Rex Tillerson, the Exxon executive and despot-elect Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of state, was the director of a joint Russian oil firm that's registered in the Bahamas according to The Guardian.
Documents released by a German newspaper and shared with The Guardian show Tillerson served as the director of Exxon Neftegas, a Russian subsidiary, beginning in 1998.
Tillerson – the chief executive of ExxonMobil – became a director of the oil company’s Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, in 1998. His name – RW Tillerson – appears next to other officers who are based at Houston, Texas; Moscow; and Sakhalin, in Russia’s far east.
The leaked 2001 document comes from the corporate registry in the Bahamas. It was one of 1.3m files given to the Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source.
Tillerson left Neftegas when he became the CEO of Exxon in 2006 according to a company statement, but that obviously doesn't tell us if he still has a financial interest in Neftegas operations.
It's anyone's guess who leaked the documents to Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's largest subscription newspaper. I will speculate that this could be only the first of many revelations to come as western intelligence agencies push back against Russian influence campaigns.
Our own media here in the United States did a very poor job of covering Trump's extensive conflicts of interest before the election and I'm not so sure we can count on them to do so moving forward even though Hillary Clinton's email server is no longer on their minds. One potential side effect of this could be increasing reliance on foreign media reports for explosive information about our own future president and his cabinet.
I'm sure you can find useful idiots and tools among the fourth estate in every nation, but you may not find as many accomplices to the Putin regime in countries where people still remember the brutality of the Soviet Union.
Exxon insists Neftegas wasn't registered in the Bahamas to dodge taxes. That's the only part of this story that I found funny.