The spy, the poison and the Trump dossier
Sergei Skripal was close to a consultant who was linked to Orbis Business Intelligence and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele
Asecurity consultant who has worked for the company that compiled the controversial dossier on US President Donald Trump was close to the Russian double agent poisoned last weekend, it has been claimed. The consultant, who the Daily Tele
graph is declining to identify, lived close to Colonel Sergei Skripal and is understood to have known him for some time.
Skripal, who is in intensive care and fighting for his life after an assassination attempt on Sunday afternoon (Monday NZT), was recruited by MI6 when he worked for the British Embassy in Estonia, according to the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency.
Skripal moved to Salisbury in 2010 and the Telegraph understands he became close to a security consultant employed by Christopher Steele, who compiled the Trump dossier.
The British security consultant, according to a LinkedIn social network account that was removed from the internet in the past few days, is also based in Salisbury. On the same LinkedIn account, the man listed consultancy work with Orbis Business Intelligence, according to reports. Orbis is run by Steele, a former MI6 agent, who compiled the dossier on Trump that detailed his allegedly corrupt dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The dossier has sparked a formal investigation in the US into Russian collusion in the US presidential election, to the fury of both Trump and Putin. If the Kremlin believed that Skripal might have helped with the dossier, it could explain the motive for the assassination attempt in Salisbury town centre. Skripal’s daughter is also in intensive care, as is a police officer who rushed to help them after they were attacked with nerve agent.
Counter-terrorism police, along with MI5, are trying to establish why Skripal was targeted seven years after being released from a Russian penal colony. He was sentenced to 13 years for being a traitor in 2006, but sent to the UK in a swap for Russian spies.
Valery Morozov, a former construction magnate who fled Russia after revealing corruption, claimed that Skripal, 66, was still working, and remained in regular contact with military intelligence officers at the Russian Embassy. That would raise the possibility that he was still feeding intelligence to people in Britain.
Morozov said that, as a result, he had decided to steer clear of Skripal for his own safety. He told Channel 4 News: “If you have a military intelligence officer working in the Russian diplomatic service, living after retirement in the UK, working in cyber-security and every month going to the embassy to meet military intelligence officers — for me, being a political refugee, it is either a certain danger or, frankly speaking, I thought that this contact might not be very good for me because it can bring some questions from British officials.”