In the wake of Michael Cohen’s surprise plea deal, even Donald Trump himself was forced to concede that yes, despite all the indignant protests to the contrary, he and his associates were indeed in communication with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump Tower Moscow didn’t make it past the planning stages, but the President may have consummated another secret deal in Russia, worth considerably more money.

That’s what it says in the so-called Steele dossier, the series of intelligence reports produced by former MI6 super-spy Christopher Steele. Given the breathtaking falsehoods told by Trump and his associates on all things Russia for the last two years, as well as the fact that these same egregious liars invested considerable effort attempting to discredit Steele and his work, the dossier now appears more likely than not to be accurate. Certainly it demands closer re-examination.

In the intelligence report dated 18 October, 2016, Steele observes that Igor Sechin, CEO of the Russian oil company Rosneft, “was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered [Carter] PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return.” Wherefore Sechin’s keenness? Well, Rosneft is one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil companies. Its majority owner is the Government of Russia — in other words, Vladimir Putin and his circle of oligarchs, a group that includes Sechin, a longtime crony of the Russian president. In 2012, Rosneft entered into a $500 billion joint venture with ExxonMobil, which at the time was run by Trump’s former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson (it was this mammoth joint venture, apparently, that inspired Putin to award Tillerson the Medal of Friendship in 2013). The oil reserves in the Arctic, the impetus for the joint venture, are estimated to contain 85 billion barrels. At a conservative price of $50 a barrel, that amounts to a staggering $4.25 trillion in potential gross revenue. Trillion, with a “T.”

These are dizzying numbers — but Putin will not see a kopek as long as the US continues to impose sanctions on Russia. Small wonder, then, that Sechin wanted those sanctions lifted.

Here’s where it gets interesting: As Steele predicted, Rosneft did sell off a percentage of its ownership — 19.5 percent, almost exactly what he’d reported — in January 2017. The details of the transaction were predictably murky, with shell companies selling to other shell companies, who were owned by different shell companies, and so on to infinity. One reads the names of these ersatz enterprises — Glencore, Intesa SanPaolo, QHG Shares, QHC Holding, QHC Cayman Limited — and one finds one’s eyelids getting heavier, and one falling slowly to sleep.

The “Q” in the name of those shell companies stands for Qatar. “Although Qatar has never publicly confirmed how much it has contributed to the deal or the size of the stake that it bought, Glencore and Rosneft say it contributed 2.5 billion euros,” per the Reuters report of January 2017. “Along with the 300 million from Glencore and the 5.2 billion loaned by Intesa, that still leaves a shortfall of 2.2 billion euros.” (Glencore, incidentally, used to be run by the venal Marc Rich, who was famously pardoned at the eleventh hour by Bill Clinton for his tax evasion charge, because God forbid the Clintons aren’t somehow involved).

Journalists spent the better part of a year figuring out who ponied up the balance of the cash for the purchase. It wasn’t until November 2018 that Reuters reported that the secret financier of the sale of a fifth of Russia’s largest oil company…was Russia’s largest bank. (Cue: sad trombone music). The attempt to lure foreign investment to Russia was a miserable failure.