The businessman Leonard Blavatnik, who has gained the main part of his fortune thanks to his partnership with Victor Vekselberg and Oleg Deripaska, saves his face in the USA by the increasing investments in philanthropic activity. Yesterday in New York, the dinner organized by the expert center Hudson Institute was held. Blavatnik Family Foundation became the sponsor of the event. The dinner was arranged in honor of the speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan and the Permanent Representative of the USA to the UN Nickey Haley.
Blavatnik is the U.S. citizen who grew up in the Soviet Union. His partners — Victor Vekselberg and Oleg Deripaska are under US sanctions, Blavatnik’s activity also caused questions by the Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. In recent years, he has sharply increased the political donations in the USA. Since 2015, he has donated some $7.6 million to republicans, one million to Trump’s inaugural committee and half a million to democrats.
He donated $50 000 for Hudson Institute’s event, only three trustees of institute and the billionaire Paul Singer brought some more. This dinner is a good example of how allegedly charity provides political access.
Blavatnik’s activity is concentrated not only in the USA. The other day the SchoolsWeek.co.uk portal reported the Blavatnik Family Foundation had become the sponsor of New schools Network. NSN — a charitable organization registered in Great Britain, which purpose is the support of the groups creating free schools within sector of the state education of England.
As Ilya Zaslavsky, the former consultant of TNK-BP notes, “Underminers” has convincing proofs of that Blavatnik is in many respects connected with the corrupted security services of Russia and law enforcement agencies and personally got profit on their illegal actions. The best illustration for that is a transaction on sale of TNK-BP “Rosneft” as a result of which he received about 7 billion dollars against his share in 2013. Zaslavsky also specifies that Blavatnik’s firm Amediateka appears in “Panama documents” as having joint venture with business of the deputy minister of internal affairs Alexander Makhonov: in 2017, Makhonov left his post after his subordinate was suspected of corruption, but he continued to do the business, as earlier.