In my last blog exposing the fact that the Skripals were not poisoned by Novichok or any other military-grade organophosphate I mentioned that there was allegedly a third suspect in this non-event invented by our spooks. To me it came as no surprise to learn the suspect was Russian. I wrote:
“You watch, very soon a picture will appear of this latest fictitious character, and Bellingcat will be paid thousands to tell us who it “really” is!”
It was very soon indeed. Here it is. Leaving aside for a moment the accuracy of the identity of Sergey Vyachaeslavovich Fedotov and Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev being one and the same person, and the grainy image of a head, there is nothing in the Bellingcat article which links him to Salisbury, and it “is unclear what Fedotov’s role may have been, if any, in the preparation and execution of the poisoning operation.” You have to get to the foot of the article before this confession appears. The rest, and there’s a lot of it, is speculation from a pre-conceived position of “guilty until proved innocent”.
Anyway it all detracts from the prima facie fact that the Skripals were never taken into hospital with nerve agent poisoning. What they were exposed to subsequently is anyone’s guess. It is unlikely they will be heard from again with Yulia going off script the last time she spoke with her cousin Viktoria more than 6 months ago.
If Bellingcat can speculate it leaves the field open for other bloggers, even those of us not relying on the funding and expertise of Integrity Initiative and Orbis Business Intelligence. So what do I think has happened?
First I think Sergei Skripal is on ice in some military morgue waiting for the story of how he died to be released to MSM. When our secret services set up this unfortunate saga they had to have patsies, Russian patsies, a person or persons to take the rap to ensure the blame never came back to its originators. Sergei Skripal alone provided Pablo Miller (today a major player in one of the fabrication businesses: Orbis Business Intelligence) with files on some 300 GRU employees. Skripal would not have been the only greedy man selling names of his compatriots but it could well be that Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev was one of the names Skripal sold.
If western secret-services then made attempts to recruit him, or actually recruited him, and gave hime a credit limit of about one million US dollars up to 2009 to run a fictitious company Loreven Style Ltd as a front for espionage activities, they would have all the paper-work and his handlers over here would be aware of his movements, especially when he was meeting with his handlers. That being the case there is nothing at all investigative about this latest Bellingcat farce.
The document below looks particularly suspicious. Anyone could have made it up (in fact anyone could have made up any of the documents in the Bellingcat blog). For a start it mentions no bank.
Заключение кредитного комитета means “Decision of the credit committee” and СОГЛАСОВАНО means that it has approved (and the next two items) a limit of 1066192 in US dollars. I cannot think of a Russian Bank, or any bank, that might approve this and it is much more likely a means of money-laundering, if the document is a genuine history. The credit limit would surely be what he was allowed and not actually what he got, or at least there is no indication of any transactions to show what he got. We might have to wait for those. Bellingcat says this document was “obtained from a leaked Russian credit history collection”. Why anybody would leak anything to an outfit like Bellingcat with its history is beyond me.
The pseudonym of Sergey Vyacheslavovich Fedotov allegedly belongs to Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeyev (Sergeyev could be formed from the first name Sergey, and the first letter of his patronymic Vyacheslavovich) while retaining the patronymic, and adding a surname Fedotov. Oh, these stupid Russians! You would have thought they could come up with something less obvious like Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo. But then they are not British are they?
This theory is much more convincing to my mind than our secret services being able to scrutinise personal bank transactions of individuals living in Russia. If they could do that the Russian banks would need to up their game and perhaps start using Kaspersky. The whole saga reeks of the pipe-smoking inventors of the Trump “golden showers”. Perhaps Sergeyev was the one who fed Orbis that story. Perhaps Skripal fed our spooks Sergeyev. And because the “golden showers” proved to be a fairy story now it’s payback time for both. Except we don’t know where Sergeyev (or Fedotov) is yet. Never mind there is apparently more to come next week. Yawn.
All the Goss 