Who Allies with Akorda in the Stati Claim (Part3)26 Sep 2022 07:46
The representatives of Frontera Resources Corporation are denying Outrider Management’s participation in the funding of the company’s projects. According to them, in 2011, Outrider's Cayman Islands based investment fund purchased a portion of Frontera's then privately held debt in a liquidation sale at a deep discount from a third-party debt holder. Frontera Resources Corporation says that, after this purchase, the fund’s representatives started using debt instruments to interfere with the company’s business in an attempt to create an advantage to achieve an inappropriate takeover and liquidation of the company. Currently, the company is settling the disputes with the fund in courts.
The company was founded in the 1990s by Bill White, an influential Democrat, who served as Deputy Secretary of Energy under the Clinton Administration and then was appointed the chairman of the Democratic Party in Texas.
The high point of White’s career was his appointment as the Mayor of Houston, the capital of the U.S. oil industry. He had served at this post from 2004 until 2010. It is in Houston that the Frontera Resources Corporation (the head structure of the entire Frontera network) main office is located.
In the 1990s, when the company was founded, her investors included influential representatives of the U.S. establishment. However, in the process of later transformations of the business, Steve Nikandros and Zaza Mamulaishvili became the main public representatives of the company.
An Unlikely Partnership
In this tandem, Steve Nikandros represented Houston and Zaza Mamulaishvili represented the former USSR. In 1989, the graduate of the Tbilisi University’s Medical School arrived in the U.S. where he intended to continue his medical career but ended up as an oil and metal trader. The Metex company that Mamulaishvili managed was engaged in exporting steel and non-ferrous metals while the MTA company was importing oil from Russia and Kazakhstan to the U.S. Simultaneously, the ties with Frontera were being established.
In one of the interviews to a Ukrainian media, Mamulaishvili stated that Bill White began working with him following the order of Bill Clinton whose Administration was trying to find ways to export the Caspian oil. As a result, Mamulaishvili (according to his own statement) was engaged in the negotiations with representatives of several countries at once — Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. The negotiations resulted in constructing the two pipelines from Baku to Supsa.
One may treat this kind of statements light-heartedly but Mamulaishvili’s plans were quite big indeed. And, each time, they were lobbied through political channels. For instance, Frontera had managed to obtain the licence to operate 40% of the Moldovan territory for the purpose of developing oil and gas fields thanks to the support of Prime Minister Pavel Filip and oligarch Vladimir Plakhotnyuk, the then backstage leader of Moldova.