Chernomyrdin threatened to sue.
The rot may run even deeper. The Geneva daily "Le Temps", which has
been following the affair relentlessly, accused, two years ago,
Roman Abramovich, a Yeltsin-era oligarch and a member of the board
of directors of Sibneft, of colluding with Runicom, Sibneft's
trading arm, to misappropriate IMF funds. Swiss prosecutors raided
Runicom's offices just one day after Russian Tax Police raided
Sibneft's Moscow headquarters.
Absconding with IMF funds seemed to have been a pattern of behavior
during Yeltsin's venal regime. The columnist Bradley Cook recounts
how Aldrich Ames, the mole within the CIA, "was told by his Russian
control officer during their last meeting, in November 1993, that
the $130,000 in fresh $100 bills that he was being bribed with had
come directly from IMF loans." Venyamin Sokolov, who headed the
Audit Chamber prior to Sergei Stepashin, informed the US Senate of
$2 billion that evaporated from the coffers of the central bank in
1995.
Even the IMF reluctantly admits:
"Capital transferred abroad from Russia may represent such legal
activities as exports, or illegal sources. But it is impossible to
determine whether specific capital flows from Russia-legal or
illegal-come from a particular inflow, such as IMF loans or export
earnings.
Pages:
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80