Firm of Oligarch Behind Trump Jr. Meeting Was Primary Client of Co. Probed for Money Laundering

[deminks]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/firm-of-oligarch-behind-trump-jr-meeting-was-primary-client-of-co-probed-for-money-laundering/

In 2000, an investigation spearheaded by then-Sen. Carl Levin identified Russian businessman Ike Kaveladze as a “poster child” for the practice of establishing anonymous US shell corporations that could be used to launder “ill-gotten gains,” according to the Michigan Democrat. And documents obtained as part of that probe into possible money laundering show that Kaveladze’s main client at the time was Crocus International, a company headed by Aras Agalarov, who in 2013 partnered with Donald Trump to bring the Miss Universe contest to Moscow.

On Monday, Levin, a onetime chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations who left Congress in 2015, sent a letter to special counsel Robert Mueller and the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate intelligence committee highlighting the probe (titled “Possible Money Laundering by U.S. Corporations Formed for Russian Entities”), which was undertaken at his request by the General Accounting Office (now known as the Government Accountability Office, or GAO). That investigation, which found concerning bank practices but no criminal wrongdoing, revealed Kaveladze’s role in helping to circulate more than a billion dollars from Eastern Europe and Russia through US bank accounts. The Russian businessman, who has lived in the United States since the early 1990s, was identified last week as one of the attendees of a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump’s top advisers—including Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort—and a Kremlin-tied lawyer who they were told had damaging information concerning Hillary Clinton. That meeting was arranged on behalf of Aras Agalarov and his son, Emin, an aspiring pop singer and executive vice president of Crocus Group, of which Crocus International is an affiliate; Kaveladze, now a Crocus International vice president who’s based in California, attended this session as a translator, according to a lawyer for the Agalarovs.

In the 1990s, Kaveladze ran a business called International Business Creations, which established more than 2,000 Delaware-based shell companies and several hundred bank accounts on behalf of anonymous Russian clients. Between 1991 and 2000, these US accounts received $1.4 billion in cash from Russia and Eastern Europe—cash that often left the accounts almost as soon as it arrived.

(snip)

So, now we know who the 'translator' was.

[Miles Archer]

1. Kick for exposure. n/t