Time September 21/September 28, 2020World
PERRY SLIPPED
THE UKRAINIAN
PRESIDENT A NOTE
WITH NAMES OF
‘PEOPLE HE TRUSTS’
months later, the company signed a deal with Shell, the Dutch
energy giant, to jointly develop the terminal at an estimated
cost of about $11 billion.
This new export venture had left one big question
unanswered : Where would Energy Transfer ship its gas? The
global market for liquefied natural gas, or LNG, has plenty of
suppliers, with shipments pouring out of Qatar, Australia and
other major exporters. To make this project succeed, Energy
Transfer needed a major buyer for its gas, ideally a buyer that
would commit to a long-term supply deal. By 2019, an oppor-
tunity like that had emerged in Ukraine.
Perry wasn’t coy about his agenda in Ukraine. When he first
visited Kyiv in November 2018, he told a gathering of business-
men about a complex way to get American gas to Europe. It
would involve shipping the gas to Poland on giant tankers, then
stashing it underground in Ukraine before selling it back, west-
ward, into the European Union. “The potential for Ukraine is
stunning,” Perry told the business roundtable. Soon after, of-
ficials at the Energy Department began to coin new terms for
American LNG, calling it “freedom gas” and “molecules of free-
dom” as they sought to market it around the world.
While the Obama Administration also sought to undercut
Russian energy influence by exporting American LNG to Eu-
rope, some of Perry’s colleagues in the Trump Administration
were surprised, and often frustrated, by the Secretary’s focus
on selling gas. “He was a fierce advocate for LNG exports
around the globe,” said Tom Pyle, who headed the Trump
transition team at the Department of Energy. “But he failed
to restart the nuclear- waste program or initiate the much
needed reforms at the agency, which are major disappoint-
ments,” Pyle told the energy-focused publication E&E News.
Perry ultimately went straight to the top in Ukraine with
his energy evangelism—and his favored
disciples. In May 2019, President Trump
sent him to Kyiv to attend the inaugura-
tion of Ukraine’s new President, Volody-
myr Zelensky. During a meeting that day,
Perry did something his handlers at the
U.S. embassy did not expect, despite their
extensive planning for the talks. Perry
handed a piece of paper to Zelensky and
urged him to have a look. As he did so, Perry explained that
the note contained a list of names of “people he trusts,” ac-
cording to Holmes, the U.S. diplomat, who was the ofcial
note taker at the event.
Among the names on the list was Bleyzer, Perry’s old friend
from Houston. The following month, June 2019, Bleyzer fi-
nally got the deal he wanted in Ukraine. In an auction of li-
censes to drill for oil and gas, the choicest license went to
Bleyzer’s company, which got the rights to develop some of
Ukraine’s biggest oil and gas fields over the next 50 years. The
deal was first reported by the Associated Press in November.
It is potentially worth billions of dollars.
There was another name on Perry’s list, and it surprised the
Ukrainians: Robert Bensh. A little-known oil and gas execu-
tive from Texas, Bensh had known Perry for only a few months
by that point. Starting in the early 2000s, Bensh spent over a
decade as one of the few American investors in Ukraine’s oil
and gas sector. His contacts in Kyiv included close associates
of Ukraine’s corrupt former President Viktor Yanukovych,
who was ousted in a revolution in 2014. After that revolution,
Bensh’s business in Ukraine dried up, and he had returned to
Houston. “I wanted nothing to do with Ukraine,” Bensh told
our reporting team in a series of interviews.
The Ukrainians soon understood at least one of the reasons
for his return: Bensh was tied to Perry’s dream of exporting
American gas to Ukraine. Along with a group of investors from
Louisiana, Bensh was promoting a company called Louisiana
Natural Gas Exports Inc., better known among its founders as
LNGE. Established in June 2018, the company had no deals
or assets to its name. The man listed as its
co-founder and director, Marsden Miller,
is related to Bensh by marriage. In 1987,
a jury in Louisiana found Miller guilty of
corruption; his sentence was later over-
turned, and the government dropped the
case against him after the U.S. Supreme
Court narrowed the relevant statute in an
unrelated case. LNGE owns no gas fields,
no pipelines, no tankers and no export terminal. But its exec-
utives had connections in Ukraine and at the Energy Depart-
ment. On July 10, 2019, those connections began to bear fruit.
That date marked a turning point in Ukraine’s relations
with the Trump Administration. It was that afternoon in the
White House that two ofcials from Kyiv were pressured to
open investigations into Trump’s political rivals. National
Security Adviser John Bolton memorably called the day’s
events a “drug deal.”
But the Ukrainians had another date with the Trump Ad-
ministration that evening. After the unsettling interaction at
the White House, the two had a dinner meeting in a restaurant
near the White House with two top Perry aides. Also there:
Robert Bensh. As he sat down at the table, Oleksandr Dany-
liuk, then the national security adviser to Ukraine’s President,