'Trade of Our Lives': After Mueller, UBS Banker Faces Questions
The email from Moscow was tantalizing: the deal with the Kremlin, the banker wrote, could be “the trade of our lives.’’
More than a decade later, that message, and others like it, lie at the center of a legal drama that’s about to unfold in a London court Monday.
The case involves Robert Foresman, now a vice chairman at Switzerland’s UBS Group AG – and, it turns out, a fleeting figure in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Last October, the special counsel’s team interviewed Foresman, who worked for more than a decade as a banker in Russia, about the Kremlin’s efforts to get Donald Trump elected.
Now, Foresman is headed to court over another source of Russian intrigue: Yukos Oil Co., once the crown jewel of the nation’s energy industry.
The Kremlin dismantled Yukos in what its founder, the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, called revenge for him challenging President Vladimir Putin. Most of Yukos’s assets were sold to Rosneft PJSC, then a smaller state-owned company, in auctions Yukos investors claimed were rigged.
Foresman is one of five people facing claims for damages and losses over their roles in the 2007 auction of Yukos’s foreign assets, according to a suit filed by entities representing Yukos’s former shareholders. Foresman "is contesting those court proceedings vigorously and refutes any suggestion of wrongdoing,’’ his lawyer, Abra Bompas, said in an emailed statement.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/trade-of-our-lives-after-mueller-ubs-banker-faces-questions/ar-AACDyJw?li=BBnbfcN
