Donald Trump's Secretary Of State Pick Rex Tillerson Forged Ties With Putin Over Decades

December 14, 2016

Dec 14: When ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson showed up in June at the annual St. Petersburg international economic forum that is dubbed Russia's Davos, he was asked about the impact international sanctions on Russia were having on his company, which had abandoned ambitious drilling plans there.

Rex

"It's a question for the government - if you find anyone from the U.S. government who's willing to answer this question," he replied to laughter from the audience of Western executives, who had been lavishing praise on their Russian hosts.

It was the first time in three years that Tillerson or most other chief executives had attended the confab, for the moment laying aside friction over Russia's abrupt annexation of Crimea and its backing of violent separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Back in Washington, the State Department was not amused. State Department spokesman John Kirby commented that "most American companies understand" that taking part in the forum "sends the wrong message about the acceptability of Russia's actions."

Six months later, Tillerson's relationships with autocrats remain a source of friction after his surprise appointment by President-elect Donald Trump to be secretary of state. The ExxonMobil chief's ties to Russia have alarmed hawks in Congress, who vow to scrutinize Tillerson's good working relationship with President Putin and the latter's longtime confidante Igor Sechin, the chairman of the Russian petroleum giant Rosneft.

With his nomination, the 64-year-old Tillerson has been thrust into the long-standing U.S. foreign-policy divide separating those who value pragmatism and dealmaking, and those who attach greater importance to principles, human rights and democracy. This is a divide that cuts across both parties.

Should he be confirmed, Tillerson will no longer answer to the more than 93,000 shareholders of ExxonMobil but primarily to a single shareholder named Trump. And he will draw on views refined in industry, not diplomacy.

To fans of Tillerson, his relationship with Putin is a sign of his pragmatism, seeking advantage for his company with a blunt, straightforward style that has won respect abroad. Speaking to students from the Texas Tech business school last year, Tillerson said the reason "why I've been able to gain Vladimir Putin's trust" is "because throughout my career I've wanted people to view me as an honest person."

To his critics, however, Tillerson and ExxonMobil come across as arrogant and indifferent to Russia's record in Ukraine or Putin's harsh suppression of domestic opposition. The oil giant's vast enterprise spanning six continents and more than 50 nations has embraced a varied cast of national leaders, including the Saudi oil ministers, Equatorial Guinea's corrupt Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the autocratic government of Kazakhstan and the emir of Qatar.

These contrary views are in some ways connected. Edward Verona, who worked for ExxonMobil for two years and spent several more working in Moscow, said one reason Tillerson was respected in Moscow was because of the way the company dealt with Venezuela's then-president, the voluble Hugo Chávez. In 2007, Chávez had wanted to rewrite contract terms for companies operating in the country's vast, oil-rich Orinoco belt. Exxon said no, abandoning 2 percent of its worldwide reserves and winning arbitration court orders to freeze Venezuelan assets.

In the same way, Exxon exited Nigeria's Niger Delta after insurgents disputed operations there.

"You have to be willing to say, 'No, we aren't going to do it that way, we are going to do it this way; if we can't do it this way, we won't be here,' " Tillerson said about the company's strategy of keeping its Nigerian exploration to offshore areas, where it was safer.

"Rex Tillerson gained the respect of Russians, particularly Sechin and Putin, because he was prepared to stand up and push back when he felt his company was being treated unfairly," said Verona, now a senior adviser to McLarty Associates.

The fight coincided with efforts by Russia's Gazprom, a state-owned company, to horn its way into a Sakhalin Island project off eastern Russia that Tillerson had helped negotiate years earlier. ExxonMobil was able to navigate the dispute with help from Putin and Sechin. The project, built in extremely harsh conditions, remains one of the company's most lucrative, Tillerson has said.

Some of Exxon's perceived arrogance is rooted in the company's history as the largest of the corporations split off from the Standard Oil Trust, the enterprise built by John D. Rockefeller.

Tillerson was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, the son of a Boy Scout administrator. He still lists the rank of Eagle Scout on his resume; and has remained active in the organization. In 2012, he was instrumental in pushing the Boy Scouts board to admit openly gay youths.

His experience as a scout fit well into the company, which insisted on rules that were more detailed than most other oil companies.

In 1997, Exxon sent Tillerson, then a promising executive who had been in Yemen, to Moscow to "pick up the relationship and repair it," Tillerson later recalled. His predecessor had been kicked out of the country. Tillerson met six different prime ministers over the course of 14 months.

The last of those was Putin.

Nearly 15 years later in Sochi, Putin provided the blessing for what could become Exxon's largest Russian deal, a joint exploration agreement with Rosneft covering almost 190 million acres, almost halfway across the Arctic shoreline and covering nine time zones.

Speaking later at Texas Tech, Tillerson cited the Boy Scout motto and urged students to have honor and integrity.

"Those words mean a lot to me," Tillerson said. "And I can tell you they mean a lot in any culture." He added that "integrity is recognized by every government, every leader. It's the most valuable asset you have, your personal integrity."

But while Tillerson preaches the value of honesty and integrity, ExxonMobil has not shied away from doing what is good for its bottom line, which has made environmental groups and others suspicious of its aims.

While Tillerson has acknowledged human involvement in the warming of the globe and backed a carbon tax to deal with it, the oil giant has continued to fund groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, whose leading members have cast doubt on climate change or its urgency. The relationship contrasted with that of Shell, which also acknowledges climate change but dropped its membership of ALEC last year citing differences over the issue.

The company is also in the midst of a bitter fight with the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts and with more than a dozen nongovernmental organizations that are looking at whether the oil giant failed to disclose what it knew 40 years ago about the damage fossil fuels were doing to the Earth's climate. The attorneys general issued broad subpoenas for internal Exxon documents, and the NGOs have encouraged them to consider bringing a fraud case similar to the one that extracted billions of dollars from tobacco companies years ago.

ExxonMobil has fought back, going to a Texas federal court near its headquarters and winning the judge's highly unusual backing for discovery on the attorneys general, including with regard to internal emails, to determine whether they were acting "in good faith."

The company also is scrutinizing individuals and organizations. The day after the presidential election, for example, the company hand-delivered a subpoena to Carroll Muffett, the head of the Center for International Environmental Law, a nonprofit organization focused on environmental and human rights issues.

"The subpoena is in fact a fishing expedition that goes far beyond any issue arguably before the Texas court," Muffett said in an email. "It is clear that Exxon is trying to leverage this case, outrageous as it is, to intimidate and silence its critics."

Another important piece of Tillerson's background is his engineering background. ExxonMobil has been widely seen as a place with a higher "EQ," for engineering quotient, than IQ, or intelligence quotient.

Even the EQ has failed from time to time. The Exxon Valdez oil-tanker accident spilled crude off the pristine coast of Alaska in 1989, and more recently company pipelines leaked in Montana's Yellowstone River and in Mayflower, Arkansas. The company has taken tough legal strategies in those instances, too, and it litigated the Valdez spill for 20 years.

Still, Tillerson draws on that engineering construct and has applied it to the problem of climate change.

"It's an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions," he said at an event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2012.

As he looked back on his career during the Texas Tech event, Tillerson said that he views the company's oil and gas operation on Sakhalin Island - an area beset by poverty, seismic instability, long icebound winters and 100-foot waves in the summer - as one of his crowning achievements.

It might look easy compared to being secretary of state.

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News Network
February 4,2020

Kuala Lumpur, Feb 4: Malaysia said on Tuesday that India's move to cut back on palm oil purchases is "temporary" and will be resolved amicably between the two nations.

Last month, India restricted imports of refined palm oil and asked importers to avoid purchases from Malaysia after its criticism of actions in Kashmir and a new citizenship law.

"Having long-standing bilateral ties, the two nations will overcome the current challenges, and prevail towards mutual and beneficial outcomes," the Malaysian Palm Oil Council said in a statement, citing Primary Industries Minister Teresa Kok.

Malaysia's push to implement B20 biodiesel starting this month will also help sustain high crude palm oil prices, the statement read.

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News Network
March 12,2020

Geneva, Mar 12: For the global economy, virus repercussions were profound, with increasing concerns of wealth- and job-wrecking recessions. U.S. stocks wiped out more than all the gains from a huge rally a day earlier as Wall Street continued to reel.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,464 points, bringing it 20% below its record set last month and putting it in what Wall Street calls a “bear market.” The broader S&P 500 is just 1 percentage point away from falling into bear territory and bringing to an end one of the greatest runs in Wall Street’s history.

WHO officials said they thought long and hard about labeling the crisis a pandemic — defined as sustained outbreaks in multiple regions of the world.

The risk of employing the term, Ryan said, is “if people use it as an excuse to give up.” But the benefit is “potentially of galvanizing the world to fight.”

Underscoring the mounting challenge: soaring numbers in the U.S. and Europe’s status as the new epicenter of the pandemic. While Italy exceeds 12,000 cases and the United States has topped 1,300, China reported a record low of just 15 new cases Thursday and three-fourths of its infected patients have recovered.

China’s totals of 80,793 cases and 3,169 deaths are a shrinking portion of the world’s more than 126,000 infections and 4,600 deaths.

“If you want to be blunt, Europe is the new China,” said Robert Redfield, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

With 12,462 cases and 827 deaths, Italy said all shops and businesses except pharmacies and grocery stores would be closed beginning Thursday and designated billions in financial relief to cushion economic shocks in its latest efforts to adjust to the fast-evolving crisis that silenced the usually bustling heart of the Catholic faith, St. Peter’s Square.

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News Network
April 15,2020

Wuhan, Apr 15: In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Janaury 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

That delay from Jan 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.

A This is tremendous, a said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system.

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China's leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan 5 to Jan 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

It's uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It's also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.

But what is clear, experts say, is that China's rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for rumor-mongering, broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city's hospitals.

Doctors in Wuhan were afraid, said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. It was truly intimidation of an entire profession. Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognising the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients, all without telling the public.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.

Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless, said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday press conference.

The documents show that the head of China's National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials.

A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.

The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event, the memo cites Ma as saying.

The National Health Commission is the top medical agency in the country. In a faxed statement, the Commission said it had organised the teleconference because of the case reported in Thailand and the possibility of the virus spreading during New Year travel. It added that China had published information on the outbreak in an open, transparent, responsible and timely manner," in accordance with important instructions repeatedly issued by President Xi.

The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo's contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February.

Under a section titled sober understanding of the situation, the memo said that clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible. It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had changed significantly because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.

With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high, the memo continued.

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