# Vnesheconombank **Vnesheconombank (VEB, now VEB.RF)** is Russia's state development corporation — a sanctioned state bank whose New York office was a documented cover for Russian foreign intelligence, and whose chairman met [[Jared Kushner]] during the [[First Trump Transition]]. ## Status and sanctions Reorganized as a state development institution in 2007, VEB was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on July 16, 2014 and by the U.K. on August 1, 2014 over the [[Annexation of Crimea]]. In February 2022 it was placed on the full SDN list and cut off from SWIFT. Igor Shuvalov has chaired it since May 2018. ## Intelligence cover In January 2015 the FBI arrested Evgeny Buryakov, deputy representative of VEB's New York office, as an unregistered agent of the [[SVR]]. See [[Buryakov Spy Ring]]. ## The Kushner–Gorkov meeting Sergey Gorkov, a former senior Sberbank executive, chaired VEB from March 2016 to May 2018. NBC reported that he graduated from the FSB Academy, which trains Russian intelligence personnel *[single-sourced]*. In December 2016 Gorkov met Kushner. The two sides described the meeting differently: the White House said Kushner was acting in his "role as a transition adviser and conduit for the State Department"; VEB called it "a business meeting," one of several with the heads of large American banks and businesses — at a time when [[Kushner Companies]] was carrying heavy debt on 666 Fifth Avenue. ## RWKB angle VEB links two Trump-world threads through a single sanctioned institution: an SVR operation that had tried to cultivate [[Carter Page]], and a transition-period meeting with the president-elect's son-in-law that the two participants could not describe consistently. ## See Also - [[Buryakov Spy Ring]] - [[VTB Bank]] - [[Jared Kushner]]