Firm Tied to Russian Oligarch Made Payments to Michael Cohen
May 8, 2018
Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s lawyer and fixer. His shell company received payments from a firm linked to a Russian oligarch, as well as corporations with business before the Trump administration.Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
A shell company that Michael D. Cohen used to pay hush money to a pornographic film actress received payments totaling more than $1 million from an American company linked to a Russian oligarch and several corporations with business before the Trump administration, according to documents and interviews.
Financial records reviewed by The New York Times show that Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, used the shell company, Essential Consultants L.L.C., for an array of business activities that went far beyond what was publicly known. Transactions adding up to at least $4.4 million flowed through Essential Consultants starting shortly before Mr. Trump was elected president and continuing to this January, the records show.
Among the previously unreported transactions were payments last year of about $500,000 from Columbus Nova, an investment firm in New York whose biggest client is a company controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, the Russian oligarch. A lawyer for Columbus Nova, in a statement on Tuesday, described the money as a consulting fee that had nothing to do with Mr. Vekselberg.
Other transactions described in the financial records include hundreds of thousands of dollars Mr. Cohen received from Fortune 500 companies with business before the Trump administration, as well as smaller amounts he paid for luxury expenses like a Mercedes-Benz and private club dues.
References to the transactions first appeared in a document posted to Twitter on Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star who was paid $130,000 by Essential Consultants to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump. The lawyer’s seven-page document, titled “Preliminary Report of Findings,” does not explain the source of his information but describes in detail dates, dollar amounts and parties involved in various dealings by Mr. Cohen and his company. Most of the transactions involved two banks: First Republic Bank and City National Bank.
The Times’s review of financial records confirmed much of what was in Mr. Avenatti’s report. In addition, a review of documents and interviews shed additional light on Mr. Cohen’s dealings with the company connected to Mr. Vekselberg, who was stopped and questioned at an airport earlier this year by investigators for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Viktor Vekselberg, left, the Russian oligarch, with Marat Khusnullin, deputy mayor of Moscow, before the inauguration ceremony of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia this week.Alexey Filippov/Sputnik, via Associated Press
Taken together, The Times’s findings and Mr. Avenatti’s report offer the most detailed picture yet on Mr. Cohen’s business dealings and financial entanglements in the run-up to the election and its aftermath. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Mr. Cohen for possible bank fraud and election-law violations, among other matters, according to people briefed on the investigation. Stephen Ryan, a lawyer representing Mr. Cohen, declined to comment.
Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, is suing Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump to break her nondisclosure agreement related to the $130,000.
It is unclear whether that or any of the other transactions were improper, but Mr. Avenatti has asserted that Mr. Cohen’s use of Essential Consultants potentially violated banking laws. The financial records indicate that at least some of the money that passed through Essential Consultants was from sources and in amounts that were inconsistent with the company’s stated purpose.
Mr. Cohen also used the company to collect $250,000 after arranging payments in 2017 and 2018 by a major Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, to a former Playboy model he allegedly impregnated, according to news reports last month.
Among the other payments to Mr. Cohen’s company described in the financial records were four for $99,980 each between October and January by Novartis Investments S.A.R.L., a subsidiary of Novartis, the multinational pharmaceutical giant based in Switzerland. Novartis — whose chief executive was among 15 business leaders invited to dinner with Mr. Trump at the World Economic Forum in January — spent more than $10 million on lobbying in Washington last year and frequently seeks approvals from federal drug regulators. Novartis said in a statement that its agreement with Essential Consultants had expired.
In addition, Korea Aerospace Industries paid Mr. Cohen’s company $150,000 last November, according to the records. The company, an aircraft manufacturer, has teamed with the American defense contractor Lockheed Martin in competing for a multibillion-dollar contract to provide trainer jets for the United States Air Force that is expected to be awarded this year. A representative for Korea Aerospace declined to comment.
AT&T made four payments totaling $200,000 between October 2017 and January 2018, according to the documents. AT&T, whose proposed merger with Time Warner is pending before the Justice Department, issued a statement on Tuesday evening confirming that it made payments to Mr. Cohen’s firm.
“Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration,” the statement said. “They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.”
The payments by Columbus Nova occurred between January and August of last year. Andrew Intrater, the company’s American chief executive and Mr. Vekselberg’s cousin, donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, campaign finance records show. He and Mr. Vekselberg attended the event together and met with Mr. Cohen there, according to a person briefed on the matter. Columbus Nova retained him as a consultant soon afterward.
The consulting deal was worth $1 million and was supposed to last for a year, according to documents reviewed by The Times. But Columbus Nova decided to end the agreement midway through after it yielded a few investment ideas but no actual deals.
A person close to Mr. Intrater said that the executive had no idea Essential Consultants was used for the separate payment to Ms. Clifford, and that he hired a number of other consultants at the time for similar prices.
“Columbus Nova is an investment management company solely owned and controlled by Americans,” said Richard Owens, a lawyer for Mr. Intrater and Columbus Nova, adding that Mr. Vekselberg has never owned the firm. “After the inauguration, the firm hired Michael Cohen as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.
“Reports today that Viktor Vekselberg used Columbus Nova as a conduit for payments to Michael Cohen are false. The claim that Viktor Vekselberg was involved in or provided any funding for Columbus Nova’s engagement of Michael Cohen is patently untrue,” Mr. Owens said. “Neither Viktor Vekselberg nor anyone else outside of Columbus Nova was involved in the decision to hire Cohen or provided funding for his engagement.”
A lawyer for Mr. Vekselberg did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to questioning Mr. Vekselberg, Mr. Mueller’s investigators have also interviewed Mr. Intrater, though there is no indication that either man is suspected of wrongdoing, The Times reported last week.
The person close to Mr. Intrater said that he was encouraged to attend the inauguration by an American friend, unrelated to Mr. Cohen, and that he had wanted to use the trip as an opportunity to meet with business associates in Washington.
Mr. Vekselberg has invested in Columbus Nova’s private equity funds through his sprawling Russian-based conglomerate, the Renova Group, which operates in the energy sector and elsewhere. Mr. Vekselberg was one of seven Kremlin-linked oligarchs hit with sanctions in April by the Trump administration, which also imposed the penalties on the Renova Group.
Renova has had a financial relationship with VTB, one of the largest state-owned banks in Russia, according to documents that were part of the “Panama Papers” leak of files from an offshore law firm. The documents show that Mr. Vekselberg’s companies received at least $350 million in loans or investments from VTB and a subsidiary, VTB Capital. The current state of the debt is unclear, though one document suggests it was discharged in 2010.
Mr. Cohen created Essential Consultants in Delaware less than two weeks before he completed his deal with Ms. Clifford, who is now contesting her contract with Mr. Cohen as invalid. Mr. Cohen initially said he paid her out of his own pocket by way of a home equity line of credit.
But last week, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York said that Mr. Trump had reimbursed Mr. Cohen through several $35,000 monthly transactions that amounted to more than $400,000 — covering the payment to Ms. Clifford and, he said, other “incidental expenses.”
Reporting was contributed by Matt Apuzzo, Emily Flitter, Adam Goldman, Sharon LaFraniere, William K. Rashbaum and Katie Thomas.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/us/p ... ments.html
How Michael Cohen cashed in
'It's a little bit like Lucy hanging out behind her table and charging people five cents for wisdom,' said Rich Gold, a longtime Democratic lobbyist.
By THEODORIC MEYER, BEN WHITE and LORRAINE WOELLERT 05/09/2018 09:45 PM EDT
Michael Cohen made more than $2 million working as a Trump whisperer. But he's far from the only one.
President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer is the latest member of the president's inner circle to cash in on connections by selling insight into how Trump operates. The president's 2016 victory rattled corporations enough that clients were eager to pay top dollar to anyone who could help them understand the administration in its first months.
Many of those insiders have become lobbyists, joining established Washington firms or starting their own shops. Gotham Government Relations and Communications, a New York law and lobbying firm that orchestrated Trump's campaign announcement in 2015, opened a Washington office after Trump's victory. So did Brian Ballard, a Florida lobbyist who had raised millions for Trump's campaign.
Others, including Cohen and former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski, avoided registering as lobbyists but took on work helping corporate clients understand Trump’s thinking.
"It's a little bit like Lucy hanging out behind her table and charging people five cents for wisdom," said Rich Gold, a longtime Democratic lobbyist, referring to the "Peanuts" character.
But Trump has proved difficult to predict or sway.
AT&T has found itself fending off Justice Department opposition to its merger with Time Warner despite inking a deal with Cohen in 2017. The pharmaceutical company Novartis said Wednesday that it determined after signing him that Cohen couldn’t deliver the services he had promised.
Both companies said Wednesday they were contacted by special counsel Robert Mueller about their relationships with Cohen.
"These people who say or look like they're close to Trump on paper in actuality don't know what he's going to do," said Ivan Adler, a headhunter who specializes in filling lobbying jobs.
In addition to AT&T and Novartis, Korea Aerospace Industries and Columbus Nova, an investment firm, have confirmed they hired Cohen as a consultant after Trump's election. The admissions came after Michael Avenatti, a lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels, accused them on Tuesday of paying Cohen through the same limited-liability company used to pay Daniels. (Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, says she was given $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Trump.)
It's not clear what Cohen did for the companies. Avenatti has suggested Cohen may have lobbied the White House without registering to do so, though there’s no evidence his work met the legal definition of lobbying.
“If Michael Cohen, the personal attorney to the president, was selling access to the highest office in the land, without complying with the appropriate rules and regulations, serious consequences should result,” Avenatti told POLITICO.
Insiders like Cohen offered corporations insight on who in Trump's orbit was up and who was down at any given moment, one Republican consultant said.
“Everyone was hiring ‘Trump whisperers’ in 2017 — every single hanger-on in the Trump orbit made a fortune in 2017,” one Republican consultant said. “And not necessarily to influence them, just to try to figure out who are the right people to talk to.”
"The question was ‘Who is the real influence?’" the consultant said. "Is it Gary Cohn? Steve Bannon? Wilbur Ross? How do we get to Jared and Ivanka? Does anyone know Dina Powell? Does anyone listen to Steven Mnuchin? There’s no point talking to Reince Priebus, right? Every single client we had was trying to figure it out."
In a memo to employees on Wednesday, AT&T said that it had "hired several consultants," including Cohen, after the election "to help us understand how the President and his administration might approach a wide range of policy issues important to the company, including regulatory reform at the FCC, corporate tax reform and antitrust enforcement." Cohen did no lobbying or legal work for AT&T, the company said.
Novartis agreed to shell out $100,000 a month to Cohen for advice on how to deal with Trump — a substantial amount even for a company that spent more than $8.6 million last year on Washington lobbying, with nearly a dozen lobbying firms on retainer.
After meeting with Cohen in March 2017, though, Novartis determined Cohen "would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated related to US healthcare policy matters and the decision was taken not to engage further," Sofina Mirza-Reid, a Novartis spokeswoman, said in a statement on Wednesday. "As the contract unfortunately could only be terminated for cause, payments continued to be made until the contract expired by its own terms in February 2018."
Presidential confidants making use of their connections — even without formally lobbying — is not unique to the Trump era. Jim Messina, a former top aide in Barack Obama's White House, started his own consulting firm, the Messina Group, after managing Obama's reelection campaign. Like Lewandowski, he never registered as a lobbyist.
"I hope you will also mention that Seems [sic] to be the same relationship that Jim Messina had with the Obama WH," Lewandowski wrote in an email to POLIITICO.
Lewandowski co-founded a lobbying firm, Avenue Strategies, weeks after Trump's victory but quit last year after several stories raised questions about him cashing in on his access. He now offers insight into the Trump administration through a new firm, Lewandowski Strategic Advisors, doing work that he says doesn't meet the definition of lobbying.
Other Trump insiders have gone to work for established Washington firms such as Mercury and Holland & Knight.
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union and the husband of White House communications official Mercedes Schlapp, is another lobbyist source of Trump intelligence. Schlapp's firm, Cove Strategies, which represents blue-chip clients such as Comcast, Verizon and Walmart, raked in cash accordingly, with more than $1 million in lobbying revenue last year compared to $630,000 in 2016.
Not every Trump campaign veteran who offered a glimpse into Trump's decision-making process after the election has been able to command the fees that Cohen has.
Michael Caputo, who served as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign before resigning for sending a tweet celebrating Lewandowski's firing as campaign manager, sent a letter last year to Washington firms offering to strike up a partnership.
"Understanding how Donald Trump ascended to the White House — and how he will likely operate — will be unique and vital counsel for your clients in the years ahead," Caputo wrote in the letter.
Caputo has lobbied for a couple of clients since Trump took office and made $7,500 a month offering what he described as insight into "the inputs that go into the president's decision-making" for another. But he said he's not in the business of telling clients how the president might approach a particular issue.
"I really think nobody can truly understand how the president thinks," Caputo said. "He's a very unique individual."
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/ ... ess-579437
Russian tycoon known for Faberge eggs tied to Cohen payment
FILE - In this Thursday, Jan. 26, 2017 file photo, Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, poses for a photo with Renova CEO businessman Viktor Vekselberg during an awarding ceremony in Moscow’s Kremlin, Russia. Outside the rarified sphere of the super-rich, tycoon Viktor Vekselberg is mostly known in Russia for spending more than $100 million to bring cultural artifacts back to their homeland, including an array of Faberge eggs glittering with gold and jewels. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File) (Associated Press)
MOSCOW — Outside the rarified sphere of the super-rich, tycoon Viktor Vekselberg is mostly known in Russia for spending more than $100 million to bring cultural artifacts back to his homeland, including an array of Faberge eggs glittering with gold and jewels.
By Vekselberg’s standards, the money he laid out wasn’t all that much: His fortune has been estimated at about $14.6 billion.
But after his holding company Renova was hit by U.S. sanctions against Russia in April, his worth appeared to shrink markedly, and he reportedly has asked the Russian government for help to stay afloat.
Now Vekselberg is facing new scrutiny.
U.S. news reports said he has been questioned by the staff of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and any possible coordination with associates of President Donald Trump. And documents reviewed by The Associated Press suggest that a company associated with Vekselberg routed money to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s consulting firm in 2017.
Vekselberg, 61, was born in Soviet Ukraine. After graduating from the Moscow Transportation Engineering Institute, he reportedly made his first significant money by selling copper salvaged from scrapped cables during the period of economic reforms under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
He built his fortune by investing in the aluminum and oil industries, taking advantage of the wide open and often questionable privatization of state companies after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
He secured a controlling interest in the Tyumen Oil company, one of Russia’s largest oil operations, and his holding company, Renova Group, and two other holding companies later merged their assets and established the TNK-BP joint venture with British Petroleum, which later was acquired by state oil giant Rosneft. More recently, he has expanded his assets to include industrial equipment and high technology.
Renova has sizable investments in the U.S. through the investment management company Columbus Nova. The firm’s operations include tech investments, real estate management and merchant banking, according to corporate and web documents.
Columbus Nova was described in a 2007 corporate document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “affiliate” of Renova. Columbus Nova is headed by Andrew Intrater, who is described as a cousin of Vekselberg in the documents reviewed by AP and in other media reports.
Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration in 2017, presidential finance documents show.
Before reportedly retaining Cohen, Vekselberg’s firm and Columbus Nova corporate entities have spent nearly 15 years trying to gain influence in Washington. Renova, Columbus Nova and its real estate arm combined to pay nearly $1.8 million to lobbyists between 2001 and 2015, at first concentrating on “encouraging trade and cultural exchanges” between the U.S. and Russia and later on small business issues.
A spokeswoman for the Carmen Group Inc., a lobbying operation paid more than $1.7 million by the Vekselberg-linked firms, declined to explain its work, saying, “we do not comment on client matters.”
Vekselberg was one of a group of Russian business leaders who met with former President Barack Obama in Moscow in 2007 during Obama’s visit with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as well as then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Vekselberg was also in attendance when Putin sat during a Moscow gala in 2015 with retired U.S. Army Gen. Michael Flynn, who was Trump’s national security adviser before he was fired. Flynn is now cooperating with the special counsel probe.
Official documents reviewed Tuesday by the AP appeared to show that a company associated with Vekselberg routed eight payments totaling about $500,000 to Essential Consultants, established by Cohen between January and August 2017.
Vekselberg’s spokesman, Andrey Shtorkh, told the AP on Wednesday that “neither Viktor Vekselberg nor Renova has ever had any contractual relationship with Mr. Cohen” or his consulting company. In a statement on its website, Columbus Nova said it has managed assets for Renova, but has never been owned by Vekselberg.
As a wealthy and powerful Russian, Vekselberg is presumed to operate with the tacit approval of Putin. How deep his relations are with the Kremlin is an open question.
Anders Aslund, an expert on Russia’s economy, was quoted by the Russian business portal RBC as saying that Vekselberg’s ending up on the U.S. sanctions list was a surprise because “he has a good reputation. ... He isn’t perceived to be especially close to Putin.”
But he apparently is close enough to the top to be willing to ask for help after the sanctions slashed the value of his holdings. According to the business newspaper Kommersant, he recently asked for state-owned banks to refinance 820 million euros ($967 million) in debt that he owes to Western banks and for preferential treatment in receiving state orders.
Vekselberg got wide public attention for buying nine Faberge eggs from the estate of Malcolm Forbes and bringing the czarist-era baubles back to Russia for display in a private museum.
He also heavily funded the establishment of a Jewish museum in Moscow and financed the return to a Moscow monastery of church bells that had been scrapped under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... 4a501f6991
