The Post-Gazette has done some excellent, excellent investigative work on Ukrainian sleazeball oligarch and benefactor of both the Azov battalion and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ihor Kolomoisky.*
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project along with the ICIJ is justifiably famous for the Panama Papers, the Pandora Papers and many others.
There have been rumors since the Panama Papers story broke in April 2016 that the OCCRP does some investigative stuff for its funders, the Open Society Foundations, the Omidyar Network and the Skoll Foundation (along with USAID and the State Department). Personally, I don't have a clue, we've linked to both sources.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the OCCRP, August 26:
For a time, Anna de Rothschild boasted of her family roots to the European banking dynasty, donning designer clothes, a Rolex watch, and driving a $170,000 black Mercedes-Benz SUV.
She talked about developing a sprawling luxury housing project on Emerald Bay in the Bahamas, a high-rise hotel in Monaco, and a Formula One race track in Miami, say people who knew her.
A pivotal moment for the woman who was fluent in several languages took place last year when she was invited to Mar-a-Lago, where she mingled with former President Donald Trump’s supporters and showed up the next day for a golf outing with Mr. Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham among other political luminaries.
But the 33-year-old woman was not a member of the famous banking family, and is now a subject of a widening FBI investigation that has delved into her past financial activities and the events that led her to the former president’s home.
“It was the near-perfect ruse and she played the part,” said John LeFevre, a former investment banker who met her with other guests around a club pool.
In addition to the FBI, law enforcement agents in Canada have confirmed that she has been the subject of a major crimes unit investigation in Quebec since February.
A year before the FBI’s spectacular raid of the former president’s seaside home, the woman whose real name is Inna Yashchyshyn, a Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine, made several trips into the estate posing as a member of the famous family while making inroads with some of the former president’s key supporters.
The ability of Ms. Yashchyshyn — the daughter of an Illinois truck driver — to bypass the security at Mr. Trump’s club demonstrates the ease with which someone with a fake identity and shadowy background can get into a facility that’s one of America’s power centers and the epicenter of Republican Party politics.
Those issues have become even more critical after FBI agents seized boxes of classified and top-secret materials two weeks ago from Mar-a-Lago after executing a search warrant on Mr. Trump’s home.
Her entry — multiple trips in and out of the club grounds — lays bare the vulnerabilities of a facility that serves as both the former president's residence and a private club, and highlights the gaps in security that can take place.
“That’s his residence,” said Ed Martin, a former U.S. Treasury special agent who spent more than two decades in criminal intelligence. “She shouldn’t have been in there.”
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project learned that numerous records have been turned over to the FBI as part of the inquiry, including copies of two fake passports from the U.S. and Canada — bearing her photo and the name Anna de Rothschild — and a Florida driver’s license with the same name that shows the address of an opulent $13 million mansion in Miami Beach where she has never lived.
In 2015, Ms. Yashchyshyn became president of United Hearts of Mercy charity, which was dropped by two payment processors because they detected fraud.
Ms. Yashchyshyn said in sworn statements in a legal dispute that she has never used another name and has not broken any laws. In an interview with the Post-Gazette, she said she didn’t know Anna de Rothschild.
“I think there is some misunderstanding,” she said.
She said that she was meeting with FBI agents on Aug. 19 and that passports or driver’s licenses generated with the Rothschild name and her photo were fabricated by her former business partner to harm her. “That’s all fake, and nothing happened,” she said.
Mr. LeFevre and three other guests interviewed for this story said Ms. Yashchyshyn repeatedly told people after entering the palatial Mar-a-Lago grounds that she was a Rothschild “and everyone was eating it up,” he said.
The probe into her activities comes three years after two different women from China — one of them toting two passports and a thumb drive with malicious software — were arrested in separate instances after they entered the club grounds while Mr. Trump was president.
Both were sentenced to less than a year in jail and have since been released with at least one being deported to China last year.
The Secret Service said it could not comment on whether the agency is investigating Ms. Yashchyshyn’s visits to the former president’s home in May 2021, or any other subsequent trips.
“To maintain the operational integrity of our work, we are unable to comment specifically concerning the means, methods or resources used to conduct our protective operations,” said Steven Kopek, a special agent and spokesman, in a statement.
The Secret Service more than likely didn’t run background checks to determine Ms. Yashchyshyn’s identity when she visited the former president’s home, partly because the level of protection drops significantly when a president leaves office, said four former agents interviewed for this story.
In most cases, “they are going to do a level of screening — a hand check” for weapons, said Jonathan Wackrow, a former agent who served on President Barack Obama’s detail. “He still has a full detail.”
But experts say her ability to mingle with members of Mr. Trump’s entourage raises concerns about ongoing security at the private club that continues to host some of the most powerful elected leaders in the country and serves as a storage site for some of the country’s closely guarded secrets.
“The question is was it a fraud or an intelligence threat,” said Charles Marino, a former Secret Service supervisor. “The fact that we are asking this question is a problem.”....
....MUCH MORE
Sounds like a set-up. And since El Donaldo is already in Putin's pocket it's probably not the Russians.
So who? The Ukrainians? The Americans? Justin from Canada? The Israelis? Elizabeth II Regina?
More to come, I'm sure.
And the Post-Gazette stories on 'ol Ihor:May 1, 2021
Will We Ever Find The Looted Billions The IMF Sent To Ukraine? Ihor Kolomoisky's Adventures In America
But then a $5 billion cash honeypot is apt to draw....um, people.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has done an astoundingly thorough job of turning up facts and figures on one part of the story of a very, very bad person....
AND:
Secrets: Ukraine's Zelensky Will Be Thrown Under the Bus As His Oligarch Patron Gets Squeezed (Deutsche Bank and dirty money)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has made something of a cottage industry digging into Kolomoyskyi's doings. Here's the latest, February 20, 2022....
