OREANDA-NEWS. Earlier today in the US, Slate published an article titled -Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? Alfa Bank wishes to make clear that there is no connection between Alfa Bank and Donald Trump, the Trump campaign, or the Trump organization. Any suggestion to the contrary by this article is false.

Alfa Bank hired Mandiant, one of the world's foremost US cyber security experts, to investigate and it has found nothing to support the allegations. Mandiant found no substantive contact, email or financial link between Alfa Bank and the Trump Campaign or Organization during its investigation. Mandiant have conducted a deep dive and investigated Alfa Bank’s IT systems both remotely and on the ground in Moscow and there was no evidence of notable contact between the alerted domain and Alfa Bank.

Neither Alfa Bank nor its principals, including Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, have or have had any contact with Mr. Trump or his organizations. Fridman and Aven have never met Mr. Trump nor have they or Alfa Bank had any business dealings with him. Neither Alfa Bank nor its officers have sent Mr. Trump or his organisation any emails, information or money. Alfa Bank does not have and has never had any special or exclusive internet connection with Mr. Trump or his entities. The assertion of a special or private link is patently false.

Mandiant has made clear to Alfa Bank that the information reporters gave us – given to them by an anonymous cyber group - is inconclusive and does not suggest an exclusive internet connection between Alfa Bank and Trump.

Mandiant’s working hypothesis is that the activity the reporters' sources allege was caused by email marketing/spam campaign by a marketing server, which triggered security software. This activity may indeed have been initiated by someone for the purpose of discrediting parties to this traffic.

Commenting on these allegations Mandiant said

Mandiant, a FireEye company, has been retained by Alfa Bank to investigate information given to them by various media. The information that has been presented is a list of dates, times, IP Addresses and Domain Names. The list appears to be a scanned copy of a printed log. There is no information which indicates where the list has come from. The list contains approx. 2800 look ups of a Domain Name over a period of 90 days. The information presented is inconclusive and is not evidence of substantive contact or a direct email or financial link between Alfa Bank and the Trump Campaign or Organization. The list presented does not contain enough information to show that there has been any actual activity opposed to simple DNS look ups, which can come from a variety of sources including anti-spam and other security software.

As part of the ongoing investigation, Alfa Bank has opened its IT systems to Mandiant, which has investigated both remotely and on the ground in Moscow. We are continuing our investigation. Nothing we have or have found alters our view as described above that there isn’t evidence of substantive contact or a direct email or financial link between Alfa Bank and the Trump Campaign or Organization.