Headline Jan 18, 2018/ ''' *MILLION$* FACEBOOK MUTATION$ '''

''' *MILLION$* FACEBOOK 

MUTATION$ '''

AND AFTER THE FACEBOOK DEAL, wherein Mr. Yuri Milner bought 8 percent of Facebook, and this all  came in part from the  Kremlin-

Mr. Yuri Milner became a Silicon fixture, spending about $100 million on a 25,000 square-foot house in Los Altos Hills,  Calif.

*YES, MILLION$ in Facebook shares rooted in Russian cash*.

Mr. Milner eventually teamed with Alisher Usmanov -an Uzbek-Russian oligarch close to the  Russian prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev -and a former Goldman Sachs executive to build a large stake in Mail.ru, a Russian Internet company that- now trades on the  London Stock Exchange.

Mr. Milner's initial American investments came as he served on an innovation commission set up in 2009 by Mr. Medvedev, who was Russia's president at the time.

In May 2009, Facebook announced an investment of roughly $200 million by Mr. Milner's company,  Digital Sky Technologies, and said the company planned to spend at least $100 million buying additional stock.

Eventually, Mr. Milner's new venture capital firm, DST Global also amassed a significant stake in Facebook.

''A number of firms approached us, but DST stood out because of the global perspective they bring,'' Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said at the time.

The documents reviewed by The Times  reveal that DST brought something else as well : a connection -through a succession of shell companies -to the Kremlin. 

TIES TO THE RUSSIAN STATE

In those years, as parts of its  diplomatic ''reset'' with Moscow, Obama administration was encouraging Russia to learn from the  American technology industry.

For the  Facebook deal, it was Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas giant, that became the bridge. The company. a vital component of the Putin government, has employed its financial subsidiary-

Gazprom Investholding, to reclain assets privatised during the 1990s.

Gazprom Investholding is ''used for politically important and strategically important deals for the Kremlin,'' said  IIya Zaslavsky, a contributor to the Kleptocracy Initiative, a project of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Both VTB and Gazprom, are under United States sanctions stemming from Russian support of separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Over several years, Gazpromn Investholding and a subsidiary made hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to a company called Kanton Services, according to records from the Panama Papers, the trove of leaked documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca.

Kanton, in turn, owned one of the DST investment vehicles used to buy shares of Facebook.

While it is unclear precisely when Kanton first received its stake in in the DST entity, Kanton received $197 million of the Gazprom Investholding loan three months Facebook announced its first deal with Mr. Milner the records show.

Kanton based in the British Virgin Islands, had numerous ties to Mr. Milner's backer, Mr. Usmanov.

Kanton was owned by a longtime Usmanov business associate, and was controlled by Mathias Bolliger, a director of numerous subsidiaries of Mr. Usmanov's main holding company, USM Holdings, according to an Appleby memo and the  Panama Papers.

And an email sent by a trust company on the Isle of man used by Mr. Usmanov referred to Kanton as a ''private investment company'' , [facebook and twitter].''

In the interviews, Mr. Milner said his investor's identities were not generally public information. And he sought to distance his company from Mr. Usmanov.

''I had no knowledge of him using state funds to invests with us,'' he said.

A spokesman for Mr. Usmanov, Rollo Head, did not address specific questions. But in a statement, he insisted that there are clear streams of money that do not mingle.

Mr. Usmanov, he said, ''did not borrow from or use state or quasi-state funds to make investments in Facebook.''

LUCRATIVE SYNERGIES

The Facebook's deal was a case study in the way Russia's oligarchs have mixed public and private roles for their own, and their government's benefit: Even as he was investing in Facebook, Mr. Usmanov was a general director of Gazprom Investholding.

In fact, Mr. Usmanov  had often intertwined his government position with his personal deals, according to a report by the  global investigations  and security firm  Kroll.  Kroll described those arrangements as  ''synergies''. 

THE KROLL REPORT  -a  ''reputation audit'' -had been commissioned by Mr. Usmanov as he set out  to burnish his image a year before his deal with Mr. Milner to invest in Facebook.

Kroll investigators, relying on public records and interviews, detailed a long and colorful history :

Time in prison in Uzbekistan [he was later exonerated] and past associations with alleged Russian organized crime figures, according to draft copy of the report reviewed by  The Times.

The investigators also recounted a  dizzying number of deals  -involving mining,  media and technology companies, often with the assistance of the Kremlin and Mr. Medvedev.

Kroll investigators found that, for  some investments , Mr. Usmanov turned to Kanton.

A Facebook spokeswoman, Vanessa Chan, declined to answer specific questions about  the  deal with  DST, calling it a  ''passive investor''  and noting that the company had invested and cashed out  several years ago.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Operational Research on Social Media and Funding continues.

With respectful dedication to the  Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all ''register'' on !WOW! -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Gold Brick Mortar '''

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