The Treasury Department’s report of Russian oligarchs and a 2017 list of wealthy Russians in Forbes magazine are remarkably similar, and not by chance, according to a new report.
Nearly all of the 96 oligarchs listed in the unclassified annex of the report with a net worth of $1 billion or more are found in Forbes’ rankings.
A Treasury Department spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the congressionally mandated report was created from Forbes magazine’s ranking of the “200 richest businessmen in Russia 2017.”
When BuzzFeed asked if there is “any truth to the criticisms that the Treasury list was inspired or derived in some way from the Forbes list,” the department spokesperson responded with a “yes.”
“The names of and net worth of oligarchs in the unclassified version of the report were selected based on objective criteria drawn from publicly available sources,” the anonymous Treasury official told BuzzFeed.
The report became mandated in the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act signed by a hesitant President Trump in August, who called the legislation “seriously flawed.”
The New York Times reported, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the list a new American “enemies list” on Tuesday.
“This is definitely an unfriendly act,” Putin said. “It is complicating Russian-American relations, where the situation is already hard, and is definitely harming international relations in general.”
Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian Federal Council’s international affairs committee, also slammed the report in a Facebook post, writing, “US intelligence agencies, desperate to find the promised … dirt on Russian politicians, simply rewrote the Kremlin phone book.”
Critics have said using the Forbes list makes the report seem more like an index of Russia’s elite rather than an official account of Kremlin-linked corruption and calls into question the department’s thoroughness of the investigation.
The Treasury Department’s report is not a sanctions list, however, many individuals on the list are subject to current U.S. sanctions. Parts of the Treasury report still remain unclassified.
