecting to receive damaging information on Hillary Clinton, their Democratic opponent, which he was told had come from the Russian government. Kushner claimed he knew nothing about the meeting’s purpose before attending and left shortly after it began.
He has also denied reports that following his father-in-law’s election victory, he proposed setting up a secure communication channel between Trump’s team and Moscow to avoid snooping by the US before Trump took office. Kislyak reportedly told his superiors in Moscow, during conversations intercepted by American intelligence, that Kushner had asked for the backchannel during a meeting at Trump Tower last December.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/n ... r-investor
