Mueller Kaveladze Mukassey Kremlin GOP

"The idea of hosting that year’s contest in Russia was raised over dinner by Paula Shugart, Trump’s top Miss Universe executive, according to Emin Agalarov. 

In a little-noticed interview published in July, Emin said Trump’s organisation seemed to be in need of the money that Moscow could offer. 

“We have a lot of debts,” he quoted Shugart as saying. 

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"Less than two weeks before the Miss Universe finals, Putin awarded Agalarov the prestigious Order of Honor medal, after Crocus had completed for him a billion-dollar transformation of a former military base into a new state university.

“I wish to thank you so much for your work and contribution to the development of this country,” Putin told Agalarov and his fellow honorees.

 Crocus would go on to be further rewarded with more government construction contracts, including for stadiums that are to be used for next year’s soccer World Cup tournament in Russia."

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"
 Kaveladze has in fact been an associate of some of Russia’s richest and most powerful people for the past three decades.

The Guardian has established that Kaveladze was involved in the $341m takeover of a US company by a Russian mining firm belonging to an associate of Putin, and was a business partner to two former senior officials at Russia’s central bank.


In 2003, the Colorado-based firm Stillwater Mining was bought by Norilsk Nickel, a metals corporation in Moscow led by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs, who is so favoured by Putin that he has played on the president’s “Hockey Legends” ice hockey team 

"As part of its $341m purchase of the American firm, Norilsk nominated Kaveladze to be one of its five handpicked directors on Stillwater’s new board, according to a filing by the company to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Kaveladze was billed as the president of “an international consulting boutique” serving a “US and Eastern European clientele”.

The deal was the first time a Russian company had ever taken a majority stake in a publicly traded US company. It was viewed as critical by the Kremlin.

 Putin was reported at the time to have personally advocated for the deal’s approval by US regulators during a meeting with then president George W Bush earlier in 2003.

Norilsk was then co-owned by Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov, another major Russian oligarch, who later sold his stake. Prokhorov, who has had mixed relations with the Kremlin, now owns the Brooklyn Nets basketball team in New York. 

Kaveladze and Prokhorov had been classmates at the Moscow Finance Institute in the late 1980s and formed a partnership selling customised jeans between their studies.

Kaveladze’s ascent to the Stillwater board was eventually derailed, according to a source, after the discovery of his earlier involvement in a $1.4bn California-based scheme involving shell companies and transfers from Russia, which US authorities said may have been used for money laundering. "

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"The Guardian previously revealed that Kaveladze’s partner in that operation was Boris Goldstein, a Soviet-born banker whose ties to former KGB officers attracted interest from US investigators after he moved to California in the early 1990s. 

In a remarkable coincidence, the US attorney in San Francisco whose office eventually declined to bring criminal charges over their alleged money-laundering scheme was Robert Mueller, the special counsel now looking into Kaveladze’s reappearance."


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/18/trump-in-moscow-what-happened-at-miss-universe-in-2013

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/18/trump-in-moscow-what-happened-at-miss-universe-in-2013

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"That was the same day that Michael Mukasey, who served as attorney general under George W. Bush, appeared before a panel of three judges on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to argue that Prevezon—the Kremlin-tied company then charged with hiding a fraction of a $230 million Russian tax scheme in Manhattan luxury real estate—should be allowed to keep a lawyer it had effectively poached from the other side."


"Just before her now-infamous meeting on June 9 of last year with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower, Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya was in court as a former U.S. attorney general tried to pull off an audacious legal maneuver against the U.S. government.


"The meeting, arranged after Trump Jr. was offered information to “incriminate Hillary” as part “of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” had originally been scheduled for 3 p.m., but was moved back an hour because “the Russian government attorney” had to be in court that afternoon, according to the email thread arranging it."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-why-natalia-veselnitskaya-was-in-new-york

https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-why-natalia-veselnitskaya-was-in-new-york