On Feb. 1, RT Television broadcast a surveillance video filmed by the Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) back in 2012, of a meeting between the executive director of Aleksey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) Vladimir Ashurkov and the Second Secretary for political affairs at the U.K. embassy in Russia, one James William Thomas Ford. Ashurkov pitches: “If we had more money, we would expand our team, of course … $10, $20 million a year.… And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake.” Ashurkov explains that, beyond anti-corruption investigations and reports, his clients get much more: “mass protests, civil initiatives, propaganda, establishing contacts with the elite and explain to them that we are reasonable people and we are not going to demolish everything and take away their assets.”
The U.K. should understand how closely they’d work as an extension of the empire. They’d work from material from the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office, as it “has access to a lot of information that would not be available to us, from British sources....” Also, they plan on releasing “a report on VTB Bank in association with Henry Jackson Society in London.” Ashurkov explains that corruption at such a major Russian bank would “make the case that it represents a threat to European financial markets and their integrity because it is a significant player in Europe.… And they make it more difficult for British firms like Lloyds or RBS [Royal Bank of Scotland] or other big banks like Barclays to compete.” Ford made no financial commitment, citing the Russian legislation on foreign agents as a problem for getting British government monies, but he suggested that a workaround would be to go through Transparency International. That “would be effective.”
The same Ashurkov this week issued a public letter to President Joe Biden, with a list of Putin’s close associates who, he says, should be sanctioned. At the same time, a second ally of Navalny, Leonid Volkov, granted an interview to Reuters with the same call for sanctions on Putin’s inner circle. “We very much hope that there will be tough sanctions against the people on whom Putin relies, against the money men in his inner circle,” said Volkov. “This will give us intra-elite conflicts.” Reuters was delighted, saying this “could trigger potentially destabilising infighting among Russian elites.” Like the January 2021 Atlantic Council call for instigating a revolt among the Chinese elites against Xi Jinping, the Brits and their assets are fantasizing that they can pull off a regime change against Putin.
https://www.rt.com/russia/514291-navalny-aide-funding-alleged-british-spy/
