Trump fixer grilled over undisclosed work for Kazakh bank seeking laundered billions
Source: McClatchy DC
Former Trump Organization executive Michael Cohen was grilled at length Wednesday about previously undisclosed work for a Kazakh bank, part of his grueling day of testimony before the House Oversight Committee
Cohen came under unrelenting attack by committee Republicans, who sought to portray him as a liar who leveraged his connections with President Trump to secure contracts that paid him millions, only to betray his former boss in the end.
The work for Bank TuranAlem, which was trying to track down billions in allegedly plundered funds, was revealed during questioning by U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-North Carolina, a powerful Trump ally. Cohen acknowledged doing the consulting work, but did not mention that the arrangement did not end well.
“Michael Cohen was recommended to BTA Bank in 2017 as a person who had access to the best legal resources, and was hired by BTA to assemble a winning team,” Matthew L. Schwartz of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, which represents the bank, said in a statement to McClatchy. “Instead, Michael Cohen did absolutely nothing of value, and BTA quickly tore up its agreement with him. Since that time, BTA has cooperated fully with all law enforcement investigations of Michael Cohen.”
The Republicans noted that Cohen, already sentenced to prison for lying to Congress, had failed to disclose the contract. Cohen’s lawyers said that wasn’t a requirement.
Cohen was not the only former Trump associate to profit from the foreign bank’s efforts to recover money. Felix Sater, a Soviet-emigre and ex-Trump executive, was also paid to help the bank.
Cohen said under questioning by Meadows that he had been hired by BTA to help it recover some of the more than $4 billion that the bank alleges was stolen by its former chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov, before fleeing the country.
“Some of that money was here in the United States and they sought my assistance in terms of locating that money and helping them to re-collect it,” Cohen said.
Some money allegedly connected to Ablyazov was used to purchase Trump-branded properties, according to court filings in the California Central District by the Kazakh city of Almaty.
A spokeswoman for Cohen declined to comment on specifics, citing her presence in the hearing all day. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, did not respond to multiple messages.
In numerous lawsuits, the bank and the city have maintained that Ablyazov and the family of Ablyazov’s son-in-law have purchased property in the United States., including three condominiums in the former Trump SoHo, to launder their ill-gotten money.
Cohen had been the point person for the Trump organization on several proposed deals in the former Soviet Union, McClatchy has previously reported, including a failed deal in Kazakhstan to build a Trump-branded tower steps from the palace of longtime Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Cohen and Sater, who was involved in a failed South Florida Trump-themed project, were also both involved in a potential Trump Moscow deal that the pair pursued well into the 2016 presidential election, both men have said publicly.
As McClatchy has previously reported, Sater also helped the extended Kazakh family purchase numerous properties — including an Ohio mall and a former state institution in Syracuse, New York — as part of what Kazakhstan has alleged was a money-laundering scheme. He also brokered an investment in a medical device company that was intended to help family members obtain a U.S. visa.
Sater’s former firm Bayrock Group, which developed the Trump SoHo project in Manhattan and worked with the Trump organization on the failed Trump International Hotel & Tower Fort Lauderdale, had also explored a project in Switzerland with a Swiss real estate company controlled at the time by the Kazakh family.
But court documents show that in 2015, Sater switched sides, entering into a cooperation agreement with an investigative firm working on behalf of the Kazakh bank and providing information to help the bank in its efforts to recover the allegedly stolen funds.
Since then, a company connected to Sater has been paid more than $2.5 million by the bank, according to a U.S. court filing. While Sater’s cooperation has long been rumored, details about the agreement have only come to light in recent months.
Sater declined to comment on the arrangement, but told McClatchy that he was surprised to learn Wednesday that BTA Bank had hired Cohen.
There’s another Trump connection to Kazakhstan. Trump surrogate Rudolph Giuliani‘s former law firm Bracewell & Giuliani helped the now-fugitive BTA chairman offer $1 billion of BTA corporate debt in 2007 to international investors. Two years later, Ablyazov had fled the country and the bank was seized by the Nazarbayev government.
The two sides of Bracewell & Giuliani have since parted ways, but Bracewell & Giuliani also did the legal work for a joint venture called KazBay B.V. in Kazakhstan between the Bayrock Group and the family that bought the Trump Soho condos, the Khrapunovs.