A company with ties to both Rostec, a sanctioned state-owned corporation, and newly sanctioned oligarch Igor Rotenberg is an expected exhibitor at this weekend's National Rifle Association Leadership Forum in Dallas, Texas.
TulAmmo USA is a private company headquartered in Round Rock, Texas, but sells small-arms ammunition manufactured by the Tula Cartridge Works in Tula, Russia, about 120 miles outside of Moscow. The factory, one of Russia’s oldest and largest arms plants, is tied to a number of entities and individuals who have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, including Rostec, Russia’s state-owned defense conglomerate, and Igor Rotenberg, an oligarch who was recently targeted alongside several other allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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“I suspect TulAmmo USA has stayed on the right side of U.S. sanctions laws,” said Peter Harrell, a former senior State Department sanctions official who is now an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “But there is something deeply troubling about a Russian arms maker -- one that makes Russian military assault rifles and anti-tank missiles -- profiting by selling ammunition in the U.S. The fact that a portion of those profits flow to some of Putin's closest cronies makes the situation even more problematic.”
In an interview with ABC News, TulAmmo USA CEO Ed Grasso confirmed that the company is a distributor for the Tula Cartridge Works but described it as a “completely separate entity” with a legal business arrangement to buy ammunition exported by the Russian factory for sale to consumers.
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Harrell told ABC News that just because TulAmmo USA has managed to remain “just outside the penalty box” doesn’t mean their presence shouldn’t cause concern.
“I also bet that the American sportsmen buying TulAmmo cartridges would be surprised to learn that they are supporting the same Russian military complex that supports Russian aggression in Syria, Ukraine, and around the world,” Harrell said.
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Tula Cartridge Works is partially owned by a holding company called High Precision Systems that was established by the state military technology firm Rostec, which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2014 and cut off from U.S. debt financing amid “continued Russian efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine.”
Igor Rotenberg purchased 46.176 percent of the Tula Cartridge Works in February 2017 ...
The Rotenberg’s family’s ties to Putin stretch back decades. Igor’s father Arkady has been Putin’s close friend since childhood, when they were judo sparring partners, and Arkady has since amassed a multi-billion-dollar fortune largely through state contracts, including the controversial effort to build a bridge between Russia and the recently annexed Ukrainian peninsula Crimea.
Rotenberg acquired significant assets from his father, Arkady, and his uncle, Boris, after they were sanctioned themselves in 2014 for supporting “Putin’s pet projects by receiving and executing high price contracts for the Sochi Olympic Games and state-controlled Gazprom.”
This week, after being hit with sanctions by the U.S. himself, Rotenberg reduced his share in the factory to 20.23 percent, a move a manager from the factory told Vedomosti [one of Russia’s leading business newspapers] was intended to allow the company to keep exporting ammunition.
Full story: NRA to host company with ties to sanctioned Russians at annual convention (ABC News)