Liberal Forum

Who Is the Russian Banker Who Met With Jared Kushner?

On Monday, newspapers reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee will interview Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s advisor and son-in-law, over meetings he took after the election with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and a prominent Russian banker, Sergei Gorkov.

Kushner met with Kislyak he was a member of the Trump transition team and still a private citizen.

After that meeting, which took place in early December, Kislyak requested a second, to which Kushner sent a deputy, to whom Kislyak conveyed he wanted Kushner and Gorkov to meet.

Kushner and Gorkov met at a later date.

Gorkov is the head of the Moscow-based Vnesheconombank, a government owned development bank that is sanctioned by the United States for Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Vnesheconombank describes itself as funding “major investment projects” — like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet project, the 2014 Sochi Olympics — and “provid[ing] support” for Russian enterprises.

It is also the bank at which Evgeny Buryakov worked under “non-official cover” as a banker while actually working for Russian intelligence (the U.S. attorney who announced he pled guilty back in March 2016 was Preet Bharara, whom the White House fired earlier this month).

Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, whose recently exposed alleged corruption was the impetus for massive protests across Russia on Sunday, sits on the bank’s supervisory board.

Previously, Gorkov was the deputy chairman of the executive board of Sberbank, Russia’s largest state bank, most recently in the news for hiring Trump’s longtime lawyer to defend it in court.

Gorkov graduated from Russia’s Academy of the Federal Security Service — that is, of the FSB — in 1994, and is also a recipient of the Medal of the Order of Merit for Services to the Fatherland, second class.

White House spokesperson Hope Hicks told the New York Times that the meeting, which lasted 30 minutes, “really wasn’t much of a conversation,” but that Gorkov communicated his interest in maintaining an open dialogue.“

Mr. Gorkov, who previously served as deputy chairman of the board at Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank, said in a statement issued by his bank that he met with Mr. Kushner in his capacity as the then-chief executive of Kushner Companies, his family’s sprawling real estate empire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/p ... .html?_r=0