Building A New Business
To build their new business, Troost and Srivastava set out a plan to lay the building blocks for success. Srivastava hired a best-in-class team of lawyers, accountants and investments bankers including Baker Hostetler, Grant Thornton, and KPMG. Chief among their tasks was to move Paramount Energy & Commodities SA’s parent company to the US so that it had better access to credit and new business opportunities. Troost envisioned a US-based parent company called Unicom, and Srivastava concurred with this plan. As the owner of several US-based companies, Srivastava understood that it was critical the company meet all relevant US laws and compliance regulations.
They also engaged lobbying firms and other representatives to develop relationships in Washington, DC in support of this new non-Russian, diversified commodities business effort. Srivastava – who up until this point had made very few political donations – started making donations from his own personal funds in support of this effort under the guidance of these advisors.
Throughout the fall of 2022, Srivastava worked to develop several business opportunities for Paramount Energy & Commodities SA in Indonesia, Congo, DRC, Guyana, Libya, Pakistan, South Africa, and Turkey, among others.
As they continued to establish new US-based parent company, Srivastava asked his team to assess the compliance risk of Paramount DMCC, a United Arab Emirates-based subsidiary of Paramount Energy & Commodities SA that Troost had established years prior. As the UAE had not introduced any sanctions on Russia, Srivastava wanted to ensure that the entity would not run afoul of US regulations once its new parent company was established in the US. Baker Hostetler consulted the US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on the matter. In all of Srivastava and his team’s correspondence with Troost and his representatives, the only mention of OFAC was in this context.
During this time, Srivastava team attempted on several occasions to begin a third-party audit of Paramount Energy & Commodities SA so that Troost could be paid the ex-dividend that was agreed as a condition of Srivastava’s investment. But for myriad reasons, they were not granted access to any of the books. In fact, at no point did Srivastava or any of his representatives have access to the Paramount Energy & Commodities SA, Harvest Commodities or Paramount DMCC offices or systems, bank accounts, or books. Also during this time, for his part, Troost and his team resisted the compliance and disclosure efforts and obfuscated and delayed on many of the new business development lines for reasons that would only become clear to Srivastava later.