Global games: John McCain’s Kremlin ties over Montenegro?
Several American medias reported about the strange meeting that John McCain had in Montenegro, during his visit in 2006.
Extracts from the Nation magazine:
In mid-September The Nation‘s website published a photo of McCain celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006 at a yacht party hosted by convicted Italian felon Raffaello Follieri and his movie-star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. On the same day one of the largest mega-yachts in the world, the Queen K, was moored in the same bay of Kotor. This was where the real party was. The owner of the Queen K was known as “Putin’s oligarch”: Oleg Deripaska, controlling shareholder of the Russian aluminum giant RusAl, currently listed as the ninth-richest man in the world, with a rap sheet as abundant as his wealth. By mid-2005 Deripaska had already virtually taken control of Montenegro’s economy by snapping up its aluminum plant, KAP–which accounts for up to 40 percent of the country’s GDP and some 80 percent of its export earnings–in a nontransparent privatization tender strongly criticized by NGO watchdogs, Montenegrin politicians and journalists. The Nation has learned that Deripaska told one of his closest associates that he bought the plant “because Putin encouraged him to do it.” The reason: “the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean.
Read whole articles at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081020/ames_berman
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081020/ames_berman/2
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