Following The Money

摘要

It's a story, as one former oil lob-byist in Washington puts it, that "a lot of people in this town wish would go away." And it's not hard to see why. It involves at least three giant, politically influential American oil companies; the leaders of an energy-rich former Soviet republic that the Clinton administration has assiduously cultivated in the post-cold-war years, and a wealthy, well-connected American middleman, James Giffen. The Justice Department is now investigating Giffen, who runs a private New York-based merchant bank, for allegedly channeling millions of dollars from those oil companies into the bank accounts of the leaders of Kazakhstan, the Central Asian country that lies just south of Russia.