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TRUMP LAWYER RUDY GIULIANI’S MYSTERIOUS TIES TO RUSSIA AND FORMER SOVIET UNION GO BACK DECADES, EXPERTS ARGUE
hile lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani represents President Donald Trump on matters related to the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, Giuliani has maintained his own ties to the Kremlin and its allies.
In the month of October, Giuliani traveled to Armenia at the invitation of a Kremlin-linked businessman to participate in a forum for a Russia-led economic union. That same month, the former New York mayor was also named in a criminal complaint because his former law firm allegedly helped Kazakh fugitives launder stolen money. Both Armenia and Kazakhstan were once part of the Soviet Union, and today their governments, security services and intelligence organizations maintain close ties to Moscow.
But experts say Giuliani’s ties to individuals from the former Soviet Union go back decades—and his lucrative connections to the region have occasionally been intertwined with Trump's.
“One of Giuliani’s earliest associations was with Semyon ‘Sam’ Kislin, who donated money to both his 1993 and 1997 campaigns [for mayor] and was appointed by Giuliani to serve on the New York City Mayor’s Council of Economic Advisors,” Olga Lautman, an investigative reporter who spent three years tracking ties between the Russian mafia and Trump’s associates, told Newsweek.
Kislin's website details that the Russian was an active member of the mayor's council until Giuliani left office in 2001.
“According to FBI and Interpol reports, Kislin, a wealthy commodities trader, was using his company to launder money from Russia to the U.S.,” Lautman added.
Giuliani's former law firm also has longstanding ties to a couple from Kazakhstan who fled their country after being accused of stealing millions.
On October 8, Viktor Khrapunov, the former mayor of the Kazakh city of Almaty, and his wife, Leila Khrapunova, were found guilty of financial fraud, taking bribes and running a criminal organization. They were sentenced to 17 and 14 years in jail respectively. Law enforcement officials say the couple helped launder around $10 billion stolen from their country.
It is unlikely, however, that the Khrapunovs will go to prison anytime soon. The couple is avoiding jail time in Switzerland, where it is exceptionally difficult to get an extradition request approved. Lawyers representing the city of Almaty argue that the couple successfully laundered billions of dollars stolen from Kazakhstan in jurisdictions across the U.S. and the world. There are currently court cases pending against them in California and New York.
Court documents allege that the Khrapunovs have deep ties to Trump’s former adviser Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman with a criminal history who claims to have been a CIA informant. In 2013, Sater’s development company Bayrock helped the Khrapunovs purchase three condos in Trump Tower Soho and quickly resell the properties.
Financial analysts say it’s likely the purchases were used to launder money.
It is unclear whether Trump was aware of the purchase or of the origin of the funds used to buy the condos. But Giuliani, Trump’s longtime friend and associate, must have been aware that the Khrapunov’s money had a dubious provenance. Years earlier, Giuliani’s law firm helped establish a company in the Netherlands through which some of the couple’s money was funneled.
On October 22, the New York City-based human rights organization Avaaz filed a complaint asking Dutch courts to investigate two companies that were set up in the Netherlands to launder some of the Khrapunovs’ stolen funds.
The companies are Bayrock B.V., the Dutch subsidiary of Sater's former employer Bayrock Group LLC, and KazBay B.V., another company Bayrock Group opened for the Khrapunovs.
KazBay B.V. was registered in 2007 with the assistance of Giuliani’s then-law firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLP.
“Rudy Giuliani's law firm was involved in setting up one of the companies, and there are a bunch of overlapping connections between that company and the other companies connected to the Khrapunovs, like the Switzerland-based company Helvetica Capital S.A.,” Emma Ruby-Sachs, deputy director of Avaaz, told Newsweek.
“One of the concrete connections is that $1.5 million went into KazBay from Bayrock and Helvetica. We also know that the biggest overlap is in the stakeholders and individuals used to set up these companies, and we know there is a connection between this fraud and Felix Sater,” Ruby-Sachs added.
Sater, a longtime adviser of President Trump who attempted to help him set up a Trump Tower in Moscow, is named as a beneficiary in the complaint. Giuliani is personally named over a dozen times in the complaint's footnotes.
t was not the first time Giuliani and his firm had dealt with Kazakhstan. Bracewell & Giuliani LLP had an office in the country as early as 1997, the same year Khrapunov became mayor of Almaty. Giuliani's firm used its office in Kazakhstan to collect donations from U.S. expats for the former mayor's failed presidential bid in 2008. During the campaign in 2007, Giuliani threw a fundraising event in Almaty. It's unclear if he ever traveled to the country personally.