By Four Corners with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Wilbur Ross was handpicked by Donald Trump to be his Secretary of Commerce.

Fresh evidence of links between the highest levels of Donald Trump's administration and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin have been revealed in a massive leak of documents from firms and corporate registries specialising in tax minimisation and financial secrecy.

US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is among scores of high-profile names to emerge in an unprecedented dump of documents out of global offshore law firm Appleby, Singapore-based Asiaciti Trust and 19 corporate registries in notorious tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, dubbed the Paradise Papers.

The ABC's Four Corners program had access to more than 13.4 million documents leaked to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, and shared through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with 96 media partners in 67 countries, in an even bigger leak than the Panama Papers in early 2016.

Mr Ross is a powerful figure within the Trump administration, handpicked and described by the President as "a killer" for his tough approach to business.

The documents reveal that Mr Ross continues to hold a stake in a shipping company that has a multi-million-dollar deal with a Russian firm part-owned by Putin cronies currently subject to US sanctions.

The latest revelations about Mr Ross feed into concerns that the Trump administration is too closely linked with powerful Russian figures, and come a week after investigators laid charges against one-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates over alleged Russian involvement to skew the 2016 presidential election in favour of Mr Trump.

Aside from Mr Ross, the leaked papers uncover offshore dealings involving other Trump officials, celebrities and business identities.

The Paradise Papers reveal how an offshore company set out to "commercially exploit" the estate of the late INXS front man, Michael Hutchence, on the 20th anniversary of his death.

The Queen's private estate is shown to have invested in Cayman Islands and Guernsey-based funds, including one that invested in a UK consumer lending company that was ordered to repay millions of pounds to customers for breaching responsible lending standards.

A Royal spokesman said Her Majesty was unaware of the investment, and the Queen pays tax on a voluntary basis, so it appears there is no tax minimisation motive.

When James Packer and his former business partner Lawrence Ho were establishing their Studio City casino in Macau, their joint venture Melco Crown asked Appleby to set up an offshore company for it in the British Virgin Islands.

Russian tech investor Yuri Milner acted as an intermediary for Russian state-owned bank VTB when it made a $190 million investment in Twitter.

The Paradise Papers also reveal that a financial subsidiary of Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom funded a shell company that, through a Milner-affiliated company, held a billion dollars worth of Facebook shares just before it floated on the share market.

One of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's key fundraisers Stephen Bronfman teamed up with fellow Liberal Party stalwart Leo Kolber to move millions of dollars into a Cayman Islands trust.

While experts say the moves may have avoided taxes, Mr Kolber's lawyers said "none of the transactions or entities at issue were effected or established to evade or even avoid taxation".

U2 front man Bono — under his full name Paul Hewson — is revealed to have an investment in a small-town Lithuanian shopping mall through companies registered in Malta.

Other leaked documents highlight how large multinational corporations structure their operations through low-tax or high secrecy jurisdictions, often to minimise their tax bills.

One of Appleby's largest clients is Swiss-based multinational mining giant Glencore, which has had more than 100 companies incorporated or administered by the law firm, and has been one of the main companies accused of aggressive tax minimisation in Australia.

Trump lieutenant maintains Russian business links

Donald Trump's Secretary of Commerce, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, will face renewed questions over his suitability for the job as the Paradise Papers, combined with publicly available company reports, show he retains a stake in a shipping company called Navigator that does business with Russia's SIBUR.

SIBUR is a major gas processing and petrochemicals company with links to oligarchs close to President Putin.

Daniel Fried, the former US State Department sanctions coordinator under President Obama, said "[SIBUR] is known to have close associations with this group of cronies".

SIBUR's shareholders include Kirill Shamalov, who is married to Vladimir Putin's youngest daughter and whose father is a close associate of the President and is under sanctions. Another shareholder Gennady Timchenko, has been under US and European Union sanctions since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

The company's largest shareholder is Leonid Mikhelson, reputed to be Russia's richest man.

In a statement to the ICIJ and its partners, a Commerce Department spokesman said Mr Ross had never met these SIBUR shareholders.

Company filings show that Navigator has received around $US68 million in revenue from SIBUR over the past three years for shipping LPG from Russia to Europe.

Mr Ross had already attracted heavy criticism at the time of his appointment as Commerce Secretary for his decision to retain his holding in Diamond S Shipping, a company specialising in petroleum transport.

However, his continued ownership of a stake in Navigator through four Cayman Island registered companies seemingly went unnoticed by the Senate committee responsible for Mr Ross's confirmation hearings.

"It appeared that his disclosure was so complex that people may not have figured out that he had kept this stake in Navigator, or about Navigator's relationship with SIBUR and the Putin insiders who ran the company," said ICIJ reporter Sasha Chavkin, who has been leading the international investigation into the Secretary of Commerce.

Mr Ross lists the companies in his ethics agreement as firms in which he will retain a financial interest.

In that agreement, he promises to: "not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that to my knowledge has a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests of the entity or its underlying assets for as long as I own it, unless I first obtain a written waiver."

However, George W. Bush's former White House ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, said Navigator's business dealings with SIBUR may make Mr Ross's position as Commerce Secretary untenable, given the current sanctions regime against Russia.

"That would make it very difficult for him to participate in discussions about those sanctions and he may actually violate the criminal conflict of interest statute if he participates in discussions about sanctions that affect his own financial interests," Mr Painter told German broadcaster NDR.

"We would not have allowed a Commerce Secretary to hold some of the holdings that Wilbur Ross apparently held on to, particularly his shipping company ... there is too much that can happen in trade that could have an economic effect on a shipping company."

Jeff Hauser from the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC said Mr Ross might use "ethics waivers" as a way to legally include himself in discussions where he has a financial conflict of interest.

"That's a get out of jail free card, literally," he said.

"You're not going to be criminally prosecuted if you can say that you were acting pursuant to an ethics waiver.

"So, it's a very valuable thing to get an ethics waiver, and ethics waivers are, the decisions are made by low ranking ethics officers, agency by agency across the administration."

However, in a statement responding to questions about his Navigator stake, a spokesman for Mr Ross said that the Commerce Secretary had not sought any ethics exemptions.

"Secretary Ross recuses himself from any matters focused on transoceanic shipping vessels, but has been generally supportive of the administration's sanctions of Russian and Venezuealan entities," he said.

"Secretary Ross has never had to seek, nor received, any ethics exemption, and he works closely with Commerce Department ethics officials to ensure the highest ethical standards."

There are concerns in Washington DC that the administration's apparent ties to Russia risk influencing major policy decisions.

Mr Fried said he heard rumours circulating early on in the Trump administration that it was planning to lift sanctions on Russia.

"In the end they didn't do it and then Congress, which I believe had heard similar stories, acted with speed and overwhelming force, a 98 to 2 vote in the Senate, to pass sanctions legislation which, among other things, locked in the executive orders making up the sanctions regime, locking those executive orders into law," he told Four Corners.

Kremlin ties to early Facebook, Twitter investments uncovered

Russian influence on US business is also highlighted by leaked documents that detail the $190 million investment in Twitter made by majority Russian state-owned bank VTB through US-based Russian businessman Yuri Milner.

One of Mr Milner's companies was also used to push huge investments tied to a Kremlin-controlled finance company into Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook.

A spokesperson for Mr Milner's investment fund confirmed that VTB had used the fund to make its investment in Twitter.

In an interview, Mr Milner said he was unaware of the Kremlin-backed finance company's involvement in any of his deals and that none of his investments were related to politics.

Mr Milner also told Forbes magazine recently that he has not visited Russia for the past "three or four years" and his main investment fund DST currently does not do any business there.

"I've moved my whole family here [to the Bay Area, California] including my parents, but my father died here three years ago.

"DST has not invested in Russia since its launch in 2009."

Mr Milner has previously invested in a real estate start-up, Cadre, founded by Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, but said he used his own money to fund that deal.

Mr Milner told Forbes that it is the only business dealing he has had with Jared Kushner.

"The investment was less than a million dollars as a part of $50 million fundraising round," he said.

Mr Milner's ties to Twitter, Facebook and Jared Kushner's firm have been previously disclosed, but his links to the Kremlin financial institutions were not previously known.

Mr Kushner is under heavy scrutiny over a meeting he had with an executive of another Russian state-owned bank, VEB, during the presidential transition period.

The leaks also reveal a wide web of offshore structures used by a range of wealthy cabinet officials, advisers and donors linked to the Trump administration.

On the other side of the US political divide, the ICIJ's investigation has revealed that Wilbur Ross's predecessor as secretary of commerce, Penny Pritzker, pledged to sell investments to avoid conflicts of interest after she assumed her post in Democratic president Barack Obama's cabinet.

The files show that soon after she received Senate confirmation in June 2013, Ms Pritzker transferred her interests in two Bermuda companies to a firm that used the same mailing address as her private investment firm in Chicago.

The company was also "owned by trusts that are for the benefit of Penny Pritzker's children," according to Appleby's files.

These transfers may have fallen short of federal ethics standards for divestment, according to ethics expert Lawrence Noble.

Ms Pritzker did not respond to requests for comment.

Trudeau adviser caught up in leak

Extensive use of offshore trusts and companies extends north of the border, with a key fundraiser and adviser to Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau caught up in the leaks.

Stephen Bronfman teamed up with another Liberal Party stalwart, Leo Kolber, to quietly move millions of dollars to offshore trusts.

The offshore transfers may have helped avoid or minimise taxation in Canada, the US and Israel according to experts who reviewed some of the 3,000-plus files detailing the trusts' activities for the ICIJ.

Mr Kolber's lawyers said in a letter to ICIJ Canadian partner CBC that "none of the transactions or entities at issue were effected or established to evade or even avoid taxation".

They added that the trusts "were always in full conformity with all applicable laws and requirements," and said that no further comment would be provided by Stephen Bronfman.

Credits

Image credits

Header image and Ross headshot Getty Images: Drew Angerer Gallery Images: Trudeau Candian Press Images, The Queen AAP: Alex Coppel, Michael Hutchence AAP: Seven Network Yuri Milner, Getty Images: Andreas Rentz Bono AAP: Tracey Nearmy, James Packer Getty Images/Bloomberg: Justin Chin