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In an auction of licenses to drill for oil and gas, the choicest license went to Bleyzer’s company, which got the rights to develop some of Ukraine’s biggest oil and gas fields over the next 50 years. The deal was first reported by The Associated Press in November. It is potentially worth billions of dollars.
There was another name on Perry’s list, and it surprised the Ukrainians: Robert Bensh. A little-known oil and gas executive from Texas, Bensh had known Perry for only a few months by that point. Starting in the early 2000s, Bensh spent over a decade as one of the few American investors in Ukraine’s oil and gas sector. His contacts in Kyiv included close associates of Ukraine’s corrupt former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in a revolution in 2014. After that revolution, Bensh’s business in Ukraine dried up, and he had returned to Houston. “I wanted nothing to do with Ukraine,” Bensh told our reporting team in a series of interviews.
The Ukrainians soon understood at least one of the reasons for his return: Bensh was tied to Perry’s dream of exporting American gas to Ukraine. Along with a group of investors from Louisiana, Bensh was promoting a company called Louisiana Natural Gas Exports Inc., better known among its founders as LNGE. Established in June 2018, the company had no deals or assets to its name. The man listed as its co-founder and director, Marsden Miller, is related to Bensh by marriage. In 1987, a jury in Louisiana found Miller guilty of corruption; his sentence was later overturned, and the government dropped the case against him after the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the relevant statute in an unrelated case. LNGE owns no gas fields, no pipelines, no tankers and no export terminal. But its executives had connections in Ukraine and at the Energy Department.