The ex-head of the Kremlin administration found a share in the company of the United States. What is known about this business?

The Guardian and the Research Dossier Center found that the former head of the presidential administration Alexander Voloshin and four more wealthy Russians in 2014 invested in the American energy company American Ethane, which last year signed a multi -billion dollar contract with China.

What is known about this company

• Information that Voloshin, the shareholder of American Ethane, was closed, writes The Guardian. According to her, a special company AV SPV was created for the transaction. Through it in 2014, Voloshin invested $ 1.25 million in the American Ethane, receiving 2.5%in it. Now the cost of this package can be tens of millions of dollars, according to The Guardian. The publication writes that Voloshin’s investment, which is a politically significant person (PEP), was “secret”, but American Ethane is not a public company and is not obliged to disclose its shareholders. Voloshin himself refused comments.
• The American Ethane website says that the company's headquarters is in Houston. In the early 2010s, on the wake of the shale revolution in the United States, the company's shareholders foresaw the overproduction of ethane in the United States and began to study the possibilities for its export. In 2015, the company opened offices in China and Bangladesh to satisfy the growing demand in Asia. And last year, American Ethane signed a long -term contract for the supply of ethane to China - its potential size is estimated at $ 26 billion, but so far it has not entered into force (its implementation, in particular, depends on the construction of production in China, for which raw materials made from ethane will be intended). The project for the supply of ethane from the United States to China support the governments of both countries - it is assumed that it will reduce the shortage of US trade balance in relation to trade with China.

Voloshin, Abramovich and other investors from Russia

• Russian investors appeared in the project because they wanted to make money at the Slantsy Revolution in the United States, writes The Guardian. With the idea to invest in this sector to Voloshin in 2014, one of the first Russian cooperators, the author of the book “Third Empire. Russia, which should be "Mikhail Yuryev. In perestroika, he created the Interprom cooperative, sponsored the “Yabloko” in the mid-1990s, went to the State Duma and took the post of vice-speaker. After leaving in 2000, he took up journalism from politics, was a regular author of the magazine Mikhail Leontyev “However”. In 2014, Yuryev, in an interview with Slon.ru, said that it remains a patriot of Russia, but "making money here is inconvenient." By that time, he left all the projects in Russia, and decided to invest in the mineral fertilizer sector and the production of shale gas in the United States. Even earlier, Vedomosti wrote that Yuryev creates a fund for this and was going to attract about $ 2 billion in it - including from foreign investors.
• Voloshin, the idea of ​​Yuryev, apparently seemed promising: according to The Guardian, he convinced to invest in this project Roman Abramovich, who in January 2014 flew into the new Orleans and eventually invested $ 50 million in the American Ethane. But after the annexation of the Crimea and the introduction of the first sanctions against Russia, Abramovich decided not to risk it and sold the share in American Ethane.
• In addition to Voloshin and Yuryev, Konstantin Nikolaev and Andrei Kunatbaev have remained its shareholders since then. Both enter the board of directors of American Ethane.
• Nikolaev - participant in the Russian Forbes list (status assessment - $ 1.1 billion). At the end of 2017, he, together with his partners, sold a share in Global Ports for $ 235 million, the largest container transshipment company in Russia. Now its main asset is the share in the Globaltrans railway operator. It was Nikolaev who lent Voloshin money for investment in American Ethane, writes The Guardian.
• Kunatbaev, as they say in his biography on the American Ethane website, earned a fortune in the television business. In 1994-2000, he worked as an investment banker in the London Botts & Co, after which the TV-3 television channel founded the TV channel. Kunatbaev is also called the co -founder of American companies AMSHALE and Pesto. The Yuryev Foundation, which was written in 2013, was called AMSHALE ENERGY CAPATAL PARTNERS. The same publication said that Pesto Investments Group, created in 2010 by Yuryev and Kunatbaev, invested $ 50-100 million in a gas production project in Texas.
• The Guardian writes that drilling in Texas turned out to be unsuccessful, after which the partners decided to engage in the production of ethane.

"Communication with the Kremlin"

• The deal with Voloshin was interested in The Guardian just because of the Multimillion-dollar contract American Ethane with China. The ceremony of signing this agreement last year was attended by Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Trump praised the deal for the fact that thanks to her, the Americans would receive “thousands of jobs”. CEO American Ethane John Houseling told the publication that the Chinese side insisted at the Trump invitation to the ceremony.
• The Guardian writes that Voloshin, who left AP in 2003, remains an influential person in Russia and has good contacts in the United States. The publication calls his investment in the American Ethane “connection with the Kremlin”. Houseling in an interview with the publication emphasized that the contract with China should not be considered in this vein, because on the contrary it reduces the dependence of the PRC on Russian gas. Russian investors are not under sanctions, the company revealed information about them to the American authorities and potential investors, he added.

What am I to me?

“Communication with the Kremlin” now often becomes the main reason for publications in foreign media. Recently, Yuri Milner fell under the fire of criticism in the United States - he even had to write an open letter about the “Kremlin’s involvement” in his investment on Facebook and Twitter. We decided that you (like us) may simply be interested in knowing how Alexander Voloshin turned out to be a co -owner of the company, which is entrusted with the hopes of the government of the two largest economies in the world.

Irina Malkova, Liana Faizova