A day after President Donald Trump notified Congress that the sanctions bill it passed in August was sufficiently “serving as a deterrent”, and that no new sanctions would be taken against individuals fingered in the bill, the Treasury Department quietly released the – now effectively meaningless – “Oligarchs List”, to the relief of the Russian business and government elite.
Included in the list, which was published minutes before the midnight deadline, are 114 senior political figures, and 96 oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich – the owner of the Chelsea Football Club – Oleg Deripaska – purportedly a former client of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and tech entrepreneur Yuriy Milner.
According to the Financial Times, the Kremlin responded by saying the list amounted to a roster of “enemies of the United States,” and had cast US-Russian relations into an “unprecedented situation.”
The Treasury Department was required to compile and publish a report on possible targets for US sanctions by a bill passed by Congress in August that was intended to make sure the Trump administration keeps pressure on the Kremlin over its military intervention in Ukraine.
After initially slipping following the publication of the list of names, Russian equities bounced back in early European trading as traders realized the list was less targeted than some had expected, or as some called it “much ado about nothing” and just a rehash of the Forbes richest Russians. By midday the Moex index of leading Russian shares was up 0.3%. The ruble climbed 0.1% to 56.25 to the dollar, bolstered by firming crude prices.
The list was compiled based on “objective criteria drawn from publicly available sources,” Treasury said, including those with net worth of $1 billion or more for the oligarchs and high official position for the senior political figures.
“They just included everybody, all the big businessmen, all the major bureaucrats,” said Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at BCS Financial Group, a Moscow brokerage.
Government officials listed ranged from Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Energy Minister Alexander Novak to the heads of state companies and Kremlin representatives in Russia’s regions.
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370313106-2018-01-29-Treasury-Caatsa-241-Final by zerohedge on Scribd
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