The U.S. Treasury Department secretly cleared the way for a Russian-American businessman who donated to President Donald Trump’s controversial White House ballroom project to complete a deal involving a bank sanctioned over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a new investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported in Esquire.
Konstantin Sokolov, one of roughly three dozen private donors financing Trump’s $350 million ballroom addition, manages Texas-based Dynamic Frontier Holdings, which purchased Teghut, one of Armenia’s largest copper mines, earlier this summer. The mine’s primary shareholder and creditor beforehand was Russia’s state-owned VTB Bank, which the Treasury Department sanctioned after Russia’s invasion, calling it a “critical artery” of the country’s financial system and barring Americans from doing business with it.
Dynamic Frontier announced in a September 3 statement that it had quietly obtained special permission from Treasury back on June 1 to go through with the acquisition anyway, buying up all of Teghut’s shares and outstanding debt.
The approval came through Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the sanctions-enforcement arm of the department, which has the power to carve out exceptions allowing specific transactions that sanctions would normally forbid, provided officials conclude the arrangement benefits both the company involved and the broader interests of the U.S. government.
Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce argued that pairing should raise alarm bells given Sokolov’s financial ties to Trump’s pet project.
“I think that, in this case and in so many others, ‘the applicant’ and the U.S. government ought to have radically different ‘interests,’” Pierce wrote.
The disclosure lands amid a string of recent stories tying Russian money to Trump’s inner circle, including reporting that a Russian oligarch helped bankroll the reception following Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding, and earlier revelations that Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the official overseeing the ballroom’s construction, made multiple trips to Russia and personally met with senior aides to Vladimir Putin.
Pierce argued the pattern of Russian entanglements swirling around the ballroom project alone could fuel years of investigative reporting, suggesting newsrooms nationwide ought to take a closer look at exactly what’s being built, and who’s paying for it.
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