Thursday, February 01, 2018

Stillwater Mine, Kaveladze, Prokhorov, Potanin, Putin, Mueller

As the GOP "retreat" at Greenbrier Bunker, with Jim Justice, owner of 70 mines. billionaire with the most outstanding FINES owed for safety and environmental damages.
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"JOHANNESBURG, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Sibanye-Stillwater said on Thursday that over 1,000 miners were stuck underground at its Beatrix gold mine in South Africa after a storm knocked out power"

https://uk.reuters.com/article/sibanye-gold-miners/update-2-sibanye-gold-miners-in-s-africa-stuck-underground-not-in-danger-idUKL8N1PR6VT

"ON MAY 4, 2017, SIBANYE GOLD LIMITED COMPLETED THE AQUISITION OF STILLWATER MINING COMPANY. FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, VISIT: WWW.SIBANYEGOLD.CO.ZA."

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"The Guardian has established that Kaveladze was involved in the $341m takeover of a US company by a Russian mining firm belonging to an associate of Putin, and was a business partner to two former senior officials at Russia’s central bank.

In 2003, the Colorado-based firm Stillwater Mining was bought by Norilsk Nickel, a metals corporation in Moscow led by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs

As part of its $341m purchase of the American firm, Norilsk nominated Kaveladze to be one of its five handpicked directors on Stillwater’s new board, according to a filing by the company to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

 Kaveladze was billed as the president of “an international consulting boutique” serving a “US and Eastern European clientele”.

The deal was the first time a Russian company had ever taken a majority stake in a publicly traded US company. 

It was viewed as critical by the Kremlin. Putin was reported at the time to have personally advocated for the deal’s approval by US regulators during a meeting with then president George W Bush earlier in 2003.


Norilsk was then co-owned by Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov, another major Russian oligarch, who later sold his stake.

Prokhorov, who has had mixed relations with the Kremlin, now owns the Brooklyn Nets basketball team in New York.

 Kaveladze and Prokhorov had been classmates at the Moscow Finance Institute in the late 1980s

Kaveladze’s ascent to the Stillwater board was eventually derailed, according to a source, after the discovery of his earlier involvement in a $1.4bn California-based scheme involving shell companies and transfers from Russia, which US authorities said may have been used for money laundering. Norilsk said he withdrew from the process for personal reasons.

The Guardian previously revealed that Kaveladze’s partner in that operation was Boris Goldstein, a Soviet-born banker whose ties to former KGB officers attracted interest from US investigators after he moved to California in the early 1990s. 

In a remarkable coincidence, the US attorney in San Francisco whose office eventually declined to bring criminal charges over their alleged money-laundering scheme was Robert Mueller, the special counsel now looking into Kaveladze’s reappearance.


Also previously unreported is Kaveladze’s close friendship with Andrei Kozlov, who was first deputy chairman of Russia’s central bank under Putin for four years before being assassinated in 2006 as he attempted to clean up Russia’s corrupt banking system.

More than 25 years after their first venture, Kaveladze continues to work alongside Agalarov at Crocus. 

Their company has become one of the biggest corporations in Russia, carrying out government building contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from Putin’s administration – and sealing international deals with tycoons such as Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/18/trump-in-moscow-what-happened-at-miss-universe-in-2013
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/18/trump-in-moscow-what-happened-at-miss-universe-in-2013

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