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Rick Perry came to Washington in search of an agreement and, less than two months after his tenure as secretary of power, discovered a promising prospect. On April 19, 2017, and Perry, the former governor of Texas, a failed presidential candidate and The Contestant of “Dancing With the Stars,” sat at his workplace on Independence Avenue with two influential Ukrainians. “He said, “Look, I’m a newcomer, I’m a negotiator, I’m a Texan,” recalls one of them, Yuriy Vitrenko, Ukraine’s then-power negotiator leader. “We’re in a position to make deals,” Perry recalls.
The agreements they discussed that day are central to Ukraine’s complex appointments with the Trump administration, an appointment that culminated in December with the House vote to charge President Donald Trump. Perry was a prominent figure in last fall’s trial investigation. He was one of those responsible, known as the “three friends,” who carried out shadow foreign policy in Ukraine on Trump’s behalf. His goal, according to the findings of the House’s political trial investigation, was to embarrass Trump’s main political rival, Joe Biden.
In parallel with this political mission, Perry and his Energy Department staff worked to promote power agreements that potentially value billions of dollars for Perry’s friends and political donors, a six-month investigation through Time, WNYC, and ProPublica reporters. Two of these agreements gave the impression Energy Transfer, the Texas-based company on the board of directors, of which Perry served without delay before and after his stay in Washington, is worth about $20 billion, according to U. S. and Ukrainian energy officials involved in his negotiations.
If the long-discussed agreement succeeds, Perry himself may benefit: in March, 3 months after leaving the government, he held Energy Transfer shares with an existing price of around $800,000, according to his most recent presentation to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Perry turns out to have remained in the right aspect of the law in the search for Ukrainian companies. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, or SDNY, have interviewed at least four other people about the agreements in the following year, according to five others familiar with the talks, and discussed them with our team of reporters on anonymity. “Already last year, they were already interested in the occasions they had taken a position in Ukraine around Rick Perry,” adding accusations that Perry “trying to make deals for his friends,” says one of the other people who spoke in Manhattan. Applicants for. Perry is not the target of his research, according to two resources close to the probes.
But two ethics experts say Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. Government officials cannot participate in issues directly similar to the corporations they recently served on the Board of Directors. Other experts say Perry and his aides may have violated federal law. rule prohibiting public servants from protecting corporations that have not been approved by the Department of Commerce. “Even if you oppose criminal status, it remains unethical,” says Richard Painter, President George W. ‘s most sensible White House ethics lawyer. , with whom we share our findings.
Through a spokesman, Perry said he “never got involved or facilitated discussions” between Energy Transfer and Ukraine’s public energy company in any of the agreements we discovered. The spokesman declined to comment on other companies that Perry has complexes while in government, adding $20 billion, or federal investigation. In reaction to the questions written for this article, Energy Transfer stated, “We are aware of any contact between Secretary Perry and Ukrainian officials on behalf of Energy Transfer. “
Our survey shows how the pursuit of power benefits in Ukraine has combined money and politics to the highest levels of the Trump administration. Perry, in and out of office, complicates the business interests of his friends and political allies. Ukrainians, in turn, sought to exploit Perry’s program to promote his national interests. Now, the good luck of Perry’s agreements will possibly feature the final results of the November election, according to Ukrainian officials involved in the negotiations. This means that the presidential race will not only be conduct It can also reshape billions of dollars in industrial agreements whose fate is closely related to that in power.
This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen officials and former officials and power leaders in the United States and Ukraine. Our team of reporters searched for clues and resources in Miami, Houston, New York, Kiev and Washington, DC, and reviewed payloads of legal document pages, lobbying files, corporate emails, and internal government communications. Many of the main points the team knew have not been reported before and, together, reveal some other facet of the occasions that paved the way for political judgment. president of the United States.
Ukrainians have never been naive in their proposals to Trump’s team. They found out Trump was a businessman. “We studied his mental profile,” says Konstantin Eliseev, who pleaded with the Ukrainian foreign policy president when Trump took office in 2017. His strategy, Vitrenko says, “attract or seduce” Trump’s leadership by proposing agreements to his leaders. “It’s typical of Ukrainian politicians,” says the power negotiator. “They think that if they could, to some extent, corrupt the U. S. government. commercially or personally, it would help. “
Ukrainians desperately needed this help. Since 2014, they have been at war with Russia and their country counts on the United States for its survival. The first offer they suspended at the April 2017 assembly with Perry was really attractive: they were looking for a Western spouse to take a 49% stake in the country’s fuel piping system. “It’s a vintage money cow,” says Oleksandr Kharchenko, one of the Ukrainian energy experts looking to sell a stake in the company. profits, he says, are approaching $2 billion.
The Ukrainians allegedly caught Perry’s attention. From the beginning, Perry’s attention to Ukraine has baffled his government colleagues, who say he is personally interested in the country’s affairs. These cases would normally be the responsibility of the State Department and not the Department of Energy. But at the U. S. embassy in Kiev, officials felt perry’s workplace had taken over Ukrainian politics. “Secretary Perry’s staff has been very competitive in selling a schedule and excluding embassy staff from meetings without giving any explanation,” said David Holmes, a senior embassy official, at a Congress during the political trial investigation last year.
Some of the voices that pushed this schedule were not members of the Department of Energy, but personal businessmen from Texas. The most visual was Michael Bleyzer, an old friend and political donor at Perry’s. Bleyzer, known for his long mane with silver hair and his reputation for diving, was born in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and emigrated to the United States in 1978. As Bleyzer explained in a series of emails and phone interviews commentary, he has an interest in photography with Perry, and they traveled together to take photos in Colorado and Israel. “He sees me as Mr. Ukraine,” Bleyzer says. Whenever he had questions about Ukraine, he was addressing me. “
So is the Department of Energy. In July 2017, 3 months after Perry’s first assembly in Ukraine, his team invited Bleyzer to discuss Ukrainian policy in his Washington office, according to his internal emails (emails were published in February in response to an American Oversight request under the Freedom of Information Act. ) The following year, Bleyzer became a constant presence at the U. S. Embassy in Kiev, occasionally requesting meetings with the U. S. ambassador. Mary “Masha” Yovanovich. ” Bleyzer came to the embassy once a month,” says Embassy staff became deeply involved in Bleyzer’s dual role in the impression of playing, either as a businessman seeking oil and fuel agreements in Ukraine and as Perry’s casual adviser. “We try to convince Masha not to participate in the assembly,” says a user close to the visits. “But she said, “I can’t. He is Perry’s boyfriend ((Yovanovich refused to comment on this article).
Bleyzer also had contacts at Energy Transfer, the company where Perry was a director. Its CEO, Kelcy Warren, donated $6 million to the 2016 presidential race of The Perry Super PACs. In mid-June 2018, Bleyzer arranged a holiday in Kiev for one of the company’s executives. “I brought Energy Transfer to Ukraine,” Bleyzer says of the holidays. His interest, he said, was in Ukraine’s pipeline network, which the country had opened to foreign investment. It was the same treatment that Ukrainians had introduced to Perry’s workplace a year earlier, in April 2017. “Bleyzer told me, when he came here to make a stop at me, that this [company] had been blessed through Perry,” said one of the Ukrainian leaders he met. “The company was called Energy Transfer. ” (Bleyzer denies saying that and says he “never discussed the power movement with Perry. “)
Both sides didn’t make an apparent match. Energy Transfer has never completed a major transaction outside North America, but investment in Ukraine is attractive. The country’s pipeline formula is a reliable source of money, says Sergey Makogon, the company’s director operating it Russia will pay more than $1 billion a year to deliver its fuel through Ukrainian pipelines to Europe. If Energy Transfer invested in this Pipeline Network, it may only get a percentage of the profits. Vitrenko, who then led the negotiations with Energy Transfer, said he had discussed a $3 billion investment.
During his time in the Trump administration, Perry had no formal connection to Energy Transfer. He sold his shares in the company after Trump appointed him to his closet and resigned from his board. At his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2017, Perry testified under oath that he had no conflict of interest in leading the U. S. Department of Energy. But during his tenure, the Department of Energy worked to advance an agreement between Ukraine and Energy Transfer, according to 3 of the Ukrainian negotiators involved. “Kharchenko, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, says. The Department of Energy says it hasn’t encouraged or complicated those discussions. The company says it has never received enough data from Ukrainians to calculate the price of a possible investment.
But the pipeline formula is not the most important task Ukraine had to offer americans. The prospect of promoting American fuel in Europe is much more valuable. a fuel export terminal in Lake Charles, southern Louisiana. A few months later, the company signed an agreement with Shell, the Dutch energy giant, to jointly expand the terminal at an estimated cost of around $11 billion.
This new export company had left a big question unanswered: where would Energy Transfer send its fuel?The global market for liquefied plant fuels, or LNG, has many suppliers, with shipments from Qatar, Australia and other primary exporters. Energy Transfer is a primary customer for your fuel, preferably a customer who would engage in a long-term supply agreement. In 2019, an opportunity like this presented itself in Ukraine.
Perry is not ashamed of his program in Ukraine. On his first stopover in Kiev in November 2018, he spoke at a meeting of entrepreneurs about a complex way to bring American fuel to Europe. This would involve sending fuel to Poland in giant tankers. hide it underground in Ukraine before promoting it westward in the European Union. “Ukraine’s perspective is incredible,” Perry said at the business roundtable. Soon after, Energy Department officials began inventing new terms for American LNG, calling it “freedom fuel” and “freedom molecules,” as they sought to market it worldwide.
While Obama’s leadership also sought to undermine Russia’s power influence by exporting U. S. LNG to Europe, some of Perry’s colleagues in Trump’s leadership were surprised and frustrated by the secretary’s concentration on fuel sales. the world,” said Tom Pyle, who led Trump’s transition team at the Department of Energy. “But it has failed to revive the nuclear waste control program or initiate the agency’s mandatory reforms, which is a great disappointment. “Pyle told publication E
Perry eventually went straight to the summit in Ukraine with his evangelization of power, and his favorite followers. In May 2019, Trump sent him to Kiev to attend the inauguration of Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. At an assembly that day, Perry did everything that was his. The managers of the U. S. Embassy did not expect, despite their extensive plans to make the talks. Perry passed Zelensky a piece of paper and pressed him to take a look. In doing so, Perry explained that the memorandum contained a list of names of “people trusted,” according to Holmes, the American diplomat, who took official notes of the event.
Among the names on the list was Bleyzer, Perry’s old friend from Houston. The following month, June 2019, Bleyzer nevertheless received the deal he was looking for in Ukraine. At an auction of oil and fuel drilling licenses, the maximum liked it. The license went to Bleyzer, who received the rights to expand some of Ukraine’s largest oil and fuel fields over the next 50 years. The deal was first reported through The Associated Press in November and has a potential value of billions of dollars.
There was another call on Perry’s list, and he surprised the Ukrainians: Robert Bensh, a little-known Texas oil and gas executive, Bensh only knew Perry for a few months at the time. more than a decade as one of the few U. S. investors in Ukraine’s oil and fuel sector. His contacts in Kiev included affiliates close to Ukraine’s former corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown by a revolution in 2014. Ukraine seded and returned to Houston. ” I didn’t need anything to do with Ukraine,” Bensh told our team of reporters in a series of interviews.
Ukrainians soon learned at least one of the reasons for his return: Bensh connected with Perry’s dream of exporting American fuel to Ukraine. Along with a Louisiana investor organization, Bensh was selling a company called Louisiana Natural Gas Exports Inc. , better known among its discoverers. like LNGE. Established in June 2018, the company had no transactions or assets in its name. The man indexed as his co-director and director, Marsden Miller, is connected to Bensh through marriage. In 1987, a jury in Louisiana discovered that Miller was to blame for corruption; His conviction was subsequently overdulled and the government abandoned the case that opposed him after the U. S. Supreme Court reduced the prestige applicable in an unrelated case. LNGE has no fuel fields, pipelines, oil tankers or export terminals, but its leaders had relations in Ukraine and On July 10, 2019, those relations began to bear fruit.
The date marked a turning point in Ukraine’s relations with the Trump administration. It was that afternoon at the White House that two Kiev officials came under pressure to open investigations into Trump’s political rivals. National security adviser John Bolton described the occasions of the day as “drug trafficking. “”so memorable.
But the Ukrainians met with Trump’s management that night. After the disturbing interaction in the White House, the two men had a dinner-meeting at a place to eat near the White House with two of Perry’s most sensitive aides. Again: Robert Bensh. While sitting at the table, Oleksandr Danyliuk, then national security adviser to the president of Ukraine, recalls wondering why bensh would be invited to a personal dinner with senior government officials. “It smells like trouble,” Danyliuk recalls.
The treatment Bensh and his associates had in mind was very similar to the one Perry had reached on his first trip to Kiev eight months earlier. For them, at least, it seemed like a victory. Sending U. S. fuel to Ukraine through Poland and then reselling it in the European Union would “return cash for LNGE,” Bensh says. It can also bring a lot of cash to an American company like Energy Transfer that you’ve been looking for for a long time. fuel-term buyers from their export terminal. “To build their terminals, they have to get orders,” Bensh says. And, of course, the deal would also be compatible with Perry’s program to sell American “free fuel” to the world.
But from Ukraine’s point of view, the plan had critical deficiencies: one of the transport charges: sending American fuel to Europe is expensive, and if Ukrainians agreed to buy this fuel, they could get stuck paying a premium for many years. While previous governments in Kiev had followed the idea, the new administration was skeptical. “It looks like it would be a big disaster,” says Danyliuk, the national security adviser. In any case, at that dinner near the White House, he too worried about the “drug business” of the day to communicate about any fuel business. It is possible queensh to see that this is not the right time to press.
But Perry continued to publicitate his vision of U. S. exports of herbal fuels. That same month, July 2019, he was one of the U. S. officials who urged Trump to make a phone call with Ukraine’s new president. “The only explanation for why I made that call was because Rick “Something About an LNG Plant,” Trump later told an organization of Republican lawmakers, according to a report through Axios quoting three. When the call arrived on July 25, 2019, Trump suggested to the Ukrainian president to open investigations opposed to the Biden family, asking Zelensky to “do us a favor. “A rough transcript of the appeal would be Annex A of the indictment investigation.
The rough transcript does not mention Perry’s fuel program, however, as a result of the presidential raid, Perry continued. For much of this summer, his team had been preparing to signal a foreign power agreement at a summit in Warsaw. The summit, which began in late August 2019, aimed to allow U. S. corporations to send fuel to Ukraine through Poland. The NGE was looking for one of the U. S. corporations, and Perry’s team invited the corporation’s leading executive to finish. had even drafted an initial offer for Naftogaz, Ukraine’s public energy company.
Perry and his staff were urging Ukraine to point it out, according to 3 power officials familiar with the ongoing negotiations. “They basically said, ‘If you need us as friends, you have to,'” remembers one. But Ukrainians had more important considerations back then. Days before the summit, Politico broke the news that the Trump administration had frozen an army aid package to Ukraine that was then revealed worth $400 million. The Kiev delegation is desperate for the freeze to rise. “The biggest precedent for me is the help of the army,” Danyliuk says.
He left it to Naftogaz, the public energy corporation, to examine the offer of an agreement with LNGE. “We’re looking for them,” says Andrew Favorov, the Naftogaz executive who tested the potential partner. A Google search took them to legal problems beyond Miller, co-founder and director of LNGE. It was a red flag for the Ukrainians. In addition, Favorov says, “the company has no real strengths. “Naftogaz pleaded with his government not to participate in a fuel deal with the Louisiana company.
Soon, the agreement became a problem. Three weeks after the Warsaw summit, it was learned that a whistleblower had sounded the alarm about Trump’s tension crusade in Ukraine, and the White House released a rough transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky. With the impe trial investigation gaining momentum and his call emerging as a central player in the Ukrainian saga, Perry announced in October that he would relinquis up the branch of power by the end of the year. .
The agreement Perry and his allies reached for 3 years while in Washington did not die when he resigned and returned to Texas. After Trump’s acquittal in the Senate on February 5, Perry’s internal and external allies, the government revived the big American fuel. had a complex and driven export agreement. In early March, LNGE representatives met with Perry’s successor as secretary of power, Dan Brouillette, a veteran Louisiana politician. “He told us they were still 100 percent out of the agreement,” said one of the LNGE Representatives who were at the assembly. The Department of Energy denies supporting the agreement. The LNGE assembly “was purely introductory and informative,” said Shaylyn Hynes, the branch’s spokesman.
After this meeting, things in Ukraine began to move quickly. On March 11, Zelensky’s government issued a decree appointing Bensh to Naftogaz’s board of directors. Two days later, Ukraine’s deputy energy minister announced that Ukraine had reached a primary LNG agreement with the Americans. The U. S. spouse of the deal: Louisiana herbal fuel exports.
The main points were not revealed, however, the way the agreement was reached caught the attention on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, critics have pointed out that the Department of Energy’s obvious help for the agreement appears to have violated federal regulations. that saves U. S. officials from protecting U. S. corporations that have not been approved through the Department of Commerce. The NGE has never undergone this verification procedure, according to its executives. “The audit procedure is there to identify conflicts of interest, in addition to the point beyond transactions, anything that may have a bad symbol of the US government. The U. S. as a whole,” says Theo LeCompte, who was deputy director of staff at the Department of Commerce at the time of Barack Obama’s tenure. branch had defended the company.
On the Ukrainian side, things were even more curious: Ukraine had not invited any competition for the agreement, but even with the obvious blessing of the US Department of Energy. The deal isn’t a padlock yet. Naftogaz executives still refused to marry Louisiana. As a spouse elected on the Ukrainian side, kiev’s Ministry of Energy has proposed a hard-to-understand state entity called MGU, which maintains stocks in Ukraine’s pipeline network.
But the company’s executives have also begun to sound the alarm, adding to the chairman of its supervisory board, Walter Boltz, an Austrian who had been hired to leave Ukraine’s notoriously problematic fuel industry blank. “It’s a silly, prevent idea,” Boltz said of the Louisiana agreement. “You must keep your friends satisfied. ” And ukrainians, he added, “might even be willing to pay a little more, I suppose, to make Trump satisfied and keep the army’s help flow. “
Last May, the Department of Energy fired skeptic Boltz and announced an initial agreement with the Louisiana-based company. In a 20-page document, known as the Memorandum of Intent, both parties clarified the approximate terms of the agreement. take fuel shipments from Louisiana over the next 20 years, according to a copy received through our reporting team. The volumes involved were considerable, amounting to 5. 5 billion cubic meters consistent with the year, rising more than the annual fuel intake of Slovakia, an EU member country bordering Ukraine. The Louisiana-based company said they projected overall proceeds for the deal at about $20 billion, or about $1 billion a year over two decades.
However, the agreement left an unanswered question: where would the Louisiana company get all that fuel?In June, LNGE turned to Energy Transfer. At this stage, Perry had regained his position on the Energy Transfer board and acquired his shares. Louisiana leaders reached their initial agreement with Ukraine, went to Energy Transfer in search of a fuel terminal, said Miller, co-founder of LNGE. In a statement, Energy Transfer downplayed the discussions, saying they amounted to an “introductory convention” “That went no further, and Miller insisted that they did not communicate about an association in Ukraine at the time. Other LNGE executives say it was just one step towards reaching the $20 billion agreement. “First we had to finalize the agreement in Ukraine,” he added, says one. “Then we got the fuel.
It was at this last level of the negotiations that the agreement ran into serious problems. The Ukrainians began to stagnate. According to an official concerned about Ukraine’s deliberations on the agreement, the explanation for why the delay is largely political: by then, the COVID-19 pandemic was booming and Trump’s approval rates had fallen dramatically amid his chaotic handling of the epidemic. of winning re-election began to seem less and less likely.
For Ukrainians, this replaced the political equation of the agreement. “If Biden is elected, I would say that [Biden’s team] would be curious enough, to say the least,” the official said. concerned in Ukraine’s deliberations. ” In terms of relationships, that would be very damaging,” the official added. “Given the latest [survey] figures, it’s just stupid,” he says.
Perry’s allies came here face to face. Six months after Zelensky’s government appointed Bensh as a member of Naftogaz’s board of directors, he has not yet officially assumed office. Aleyzer, Perry’s friend from Texas, didn’t do much better. Shortly after obtaining licences to expand oil and fuel deposits in Ukraine in June 2019, Naftogaz challenged the granting of such licences in court. The Ukrainian government, which owns one hundred percent of Naftogaz, refused to interfere with the dispute, which prevented the start of Bleyzer’s oil and fuel projects.
With regard to the power movement, the chimney of the political trial investigation in October 2019, the Ukrainian Parliament made the decision that promoting the country’s pipelines was not such a clever idea and voted to ban foreign ownership of these pipelines. The costs of the COVID-19 pandemic have affected energy movement with force Plans to build an LNG export terminal in Louisiana were affected by the end of March 2020, when Shell, his 50-50 spouse in the project, made the decision to retire. unfavourable market conditions.
Some of Louisiana’s executives are furious about dragging their feet in Kiev, and blame Naftogaz. In emails received through our team of reporters, Miller, director and co-founder of the Louisiana company, criticized Naftogaz for informing the Kievan government of Miller’s corruption. “Is this the guy who turned to sdNY’s federal prosecutor?” wrote Miller outraged his colleagues, referring to Andriy Kobolyev, NAftogaz’s chief executive. In fact, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office for the Southern District of New York contacted Kobolyev in The Fall of 2019 and said he had agreed to speak with his investigators. Since then, researchers have questioned at least 3 other people about Perry’s efforts to succeed in fuel agreements in Ukraine, according to others close to what they told investigators.
But before this year, prosecutors dropped that line of questions, according to two other people familiar with the questions they have been asking since April. Noah Bookbinder, a former anti-corruption prosecutor with whom we shared our findings, says that US law makes this possible. “Criminal conflicts of interest are not charged because they can be difficult to resolve,” he says. “He has a relatively modest sentence. VeryArray prosecutors look at that and say,” It’s a lot of pictures to turn around, and it’s not the biggest fault, so we’re not passing to take the time to go down that road.
Two years ago, some Democrats called for stricter restrictions on potential conflicts of interest, noting that Perry was dating Energy Transfer to justify new legislation. Senator Elizabeth Warren filed an invoice in 2018, known as the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, which would prohibit corporations from hiring or paying former heads of agencies they pressured. In a letter to Perry and Energy Transfer in January, Warren suggested Perry resign from the Energy Transfer board. “This is precisely the kind of immoral and resounding corruption that has made Americans cynical and wary of the federal government,” Warren wrote. In a brief response, the company told Warren that “fully aware of our legal and moral criteria similar to Secretary Perry’s, he returns to our Board of Directors. “
Is the $20 billion settlement dead? Not necessarily. Ukrainians seem to be waiting to see where political winds turn in November. If Trump wins the term, some Ukrainians assume that Perry’s deal could come back to life. “Wait three months, then see what happens, ” said the official, concerned at the deliberations in Kiev. “This is an apparent political problem. You don’t have to be a genius to perceive this logic. “
But despite all ukraine’s efforts to woo Americans, some are at least disappointed throughout the entire process. They hoped, at some level, that the US calendar would be motivated by a non-unusual set of objectives and values, such as strengthening alliances and fighting Russia’s influence. But over time, says Vitrenko, the power negotiator, it has become transparent that objectives number one were easier and, for Ukrainians, more familiar. “It was about making agreements,” he says. And make money.
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