Former NATO Secretary General becomes advisor to Russian-owned bank in Latvia
Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been appointed Deputy Chairman of the Board at Latvian bank Norvik Banka, according to the website of the international intelligence community InformNapalm.
Grigory Guselnikov, a Russian banker, is the owner of Norvik Banka; he also controls Vyatka Bank.
In July, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) denied Grigory Guselnikov and Sait-Salam Gutseriev from purchasing the Ukrainian branch of Sberbank.
"This bank [Vyatka Bank] recently tried to buy out the Ukrainian branch of the Russian Sberbank in a consortium with Belarusians. Behind the ‘Belarusians’ were [actually] structures owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev, who controls Rosneft, Binbank and El Dorado. At one time, Guselnikov once worked for Gutseriev," the report said.
Mikhail and Sait-Salam Gutseriev made it into a recently-released US report on Russian oligarchs close to the Kremlin.
In September, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder became the Chairman of the Rosneft Board of Directors; and in October 2016, Schroeder headed Nord Stream 2.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is from Denmark, led NATO from August 1, 2009 until September 30, 2014. He was succeeded by former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
In May 2016, President Petro Poroshenko appointed the former NATO Secretary General as his unofficial adviser.
Rasmussen has repeatedly advocated giving Ukraine defensive weapons and deploying peacekeepers in the Donbas.
Former NATO Secretary General Rasmussen visited the Donbas in September 2017.