May 5, 2014 | Quote

The Art of Financial Warfare: How the West Is Pushing Putin’s Buttons

“We found out by Twitter,” an executive at Gunvor Group Ltd., the world’s fourth-largest oil trading firm, told Newsweek.

It was midday on March 20 when the executive, sitting at his office computer in Geneva, glanced up at the screen and got a jolt: A tweet had popped up saying one of the company’s founders, Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire Russian businessman, had been placed on a U.S. government blacklist, along with 31 other people and businesses said to be linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The previous day, Timchenko had finalized the sale of his 43.59 percent stake in Gunvor to his business partner, Torbjörn Törnqvist, a Swedish oil trader, the firm’s other co-founder and now its chief executive.

“The financial sanctions depend on direct outreach to private financial institutions, rather than on going to the foreign governments in which those institutions are based,” says Orde Kittrie, a sanctions scholar and senior defense fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy-research think tank in Washington. Kittrie was a senior State Department economic policy official from 1993 to 2004.

Read the full article here.

Issues:

Russia