Escort who says she has election dirt faces prison
THAILAND: A female escort who claims to have evidence of ties between Russia and United States President Donald Trump’s election campaign is facing new criminal charges in Thailand.
Anastasia Vashukevich was detained in February in Pattaya, alongside a friend who describes himself as a sex guru, and charged with holding a sex training course without a work permit.
Additional arrest warrants have now been issued against the pair for soliciting, which carries a maximum prison term of 10 years, and conspiracy, which has a maximum penalty of seven years.
The new charges are likely to fuel suspicions of interference from Moscow. Vashukevich, a citizen of Belarus who is in her 20s, is being held in an immigration detention centre and has pleaded not to be expelled to Russia, saying she fears for her life.
Vashukevich came to public attention this year when Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny highlighted pictures and video she had posted to her Instagram account. They showed her on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s yacht off Norway in August 2016, when he met Sergei Prikhodko, the Russian deputy prime minister who was previously a foreign policy adviser to President Vladimir Putin.
Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, offered private briefings to Deripaska, who is closely aligned with the Kremlin, on the progress of Trump’s race for the White House in July 2016. Navalny alleged that Prikhodko could have been on the yacht to receive such information, and that the trip was equivalent to receiving a bribe.
After her arrest, Vashukevich and ‘‘sex guru’’ Alexander Kirillov, 38, asked for asylum in the US, saying she could hand over more than 16 hours of taped audio recordings from the yacht. She claimed in a video posted online that she was ‘‘the only witness and the missing link in the connection between Russia and the US elections, the long chain of Oleg Deripaska, Prikhodko, Manafort and Trump’’.
Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s security council, was in Bangkok for talks two days after the pair were arrested in February. A friend of Kirillov has said he and Vashukevich were about to be released but were kept in custody after a Russian official’s intervention in Thailand. Putin’s spokesman has denied any link with Patrushev’s visit.
Thai police have admitted that the pair were arrested with the help of a ‘‘foreign spy’’.
Deripaska was one of seven Russian billionaires sanctioned by the US last week in response to Moscow’s ‘‘malign activity’’. One reason given by the US Treasury was ‘‘allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official’’. That is likely to be a reference to the yacht trip with Prikhodko.
Deripaska and Prikhodko deny any wrongdoing. The tycoon says he is the victim of ‘‘outrageous false allegations’’.