President-elect Donald Trump's choice for secretary of state, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, was a director of Exxon's Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, from its founding in 1998 until 2006, The Guardian reported Sunday, citing documents leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The company is one of 67 registered by ExxonMobil in the Bahamas, a country with laws that favor corporate secrecy and a corporate tax rate of zero. Tillerson's name, RW Tillerson, is listed next to other officers from Houston, Moscow, and the far-eastern Russian island of Sakhalin.
Tillerson's role in the Russian-U.S. oil company doesn't break any laws, but it highlights his close ties to Russia's power elite (skewered by SNL), including President Vladimir Putin — who awarded him the Order of Friendship — and especially Igor Sechin, the former KGB agent who heads Russian state oil company Rosneft. Sechin is personally targeted under the sanctions the Obama administration enacted against Russia after it annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in 2014; Tillerson publicly opposed the sanctions, which also hurt ExxonMobil's business partnerships with Russia. "ExxonMobil's use of offshore regimes — while legal — may also jar with Trump's avowal to put 'America first,'" The Guardian speculates.
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