Here is a story that would have ended any other presidency in American history, and instead it will get a shrug, a Truth Social rant about the Failing New York Times, and a Fox segment about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The Financial Times and the New York Times both dropped the same bomb Friday night. A $25 billion gas export project on Alaska’s North Slope, the one that keeps coming up in Trump’s so-called peace talks with Vladimir Putin, was secretly bankrolled by Novatek, a sanctioned Russian energy giant run by Russia's richest man. The American executives running the thing found out, warned the Trump administration, and walked. The company responded by calling the whistleblower a disgruntled employee and handing the keys to a guy who used to run Goldman Sachs in Moscow.
You cannot make this up. Nobody would believe you.
The guy who quit
Joel Riddle is not a resistance lib. He is a former ExxonMobil engineer who was recruited to run Polar Train LNG, a startup planning to liquefy natural gas on the North Slope and ship it to Asia. Big, strategic, exactly the kind of project Trump loves to stand in front of and take credit for.
Riddle was told the money came from two places: Gentry Beach, a Texas financier, and an Abu Dhabi outfit called Tech Wave Industrial Projects Management, run by two Norwegians, Rajeev Lehar and Bjorn Gundersen. Gundersen used to work for Novatek. File that away.
As the project grew and the bills got bigger, Riddle went looking for the money and found out Beach had never put in a dime. Not a shareholder, not an officer, not a director. The Abu Dhabi story was a front. Novatek was providing the cash, and it was also setting the direction. FT-reviewed WhatsApp messages show Denis Solovyov, a Novatek board member, discussing financing and pushing to expedite money transfers to Polar. The Times saw texts in which Solovyov and Novatek CEO Leonid Mikhelson discussed sending up to $15 million to Tech Wave to keep it alive.
A gas venture that came up in President Donald Trump's Ukraine peace talks had a hidden backer, according to its former boss.Polar LNG, a startup pitching a plan to export natural gas from Alaska's North Slope, received secret funding from Russian energy giant Novatek, The New York Times...
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