Two months ago, the Trump administration made a momentous, and surprising, decision to put post-Soviet oligarchs on notice. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in an unexpected January 13 announcement, revealed that the United States would be issuing sanctions against Moldovan politician Vladimir Plahotniuc, one of the most conniving figures Moldova has ever produced. “In his official capacity, Plahotniuc was involved in illicit acts that undermined the rule of law and severely compromised the independence of democratic institutions in Moldova,” Pompeo said, describing Plahotniuc as an “oligarch” involved in “significant corruption.”

Nothing that Pompeo said was inaccurate. For years, Plahotniuc effectively steered Moldova’s economic development, transforming it into a key linchpin of post-Soviet kleptocracy. As the head of Moldova’s Democratic Party from December 2016 to June 2019, Plahotniuc styled himself as a reformist figure, dedicated to bringing Moldova’s struggling democracy closer to the Western fold and away from Russia’s embrace. All the while, he had his hand at the till of some of the most nefarious schemes to come out of the region.

Plahotniuc, who also served several off-and-on stints in the Moldovan parliament, was finally ousted from office in July 2019, thanks to an unlikely coalition between Moldova’s Moscow-leaning Socialists and a new pro-reformist party. He pulled up stakes and left the country: a clear victory for a post-Soviet nation hoping to escape the clutches of crooked elites who prey on the populace. The Trump administration’s decision to issue a visa ban against Plahotniuc was thus a relatively easy call, and it received plaudits across the political spectrum and across the region.

But there was one catch, which only surfaced last week. It turns out that Plahotniuc hasn’t spent the past few months hiding away in London, Moscow, or Dubai. Instead, he’s been lying low in the very country that supposedly banned him—the U.S.—and it seems he has at least one key ally high up in the Trump administration.

Even in the seamy world of post-Soviet corruption, Plahotniuc has distinguished himself. In one scheme, in 2014, he swiped the holdings of a number of Moldovan banks to the tune of approximately $1 billion. That’s the equivalent of over 10 percent of Moldova’s GDP, up and gone, swindled in what investigative journalists dubbed the “theft of the century.” Another scheme, which earned the title of the “Russian laundromat,” enlisted Moldovan judges in a plot to launder tens of billions of dollars in ill-gotten Russian boodle that ended up scattered across the West. As The New York Times wrote, Plahotniuc’s involvement in these and similar enterprises was enough to earn him the reputation of the “most-feared figure” in Moldova, one who, analysts contended, had become widely skilled in “corruption, kompromat, and an adroit use of geopolitical rhetoric.”