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    Trump eased sanctions on this guy Archived Message

    Posted by margo on January 25, 2021, 2:35 pm

    Gertler appears to have got mistakenly sanctioned via the conman Browder's Magnitsky Act Laws (which were really supposed to aim only at Russians).
    Alan Dershowitz was seen scurrying in to see Trump in final days of office, presumably working on freeing up this badly misunderstood good guy

    extract

    Trump Administration Quietly Eased Sanctions on Israeli Billionaire

    The reversal by the Treasury Department during the administration’s final days came after an appeal by lobbyists with close ties to the former president.

    WASHINGTON     — The Trump administration quietly moved in its final days to ease sanctions imposed in late 2017 on an Israeli billionaire who had been punished by the Treasury Department for corrupt and abusive mining practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

    The reversal by the Treasury came after an appeal by lobbyists with close ties to former President Donald J. Trump who were hired by Dan Gertler, the Israeli billionaire, including the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz, who helped represent Mr. Trump during his first impeachment, and Louis J. Freeh, a former F.B.I. director.

    Mr. Gertler was accused in 2017 by the Trump-era Treasury Department of using his connections to the former Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to arrange “opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals” that cost the citizens of Congo more than a billion dollars in lost revenue.

    The reversal by the Treasury drew immediate condemnation by human rights advocates, who said they hoped that the Biden administration would move to reverse the action.

    “Letting Dan Gertler off the hook sends a message to the world’s most corrupt business people that the U.S. will let them walk free after a bit of lobbying,” said Sasha Lezhnev, the deputy director of policy at The Sentry, a nonprofit group that tracks African war criminals and foreigners who try to profit off them.

    Sanctions were first placed on Mr. Gertler in December 2017 under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, a law passed in 2016 that allows the United States to impose sanctions on foreign business executives or foreign government officials implicated in “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

    Mr. Gertler was found to have used his friendship with Mr. Kabila to act as a middleman for mining sales in Congo, requiring other companies to go through Mr. Gertler to do business with the Congolese state, costing the country more than $1.36 billion in revenue.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/dan-gertler-sanctions.html?referringSource=articleShare

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