"New Commerce Secretary Was No Friend to Russians at Cyprus Bank"

...That was enough to raise concerns when President Trump nominated Mr. Ross to be his commerce secretary. The president’s critics wanted to know if Mr. Ross had ever met with Russian intelligence, or if the bank ever gave favorable loans to the new president. They suspected that might be why Mr. Trump had spoken so favorably of Mr. Putin.

But while several of Mr. Trump’s closest allies have come under scrutiny for Kremlin ties, Mr. Ross, who was confirmed by the Senate on Monday, was no friend to the Russians in Cyprus — and in fact, he forced them out of the bank.

According to bankers, lawyers and others who have worked closely with the Bank of Cyprus, within months of Mr. Ross’s becoming a shareholder in the summer of 2014, all six Russians who were on the board when he arrived, including Mr. Putin’s former K.G.B. colleague, Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, were gone, ousted in a rolling purge of Kremlin influence.

“He has not been an accomplice of the Russians but the opposite,” Loizos Hadjicostis, president of the Cyprus Union of Bank Employees, said in an interview. ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/world/europe/wilbur-ross-russia-bank-of-cyprus.html