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NEW YORK: A former high-ranking FBI counterintelligence official who investigated Russian oligarchs has been indicted on charges he secretly worked for one, in violation of US sanctions. The official was also charged, in a separate indictment, with taking cash from a former foreign security officer.
Charles McGonigal, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York from 2016 to 2018, is accused in an indictment unsealed Monday of working with a former Soviet diplomat-turned-Russian interpreter on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire they purportedly referred to in code as “the big guy” and “the client.”
McGonigal, who had supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska, worked to have Deripaska’s sanctions lifted in 2019 and took money from him in 2021 to investigate a rival oligarch, the Justice Department said.
The FBI investigated McGonigal, showing a willingness to go after one of its own. Nonetheless, the indictment is an unwelcome headline for the FBI at a time when the bureau is entangled in separate, politically charged investigations — the handling of classified documents by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — as newly ascendant Republicans in Congress pledge to investigate high-profile FBI and Justice Department decisions.
McGonigal and the interpreter, Sergey Shestakov were arrested Saturday — McGonigal after landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport and Shestakov at his home in Morris, Connecticut — and held at a federal jail in Brooklyn. They both pleaded not guilty Monday and were released on bail.
McGonigal, 54, and Shestakov, 69, are charged with violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering. Shestakov is also charged with making material misstatements to the FBI.
McGonigal “has had a long, distinguished career with the FBI,” his lawyer, Seth DuCharme, told reporters when he left court with McGonigal following his arraignment.
“This is obviously a distressing day for Mr. McGonigal and his family, but we’ll review the evidence, we’ll closely scrutinize it and we have a lot of confidence in Mr. McGonigal,” said DuCharme, the former top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn.
Messages seeking comment were left for lawyers for Shestakov and Deripaska.
McGonigal was separately charged in federal court in Washington, D.C. with concealing at least $225,000 in cash he allegedly received from a former Albanian intelligence official while working for the FBI.
The indictment does not charge or characterize the payment to McGonigal as a bribe, but federal prosecutors say that, while hiding the payment from the FBI, he took actions as an FBI supervisor that were aimed at the ex-intelligence official’s financial benefit.
They included proposing that a pharmaceutical company pay the man’s company $500,000 in exchange for scheduling a business meeting involving a representative from the US delegation to the United Nations.
In a bureau-wide email Monday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said McGonigal’s alleged conduct “is entirely inconsistent with what I see from the men and women of the FBI who demonstrate every day through their actions that they’re worthy of the public’s trust.”
The US Treasury Department added Deripaska to its sanctions list in 2018 for purported ties to the Russian government and Russia’s energy sector amid Russia’s ongoing threats to Ukraine.
In September, federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Deripaska and three associates with conspiring to violate US sanctions by plotting to ensure his child was born in the United States.
Shestakov, who worked as an interpreter for federal courts and prosecutors in New York City after retiring as a diplomat in 1993, helped connect McGonigal to Deripaska, according to the indictment.
In 2018, while McGonigal was still working for the FBI, Shestakov introduced him to a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who functioned as an agent for Deripaska, the indictment said. That person is not named in court papers but the Justice Department says he was “rumored in public media reports to be a Russian intelligence officer.”
According to the indictment, Shestakov asked McGonigal for help getting the agent’s daughter an internship in the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism and intelligence units. McGonigal agreed, prosecutors say, and told a police department contact that, “I have an interest in her father for a number of reasons.”
According to the indictment, a police sergeant subsequently reported to the NYPD and FBI that the woman claimed to have an “unusually close relationship” with an FBI agent whom, she said, had given her access to confidential FBI files. The sergeant felt it was “unusual for a college student to receive such special treatment from the NYPD and FBI,” the indictment said.
After retiring from the FBI, according to the indictment, McGonigal went to work in 2019 as a consultant and investigator for an international law firm seeking to reverse Deripaska’s sanctions, a process known as “delisting.”
The law firm paid McGonigal $25,000 through a Shestakov-owned corporation, prosecutors say, though the work was ultimately interrupted by factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2021, according to the indictment, Deripaska’s agent enlisted McGonigal and Shestakov to dig up dirt on a rival oligarch, whom Deripaska was fighting for control of a large Russian corporation, in exchange for $51,280 up front and $41,790 per month paid via a Russian bank to a New Jersey company owned by McGonigal’s friend. McGonigal kept his friend in the dark about the true nature of the payments, prosecutors say.
McGonigal is also accused of hiding from the FBI key details of a 2017 trip he took to Albania with the former Albanian intelligence official who is alleged to have given him at least $225,000.
Once there, according to the Justice Department, McGonigal met with Albania’s prime minister and urged caution in awarding oil field drilling licenses in the country to Russian front companies. McGonigal’s Albanian contacts had a financial interest in those decisions.
In an example of how McGonigal allegedly blurred personal gain with professional responsibilities, prosecutors in Washington say he “caused” the FBI’s New York office to open a criminal lobbying investigation in which the former Albanian intelligence official was to serve as a confidential human source.
McGonigal did so, prosecutors allege, without revealing to the FBI or Justice Department his financial connections to the man.
LONDON: A Middle Eastern and North African category could be added to US federal surveys and censuses, and changes could be made to how Hispanics are able to self-identify, under preliminary recommendations released Thursday by the Biden administration in what would be the first update to race and ethnicity standards in a quarter century.
The federal government’s standards haven’t been changed since 1997, two decades after they were created as part of an effort to collect consistent race and ethnicity data across federal agencies when handling censuses, federal surveys and application forms for government benefits.
Questions about race and Hispanic ethnicity are asked separately using the 1997 standards. They would be combined into a single question under the initial proposals, which were made by a working group of representatives from different federal agencies convened by the Office of Management and Budget.
Some advocates have been pushing for combining the race and Hispanic origin questions, saying the way race is categorized often confuses Hispanic respondents who are not sure how to answer. Tests by the Census Bureau in the 2010 census showed that combining the questions yielded higher response rates.
Using the 1997 standards, US residents from Middle Eastern and North African countries were encouraged to identify as “white.” Under the new proposal, there would be a separate category for people often referred to by the “MENA” acronym. The Census Bureau recommended adding a MENA category to the 2020 census form, but the Trump administration dropped the idea.
According to a Federal Register notice that will be published by the Biden administration Friday, research suggests that many MENA respondents view their identity as distinct from white — and for over 30 years, stakeholders have advocated for collecting MENA information separate from the census’s “white” category.
Among the countries of origin that would get a check for the MENA category would be Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Israel, the notice said.
“This is a really big deal,” said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, a Washington-based civil rights group. “We have been working to get a checkbox to get better data about our community for decades.”
The proposals encourage the collection of more detailed race and ethnicity information by allowing respondents on government forms to list their country of origin when answering a question about their race or ethnicity. They also recommend striking from federal government forms the words “Negro,” “Far East” — and the use of the terms “majority” and “minority,” saying they can be considered pejorative or outdated, and that the standards need to be “respectful of how people refer to themselves.”
The need to update the standards was driven by increasing racial and ethnic diversity, a growing number of people who identify as more than one race or ethnicity, and changing immigration and migration patterns, according to the Federal Register notice.
The working group said their proposals were preliminary and that they don’t yet reflect the official standards of the federal government since they will continue to be hashed out with input from the public, which has until mid-April to submit comments. The goal is to ensure that that “the standards better reflect the diversity of the American people,” Karin Orvis, the US chief statistician, said in a blog post.
“As we consider these recommendations, we want to hear directly from the American people,” Orvis said.
PARIS: France has called for the “immediate release” of seven French nationals detained in Iran, denouncing an “unjustifiable and unacceptable” situation.
French “hostages” in Iran include 35-year-old Louis Arnaud, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Anne-Claire Legendre said.
Arnaud, whose name has just been made public, was arrested on Sept. 28 as he was traveling in Iran “for touristic reasons,” she said.
He is being detained in “very difficult conditions” in the Tehran prison of Evin, where France’s ambassador to Iran was able to meet him on Dec. 11, she added.
Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna on Wednesday discussed the issue in a phone call with her Iranian counterpart Hossein Hossein Amirabdollahian, the French Foreign Ministry said.
“We are especially worried about Bernard Phelan given his health condition,” Legendre said. The Foreign Ministry has said that the French Irish citizen, detained in Iran since October, needs “appropriate medical care that is not provided” in prison.
Iran has detained a number of foreigners and dual nationals over the years, accusing them of espionage or other state security offenses and sentencing them after secretive trials in which rights groups say they are denied due process.
Families and support committees of Arnaud and other French people jailed in Iran, including Fariba Adelkhah, Benjamin Briere and Cecile Kohler, have called for a gathering on Saturday in Paris.
A separate event has been organized in Paris that day in support for Belgian national Olivier Vandecasteele by Doctors Without Borders.
The aid worker, who worked for the nongovernmental organization for many years, was arrested in Tehran in February last year. Doctors Without Borders says the conditions of his detention are putting his life at risk.
LONDON: British police on Thursday said a 27-year-old man has been charged with terrorism and other offenses after he was found last week with a suspicious device in the grounds of a hospital in Leeds, in northern England.
Mohammed Farooq from Leeds was charged with preparation of a terrorist act and possession of an explosive substance and an imitation firearm, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said.
Farooq, who was arrested last week, will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Friday, the CPS added.
Emergency services were called last Friday to St. James’s Hospital in Leeds after a suspicious package was found outside the maternity wing. Some people had been evacuated from the area.
“We are satisfied that there is currently no evidence of an increased risk to the public, within our communities or the UK hospital estate, in connection with this investigation,” James Dunkerley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East, said in a statement.
Dunkerley said further enquiries since Farooq’s arrest had confirmed an initial assessment that it was an isolated incident.
NEW YORK CITY: The deputy secretary-general of the UN on Wednesday called on Muslim countries to unite in their efforts to put pressure on the Taliban to modernize and move “from the 13th century to the 21st.”
Amina Mohammed was speaking after returning from a two-week official visit to Afghanistan, during which she attempted to persuade Taliban officials to reverse their recent decisions to deny Afghan women and girls access to education beyond the sixth grade and ban women from working for humanitarian organizations, among other restrictions of their rights.
Mohammed, the highest-ranking female official at the UN, told Arab News the Taliban government, the authority of which is not recognized by any other country, craves international recognition and wants to assume Afghanistan’s seat at the UN, which is still held by the previous government led by former President Ashraf Ghani.
Taliban fighters took control of the capital, Kabul, on Aug. 15, 2021, after US and NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of war.
It is important to maximize whatever leverage is available to steer the Taliban toward the universal principles that underpin participation in the international community, Mohammed said.
“No one objects to a Muslim country or Shariah,” she said. “But all of this cannot be re-engineered to extremism and taking views that harm women and girls. This is absolutely unacceptable and we should hold the line.”
She said the Taliban officials she met “spoke off one script” and highlighted what they consider to be their achievements in protecting Afghan women, efforts for which they complained they had not received international recognition.
Mohammed said she and her delegation pushed back against this Taliban narrative, telling them “their definition of protection would be ours of oppression.”
She added: “We reminded them that in humanitarian principles, nondiscrimination was a key part … and that they were wiping out women from the workplace.
“We reminded them that even in the case where they talked about the rights (and) edicts that they had promulgated for protecting women, they were giving rights with the one hand and taking away with the other, and that was not acceptable.”
Mohammed said she had used everything she had in her diplomatic “toolbox” to try to defend and restore the rights of women in Afghanistan.
“One of those (tools) was to tell them that I, like them, was a Sunni Muslim,” she said. “They are the Hanafi school of thought, I am the Maliki school of thought and both are right.
“However, when it comes to preventing women’s education and their rights, we don’t see eye-to-eye on that and the ultimate judge will be God. And a lot of what they’ve done is harming people.”
Before arriving in Kabul, Mohammed’s delegation visited other Muslim-majority countries, including Turkey, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, where she said there was widespread opposition to the Taliban assault on women’s rights.
“Every time I went to one of these Muslim countries, they did reinforce the fact that Islam did not ban women from education or from the workplace,” she said.
Mohammed discussed with Taliban officials in Kandahar the progress in Saudi Arabia in recent years on women’s rights but said they were quick to respond that they are “not on the same page” as the Kingdom on the issue.
“So it’s very important that the Muslim countries come together and establish it,” she said. “It is difficult; we do not have a pope in Islam, we have a Qur’an and we have different schools of thought — but we do have rights in Islam.
“I reminded the Taliban that (if) it is women in business (we are talking about), the first wife of the Prophet … was a businesswoman that funded Islam. Khadija funded Islam. If it was (about) coming for more knowledge and advice and guidance, it was the younger wife, Aisha, who gives that.
“‘Iqra’ (read) is the first word in the Qur’an and (Islam) is a religion of light. It’s a living religion and I think that a lot of what we have to deal with is how we (move) the Taliban from the 13th century to the 21st. And that’s a journey, so it is not just, you know, overnight.”
Mohammed said it has been proposed that the UN and the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation co-host an international conference in March focusing on women in the Muslim world. She said she has also asked for the inclusion of more women in OIC delegations.
“It’s very important that the Muslim countries come together,” she said. “We have to take the fight to the region.
“We have to, within Islam, talk much more to the moderates about what this means, not just for Afghanistan but the narrative of other Muslim countries where we are having huge pushback, whether it is Iran or it is Yemen. We have to be clear that this is about women in the Muslim world.”
MANILA: When Jenny Segalowitz arrived in the UAE two decades ago, she started with a minimum wage job, working hard to help her family, and with a resilience that years later saw her flourish as one of the most successful Filipino entrepreneurs in Dubai.
Segalowitz spent her childhood in a poor household in the suburbs of Las Pinas city, near the Philippines capital, Manila. Her home had no electricity and no running water. To sustain the family’s nine children, Segalowitz’s father worked as a carpenter and her mother earned money as a tailor.
The entrepreneur started work at just six years old after her father had an accident and her mother became the family’s sole breadwinner.
“When I was a kid, every Saturday and after school, me and my siblings would collect trash that we could sell,” she told Arab News.
“When we had nothing to eat, at the age of six I learned to earn money already. I was selling ice.”
Later, she would also become a ragpicker, laundress or housemaid — working and at the same time attending classes in school.
Segalowitz worked her way through to college and made it to the Philippine Normal University in Manila, which specializes in teachers’ education. Her dream was to become a teacher, but she was dealt another cruel blow when her father died.
In 2003, while still in college, Segalowitz received a job offer from a fast-food chain in Abu Dhabi. It did not take her long to make the decision to move and she was soon climbing an airstair for her UAE-bound flight.
“I will never forget when I was crying while climbing the steps to get into the plane. I was crying because of joy,” Segalowitz said.
She only that knew she would be employed in a service crew, with a salary of 1,000 dirhams ($270).
“I told myself I will use this as a stepping stone … I prayed and thanked the lord, and I asked him to help me not to waste the opportunity he has given me.”
Working 11 hours a day was sometimes tough, but Segalowitz knew that she had to carry on.
“When I got very tired, I would mop the floor in the toilet, and then I would kneel down to pray.
I would ask the lord to bless my life,” she said.
“My only desire at that time was to get an additional 1,000 dirhams or for my salary to double.”
But her salary did not increase and as she married and had children, Segalowitz would take on two full-time jobs — at a salon and as a house cleaner. Then she had an idea to manage apartments, rather than clean them.
“I think being an entrepreneur runs in my blood,” she said.
“That was in 2008 to 2015 … I started with just one unit, but not long after, it became 10 apartments. So, from the 2,000 dirham income that I was praying for, I was already making 35,000 dirhams.”
But when everything seemed to be finally going great and Segalowitz could guarantee her loved ones a good standard of living, her family life suffered.
She divorced her abusive husband and became a single mother, solely responsible for her three children.
When the market suffered a downturn in 2016, Segalowitz had to close her apartment business and began investing money in other companies, often taking big risks.
“I was a risk taker, so I was investing millions,” she said.
“I was also praying that if the lord will give me a new partner in life, let him be a good man.”
That prayer was answered in 2019, when she met her now husband, Douglas Segalowitz, an American IT professional and a man in whom she found support — both in family terms as well as in her endeavors.
It was her new partner who encouraged Segalowitz to pursue her dream of opening a restaurant.
The business officially launched in January 2021, with one outlet in Abu Dhabi’s Muroor Road, but as strict COVID-19 restrictions were still in place, it took one year for the restaurant to fully open.
The all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue and seafood outlet, Mukbang Shows, became a hit last year. Its second branch opened in Electra Street, also in Abu Dhabi. A third is scheduled to open in Dubai later this year.
“The concept of mukbang was my husband’s. He is a jolly person, and he just wants to be always happy. He loved to do mukbang,” Segalowitz said, referring to Korean-style live-streamed videos featuring people eating large quantities of food as they address fans.
“We were surprised with its immediate success. There was always a long queue of customers outside. Others are making advance bookings. Some even drove for 1.5 hours just to try our food … our blessings were overflowing.”
To give back, Segalowitz is now trying to help fellow Filipinos, sponsoring children’s education back home and giving employment to those in the UAE, her second home, which she calls a “land of opportunity.”
At the same time, the Filipino never forgets where she came from, and makes it her main advice for others who dare to aim higher.
“I didn’t expect to get this far, from collecting garbage to being a restaurant owner … in life, nothing is impossible as long as you trust yourself,” she said.
“Dream, endure and persevere. Do not give up on life.”
