Leaked document reveals Rex Tillerson is director of Bahamas-based US-Russian oil company

Desdemona Despair

By Luke Harding and Hannes Munzinger
18 December 2016

(The Guardian) – Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next US secretary of state, is the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, leaked documents show.

Tillerson – the chief executive of ExxonMobil – has been a director of the oil company’s Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, since 1998. His name – RW Tillerson – appears next to other officers who are based at Houston, Texas; Moscow; and Sakhalin, in Russia’s far east.

The leaked 2001 document comes from the corporate registry in the Bahamas. It was one of 1.3m files given to the Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source. The registry is public but details of individual directors are typically incomplete or missing entirely. […]

Exxon Neftegas’s most important oil and gas project is Sakhalin-1. It is located in the sub-Arctic, off the frozen and difficult-to-access north-east coast of Russia’s Sakhalin island. This is 10,700km (6,650 miles) away from the subsidiary’s official business home in Nassau, the semi-tropical capital of the Bahamas. The Bahamas is notorious for secrecy and has a corporate tax rate of zero. [more]

Leak reveals Rex Tillerson is director of Bahamas-based US-Russian oil company