As turmoil roils DC a Russian-linked battery company is embedding itself in the US energy sector

Bankrupt North Carolina battery plant Alevo, funded by Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, sold its assets and re-formed as Innolith, retaining many of Alevo’s leadership team and Russia ties — and it aims to help power the U.S. electrical grid.

As the House proceeds with the impeachment investigation and looking into possible Russian or foreign money funding U.S. politicians, another area that should be investigated is the potential national security risk posed by Russian or foreign investments in the U.S. energy sector.

One story that has been covered widely is a $200 million investment by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s company Rusal into the Kentucky aluminum company Braidy Industries, shortly after Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell helped remove sanctions from Rusal. I further reported that Braidy leaders Craig Bouchard and Thomas Modrowski had previously done significant business with the Russian steel company Severstal. Another energy story to watch is the possibility that Russian state-run oil company Rosneft may acquire part ownership of a Texas-based Citgo refinery if Venezuela defaults on upcoming PDVSA bond payments.

However, a story reported on in 2017 and 2018 has, with the exception of a few trade publications, been under the radar of the U.S. mainstream media and should be looked at more closely. Dmitry Rybolovlev was the major funder of Swiss company Alevo, which owned an electrical battery plant in North Carolina that went bankrupt in 2017. Alevo assets were sold off, but part of the company has re-emerged as Innolith, with most of Alevo’s key management still in place, and a new board director at Innolith is a senior executive for Dmitry Rybolovlev. Innolith won’t disclose where their funding comes from and it’s not clear from the past failure of Alevo if Innolith’s business model has any chance of success. However, Innolith has partnered with some organizations which may give it access to proprietary data about the U.S. electrical energy sector.

House investigators should find out: Who funds Innolith? Is there more to see behind the many unusual financial transactions related to the company funding, bankruptcy, asset sale and massive tax incentives? And what proprietary or critical infrastructure data does Innolith, through its partnerships, have access to, such as data on usage modeling, infrastructure or weaknesses in the U.S. electrical grid?

I would like to note that researcher D. Dulany first brought this story to my attention and was invaluable in providing background information and sourcing for this article.

Dmitry Rybolovlev

The shroud of mystery around whether or not Dmitry Rybolovlev continues to be a main investor in Innolith is a bit ironic, since he happens to be one of the most publicly visible Russian oligarchs — with his divorce, lawsuits and interactions with Trump splashed across the media.

Dmitry Rybolovlev via Wikipedia

Rybolovlev made his fortune in the potash business in Russia, and sold his company Uralkali in 2010–2011 for $6.5 billion. Previously in 1996 he had been jailed eleven months for murder until charges were later dropped. He has had a messy public divorce and various lawsuits that have exposed exorbitant spending on real estate, such as a record-setting $88 million apartment purchased for his daughter in NYC, a 300 million euro apartment in Monaco, and the Greek island Skorpios, previously owned by Aristotle Onassis. Rybolovlev has spent $2 billion on his art collection, and then sued his dealer Yves Bouvier, who he claims over-charged him by $1 billion. He is suing Sotheby’s as well.

Rybolovlev has deep business ties in Cyprus and was the largest shareholder in Bank of Cyprus with a 9.9% stake through 2013. In 2014 Treasury Secretary Wilbur Ross led a group of investors in a $1 billion recapitalization, became Vice Chairman, and helped install former Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann, who presided over a $10 billion Russian money laundering scandal at Deutsche, as the new chairman.

But Rybolovlev is best known in the Trump-Russia story for a transaction reported by James Henry — in 2008 Rybolovlev purchased a Florida mansion from Donald Trump, for more than $50 million over Trump’s 2004 purchase price. Trump had bought the property known as ‘Maison de L’Amitie’ (House of Friendship) after hearing about it from Jeffrey Epstein. The $50 million gain Trump made from Rybolovlev in 2008 came around the same time a payment for millions of dollars was coming due to Deutsche Bank.

During the 2016 presidential election, Rybolovlev’s plane was coincidentally spotted twice on the tarmac near Donald Trump’s plane — once in Las Vegas, and once in Charlotte, North Carolina, near the Alevo battery plant in Concord that was funded by Rybolovlev.

In 2018 there were some curious events I have amplified on Twitter related to Rybolovlev’s sale of Da Vinci’s Salvatore Mundi painting for $450 million, which shattered auction records, and was $300 million above his purchase price. The price was driven up by bidding between Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. and the painting was ultimately purchased by a buyer on behalf of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and it then went missing.

Currently Rybolovlev is embroiled in a scandal in Monaco, where he resides, involving alleged bribery of government officials related to his lawsuit against art dealer Yves Bouvier. He has a Monaco-based and Cyprus-registered family holding company called Rigmora Holdings Ltd, which lists Montrago Services as secretary. The CEO of Rigmora Holdings is one of the key people who ties Rybolovlev to the new company Innolith.

It should be noted that in 2018 Dmitry Rybolovlev’s name appeared on an unclassified Treasury list of senior foreign political figures and oligarchs in the Russian Federation, in the appendix B list of oligarchs. But Rybolovlev is not listed in the Treasury department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions list.

Rybolovlev funded Alevo, but plans didn’t work out

Alevo battery plant, North Carolina, source: Greentech Media

The Alevo Group S.A. was founded in 2009 by Norwegian Jostein Eikeland with headquarters based in Switzerland. In 2014 Alevo USA Inc. bought the former Philip Morris cigarette plant in Concord, North Carolina for $68.5 million, and then sold it and became its tenant.

A story in Business North Carolina described Alevo’s plan to build container-sized electricity storage batteries called GridBanks, that could power 1,300 houses after being charged by conventional power plants or sun and wind power. Alevo touted that its technology used components that were noncombustible and the batteries could be recharged almost endlessly. The potential market size is estimated at $20 billion and competitors included Tesla and Toshiba. As Edward Martin reported in Business North Carolina, the GridBanks are meant to provide electricity during blackouts and can also serve impoverished hard to reach areas worldwide.

While the business potential of Alevo was exciting, the business leadership and funding behind the company was dubious at best.

In 2016 reporters Gøran Skaalmo and Knut Gjernes published an expose in Dagens Naeringsliv, called “Serial Billionaire,” that focused on Alevo founder Jostein Eikeland, and revealed his pattern of securing big investments in brash business ventures that never got off the ground and then crashed or went bankrupt. They describe Eikeland’s history with IT company TeleComputing in the 1990s, which lost 90% of it’s value after the tech bubble burst, and Tonsberg Magnesium Group (TMGI) which went bankrupt in 2008.

The original funding for Alevo raised by Eikeland is described in detail by Skaalmo and Gjernes with tens of millions of dollars funneled through a law firm, DLA Piper, to a shell company in the UK with multiple intermediary layers making it difficult to track. Five million euros came from Unaico in Hong Kong, a known pyramid scheme operator. And they revealed that Norwegian drug trafficker Gjermund Cappelen was among Alevo’s investors.

But the Alevo investor that caught the attention of the U.S. media was Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. A lawyer at Alevo testified in a lawsuit protesting his ouster, that Rybolovlev’s takeover was “creepy” or “sneaky” because he purchased shares in Alevo through shell companies that masked his identity.

Initial plans for Alevo had included investing $350 million, employing 2,500 people and ramping up to 6,000 employees, and selling 16,000 GridBank units a year by 2020. Alevo was granted over $10 million in tax breaks in North Carolina.