Did Vladimir Putin try to bribe Donald Trump to lift sanctions on Russia with an $11 billion stake in Rosneft, the largely state-controlled Russian oil company giant? While no evidence directly links Trump to last month’s sale of a 19.5 percent stake in Rosneft to mysterious buyers whose identities have yet to be revealed, an allegation contained in the so-called “Steele Dossier” published earlier has thrust the question of the new U.S. president’s role into public scrutiny.

The “Steele Dossier,” compiled by Christopher Steele — a former British intelligence agent who now acts as a private research consultant — made headlines primarily for the allegation that Trump had hired Russian prostitutes to perform a “golden shower” show for him in a Moscow hotel.

But while the vivid imagery of Trump enjoying the scene as women urinated on each other grabbed the national imagination, the Steele Dossier contained a far more important and potentially explosive allegation: that a secretive former top Trump confidant, Carter Page, received an offer from Rosneft CEO Igor Sachin to broker a sale of 19 percent of the massive oil firm, according to a report by Business Insider last week.

Former Trump adviser Carter Page, who allegedly met in Moscow with Rosneft CE) Igor Sachin. (Image By Pavel Golovkin/AP Images)

According to the report, the offer of nearly 20 percent of the Russian oil megalith was tied to a promise that if elected president, Trump would lift economic sanctions against Russia that had been imposed by former President Barack Obama as punishment for Putin and Russia’s aggression against neighboring Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

“Sechin’s associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page and his associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft,” according to the Steele Dossier, as quoted by Business Insider. “In return, Page had expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected U.S. president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”

While Trump has not yet committed to lifting the sanctions, Russia sold a 19.5 percent stake in Rosneft last month for a price of 10.2 billion euros — approximately $11 billion — to a Singapore-based investment that supposedly was jointly owned by the government of Qatar and a Swiss oil trading company, Glencore, Reuters reported last week.

But experts say that the Qatar-Swiss partnership is merely a front for the real buyers, whose identity remains a deeply buried mystery, the Reuters report said.

“The main question in relation to this transaction, as ever, still sounds like this: Who is the real buyer of a 19.5 percent stake in Rosneft?” said Sergey Aleksashenko, a former high-ranking official in Russia’s central bank, Reuters reported.

In fact, the Qatar-Glencore partnership is at least partly owned by a shadowy company in the Cayman Islands — a popular haven for money laundering, tax evasion and other unregulated financial operations — according to Reuters. The ownership of the Caymans-based firm remains unknown. As part of its freewheeling financial environment, the Cayman Islands allows company owners to remain anonymous.

Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian state-run oil company Rosneft. (Image By Sergei Karpukhin/AP Images)

“The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December,” wrote political analyst Yonatan Zunger in a Medium.com posting on Sunday. “And 19.5 percent sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”

Another possible reason that the true buyers of the Rosneft shares may need to remain anonymous is that the sale itself may violate the very sanctions that Sachin, Putin, and Russia would like to see lifted — as explained by former Obama administration State Department Deputy Envoy Amos Hochstein in the video below.

At a January 11 press conference, Trump’s spokesperson Sean Spicer — now the presidential press secretary — denied that Trump even knew page and that the adviser was “put on notice months ago” by Trump’s presidential campaign.

But the day before the January 20 inauguration of Donald Trump, the New York Times reported that Carter Page was one of at least three individuals in the Trump campaign who were under investigation by the FBI, National Security Agency, and Central Intelligence Agency for possible links to high-ranking Russian officials.

[Featured Image By Pool/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]