Time September 21/September 28, 2020World
was worth an estimated $20 billion, according to U.S. and
Ukrainian energy executives involved in negotiating them.
If this long discussed deal succeeds, Perry himself could stand
to benefit: in March, three months after leaving government,
he owned Energy Transfer shares currently worth around
$800,000, according to his most recent filing with the Securi-
ties and Exchange Commission.
Perry appears to have stayed on the right side of the law
in pursuing the Ukraine ventures. Federal prosecutors in the
Southern District of New York (SDNY) questioned at least
four people about the deals over the past year, according to
five people who are familiar with the conversations and dis-
cussed them with our reporting team on condition of ano-
nymity. “As far back as last year, they were already interested
in events that had taken place in Ukraine around Rick Perry,”
including allegations that Perry “was trying to get deals for
his buddies,” says one of the people who spoke to the Manhat-
tan prosecutors. Perry is not a target of their investigation, ac-
cording to two sources familiar with the probes.
But two ethics experts say Perry’s efforts were violations of
federal regulations. Administration officials are not allowed to
participate in matters directly relating to compa-
nies on whose board they have recently served.
Other experts say Perry and his aides may have bro-
ken a federal rule that prohibits officials from advo-
cating for companies that have not been vetted by
the Commerce Department. “Even if it skirts the
criminal statute, it’s still unethical,” says Richard
Painter, the top ethics lawyer in the White House of
President George W. Bush, with whom we shared our findings.
Through a spokesman, Perry said he “never connected
or facilitated discussions” between Energy Transfer and
Ukraine’s state energy firm in one of the deals we uncov-
ered. The spokesman declined to comment on the other ven-
tures Perry advanced while in government, including the
$20 billion deal, or on the federal probe. In response to writ-
ten questions for this article, Energy Transfer said, “We are
not aware of any contact between Secretary Perry and Ukrai-
nian officials on Energy Transfer’s behalf.”
Our investigation shows how the hunt for energy profits in
Ukraine mixed money and politics at the highest levels of the
Trump Administration. Perry, in and out of office, advanced
the business interests of his friends and political allies. The
Ukrainians, in turn, sought to exploit Perry’s agenda to advance
their national interests. Now the success of Perry’s deals may
depend on the outcome of the November elections, according
to Ukrainian officials involved in the negotiations. That means
the presidential race will not only set the conduct of American
foreign policy. It could also reshape billions of dollars’ worth
of business deals whose fate is closely tied to who is in power.
This account is based on interviews with more than two
dozen current and former government officials and energy
executives in the U.S. and Ukraine. Our reporting team has
pursued leads and sources in Miami, Houston, New York,
Kyiv and Washington, D.C., and reviewed hundreds of pages
of legal documents, lobbying records, corporate emails and
internal government communications. Many of the details
the team uncovered have not previously been reported, and
together they reveal another side of the events that set the
stage for the impeachment of the U.S. President.The Ukrainians were never naive in their overtures to
the Trump team. They realized that Trump was a business-
man. “We studied his psychological profile,” says Konstantin
Eliseev, who advised Ukraine’s President on foreign policy
when Trump took office in 2017. Their strategy, says Vitrenko,
was “to lure or to seduce” the Trump Administration by offer-
ing deals to its officials. “It was typical for Ukrainian politi-
cians,” says the energy negotiator. “They thought that if they
could, to some extent, corrupt the U.S. government, or get
them interested commercially or personally, it would help.”
The Ukrainians desperately needed that help. Since 2014,
they have been at war with Russia, and their country relies on
U.S. support for its very survival. The first offer they dangled
in that April 2017 meeting with Perry was indeed seductive:
they were looking for a Western partner to take a 49% stake in
the country’s gas- pipeline network. “It’s a classic cash cow,”
says Oleksandr Kharchenko, one of the Ukrainian energy ex-
perts involved in trying to sell a stake in the company. Its an-
nual profits, he says, are close to $2 billion.
The Ukrainians apparently got Perry’s attention. From the
outset, Perry’s focus on Ukraine had puzzled his colleagues in
government, who say that he took a personal interest in the
country’s affairs. Those affairs would normally fall under the
purview of the State Department, not the Energy Department.Trump and
Perry embrace
after a June
2017 event in
Washington