Supp.1 | Supp.2 | Supp.3 | Supp.4
Supp.5 | Supp.6 | Supp.7 | Supp.8
Alfa Bank is a front for Russian intelligence. Along with Dimitry Firtash, a Russian agent of influence, it owns Cambridge Analytica, the data targeting company used by Trump’s campaign. It also owns SCL, the propaganda company responsible for what has been termed “fake news” but was actually real propaganda co-ordinated by Russian intelligence.
From Wikipedia’s time-line summary of Alfa Bank’s 2008:
2008 — Alfa Bank seeks $400 million government loan in October;[13] Alfa Bank deploys 20.000 Aladdin eToken USB smartcard devices to its online customers;[14] acquires Severnaya Kazna, a major regional bank operating in the Urals region[15]
The 14th footnote references an interesting article about Alfa Bank doing a deal with an American company called Aladdin Knowledge Systems (they make technology that secures banks and stuff — lots and lots of entities use their tech). Here’s a preview:
More on Aladdin here (it was acquired by Vector Capital in 2009 and later merged with Safenet).
Before the acquisition by Vector, Renaissance Technologies LLC owned a sizable chunk of Aladdin Knowledge Systems (AKS) (over 5%). We already know about Renaissance Technologies — they are the original quants and some of its owners dabble in politics. I believe RenTec may have been holding substantial Aladdin stock at the time AKS transacted with Alfa.
- Note 1 — Compare the date of the RenTec/Alfa transaction vis-a-vis RenTec’s period of AKS ownership AND the date of Alfa’ bailout from the Russian govt (see 13th Footnote in above-referenced Wikipedia article and material referenced in Supp.3).
Not to be forgotten, AKS authentication technology plays a key role in securing banks and other sensitive databases around the world. Both RenTec and Alfa could have learned valuable technical information about AKS software as a result of Alfa commissioning etoken technology*, the purpose of which was to secure its online banking portal.
- Note 2—Back in 2006, SafeNet was selected by SWIFT to help secure its network.
- Note 3— While 2006 was a few years before SafeNet’s merger with AKS, authentication tokens from SafeNet are still utilized by SWIFT.
- Note 4 — Apparently U.S. IC has been trying to monitor SWIFT transactions for some time.
- Note 5 — The U.S. IC is rightly concerned about SWIFT, just look at recent history.
- Note 6 — RT recently reported that Russia’s banking system has SWIFT alternative ready (shocker).
- * i.e., the vulnerabilities/attack vectors in the technology— RenTec, being full of Ph.D.-level computer scientists working on high frequency trading and hashing technologies, would have had the personnel to meaningfully contribute to the development discussion around said technologies with AKS (This article from Wired describes an investment firm operating an A.I. and Bitcoin-powered hedge fund that Renaissance Technologies recently invested in — it provides a window into what RenTec is interested in as a company).
