OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Disapproval of President's Proposal Relating to Application of Certain Sanctions

Floor Speech

By: Jim Himes
By: Jim Himes
Date: Jan. 17, 2019
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: National Security Foreign Affairs

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Mr. HIMES. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the advocacy of Chairwoman Waters, but this is fundamentally not a partisan issue, and I appreciate the ranking member making the point. This is a reputational issue, and I want everyone in the Chamber to understand that this is about the reputation of the United States, about the Congress, about the Treasury, and about each individual Member who votes today.

This is a complicated deal. I have spent hours understanding this deal.

But there is a big question that every Member ought to ask themselves: Is this the moment to relax sanctions on a Russian company; on a Russian oligarch?

Is this the moment to sign off on a deal that allows an oligarch to hand his shares to a Russian bank, which is also sanctioned and controlled by the Russian Government?

At the end of this deal, if this deal goes through, Mr. Deripaska will continue to own and vote 35 percent of the shares of this company. Mr. Speaker, you can control the company with 35 percent of the shares. But an additional 28 percent of those shares will be owned and controlled by affiliates of Mr. Deripaska.

Now, Treasury says that doesn't matter because there will be somebody independently voting those shares. I have asked three times now, and Treasury has not told me who those people are.

So what is the rush?

There is no problem in the aluminum markets today. The price of aluminum today is lower than it was before this company was listed. This is reputational.

The architect of this deal, Lord Barker of Battle, is a British peer who has been denied access to classified information in the Parliament and who is under investigation by the Parliament because of possible ties to the Russians.

So I will just close, Mr. Speaker, by making this point: there is no rush. I have become an expert on this deal. Members who vote against this resolution, if Deripaska turns out to be worse than we think he is, if Lord Battle turns out to be worse than we think he is, and if the Russians and Deripaska continue to control this company after this vote, you too will become an expert on this deal, and not in a good way.

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