Felix Sater-Bayrock

Why Did a Russia-Friendly Icelandic Fund Want To Invest In Trump Projects? Talking Points Memo By Sam Thielman August 22, 2017 “A former finance director at Bayrock, Jody Kriss, sued the company in 2010 for allegedly misrepresenting Sater’s role—though the complaint remained sealed by the court until 2016. In an interview with Bloomberg, Kriss said another Icelandic bank called offering a counter investment to FL Group’s proposed $50 million, and Sater and Arif told him to stick with that firm because it was “closer to Putin.” The $50 million payment was unusual, to say the least. According to Kriss’s complaint, FL Group bought 62 percent of the profits from four Bayrock properties, which was the developer’s entire stake. Those properties were a development called Waterpointe on a blighted 20-acre property in Whitestone, New York that Bayrock had agreed to detoxify; Trump SoHo; a Trump tower in Phoenix, Arizona; and the Trump Merrimac in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida…Another bank owned in large part by FL, Kaupthing, had made loans to Alexander Shnaider, the Russian-Canadian billionaire who financed the failed Trump tower in Toronto, which he used to buy a yacht. It also had other wealthy Russians on the books, among them Smirnoff Vodka magnate Yuri Shefler. ”

Sater’s father, Michael Sheferovsky, was a “syndicate boss” for the notorious Semion Mogilevich, who moved to Brighton Beach, NY in 1974 to escape religious prosecution as Chabad Jews.

The Bayrock Group was founded by Kazakh Tevfik Arif. Arif moved to Brooklyn after developing hotels in Turkey, founded Bayrock in 2001, hired Felix Sater around 2002 and opened an office in Trump Tower.

Tevfik Arif controlled the FL Group (Alexander Machkevich, Patokh Chodiev, Alijan Ibragimov), also employing Sater in development deals.

The Trump SoHo hotel “was a joint venture between Bayrock, The Trump Organization, and the Sapir Organisation, a company owned by Georgian real estate developer Tamir Sapir. Trump provided a licensing deal for the hotel in exchange for a 18% equity stake in the project.[15][4] The project was funded by Kazakh businessman Alexander Mashkevitch.[16]” Wikipedia

Former Mafia-linked figure describes association with Trump

Donald Trump And The Felon: Inside His Business Dealings With A Mob-Connected Hustler Forbes

Mueller Expands Probe to Trump Business Transactions Bloomberg By and FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development in New York with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008, the person said. The investigation also has absorbed a money-laundering probe begun by federal prosecutors in New York into Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.  John Dowd, one of Trump’s lawyers, said on Thursday that he was unaware of the inquiry into Trump’s businesses by the two-months-old investigation and considered it beyond the scope of what Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be examining.” Photo caption: “Trump, Ross and Kushner attend a meeting at the White House on Feb. 2, 2017.”

Sater was not the original Russia connection, just maybe the first that Rice was aware of…..

The Original Russia Connection Felix Sater has cut deals with the FBI, Russian oligarchs, and Donald Trump. He’s also quite a talker. By    NYMag.com. “On June 19 [2017] in a courtroom in Downtown Brooklyn, a federal judge took up the enigmatic case of an individual known as John Doe [Sater]. According to the heavily redacted court record, Doe was an expert money launderer, convicted in connection with a stock swindle almost 20 years ago….On July 20, Bloomberg News reported that the special counsel had taken over a preexisting money-­laundering investigation launched by ousted U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and was said to be examining, among other things, the development of the Trump Soho.” NYMag.com

Who is Felix Sater? Judicial Watch.   Note: Judicial Watch Page

“Felix Sater is back. The Donald Trump business associate last month splashed down in the middle of a New York Times story about a freelanced Ukraine “peace proposal” hand-delivered to the White House by Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen dropped the proposal off in a sealed envelope at the office of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The deal outlined “a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia” in exchange for a withdrawal of Kremlin-aligned forces from eastern Ukraine and a long-term lease of Crimea to Moscow, the Times reported. The government of Ukraine was not pleased. A spokesman called the deal a “gross violation of the [Ukraine] Constitution” by forces “covertly representing Russian interests.”

A Russian-American businessman with a colorful criminal past, Mr. Sater was the middleman for the Ukraine deal. He connected a possibly corrupt Ukrainian politician, the putative author of the proposal, to Mr. Cohen, the Trump confidant. Mr. Sater’s history with Mr. Trump fills in a few blanks about the president’s Russia links prior to the 2016 presidential campaign. The Ukraine case puts him in the here-and-now, at the center of the Trump universe, drawing a line from Mr. Trump’s past activities to his inner circle today.

Mr. Sater connects some of those dots. He was born in Russia in 1966, moved to Israel and then moved on, arriving in the United States in the early 1970s. A document filed in one of the many court cases surrounding Mr. Sater cites an FBI claim that his father, Michael Sheferovsky, was a “syndicate boss” for the notorious Mogilevich organized crime family in Russia. In 2000, Mr. Sheferovsky pleaded guilty to two counts of extortion for shaking down businesses in Brooklyn.

In 1991, Mr. Sater stabbed a commodities trader in the face with a broken bar glass and was sent to prison. By 1993, he was out and working a pump-and-dump stock scheme in Brooklyn. The investigative economist James S. Henry has put together the most extensive record of Mr. Trump’s Russian connections. Writing in the American Interest, he called the Brooklyn scheme “an innovative joint venture among four New York crime families and the Russian mob aimed at bringing state-of-the-art financial fraud to Wall Street.”  Judicial Watch

March 28, 2017: Feds Arrest 10 Bonanno Organized Crime Family Members and Associates NBC NY  “Ten members and associates of the Bonanno organized crime family, including alleged acting captain Ronald Giallanzo, were arrested early Tuesday by the FBI and NYPD Joint Organized Crime Task Force, officials said. The 37-count federal indictment charges the men with operating a racketeering conspiracy since 1998 that earned them more than $26 million in illicit proceeds, according to prosecutors. Operating mainly in the Howard Beach section of Queens, the defendants allegedly engaged in loansharking, illegal gambling, robbery, and extortion, prosecutors said.”  Link to the Arrested including Ronald Gaillanzo, nephew of reported Trump Associate

BAYROCK LLC AND TRUMP

WATCH: Felix Sater in the Dutch Investigation of Trump’s International Money Laundering The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump

Inside Trump’s Russia Connections: The Felon And The Pop Star  Forbes March 28, 2016

“The Russian-born Sater worked at Bayrock, a New York-based firm that partnered with Trump on real estate deals in the early 2000s, including Trump SoHo. (Prior to that, Sater was a Wall Street broker until serving a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight–and then an FBI informant; in 1998 he pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering for allegedly conspiring with the Mafia in a pump-and-dump stock scheme and began working with the feds.)  Sater has said that at Bayrock he worked on an exclusive deal with Trump to develop a Trump-branded project in Russia, and in 2006, he spent time in Moscow with Donald Jr. and Ivanka. Sater has said Trump asked him to show his children around the city; a Trump lawyer maintains it was a coincidence the three were there at the same time.

Nevertheless, in late January, Sater and a Ukrainian lawmaker reportedly met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, at a New York hotel. According to the Times, they discussed a plan that involved the U.S. lifting sanctions against Russia, and Cohen said he hand-delivered the plan in a sealed envelope to then-national security advisor Michael Flynn. Cohen later denied delivering the envelope to anyone in the White House, according to the Washington Post.”

Funded by Alexander Machkevich, Patokh Chodiev, Alijan Ibragimov (Khazakhstan) and the FL Group (Public Icelandic Investment Co), Controlled by Tevfik Arif. Felix Sater worked there with Trump personally on Trump Soho, pitching a Russian development project, and another in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

“According to several reports, Tevfik Arif was originally from Kazakhstan, a Soviet republic until 1992. Born in 1950, Arif worked for 17 years in the Soviet Ministry of Commerce and Trade, serving as Deputy Director of Hotel Management by the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse.10 In the early 1990s he relocated to Turkey, where he reportedly helped to develop properties for the Rixos Hotel chain. Not long thereafter he relocated to Brooklyn, founded Bayrock, opened an office in the Trump Tower, and started to pursue projects with Trump and other investors.11″   The American Interest

“Felix Sater has testified that he joined Bayrock, controlled by Tevfik Arif, around 2002. Bayrock was based in Trump Tower. In a sworn deposition in 2008, Sater testified that he would pitch business ideas to Trump (“just me and him”) and his team (“on a constant basis”).Forbes      Financial Times on Bayrock

Trump And The Oligarch ‘Trio’ Forbes “A full-color 28-page presentation by the Bayrock Group, produced in 2007, reveals that the equity financing and “strategic partners” for Trump projects–the Trump SoHo hotel-condo in New York as well as other proposed developments in Florida and Arizona–will come from two sources. One of the those is FL Group, a publicly traded investment company in Iceland that capsized a year later. The other listed partner is Alexander Machkevich and the Eurasia Group, which he controls with Chodiev and Ibragimov (the Trio). Billionaire oligarchs Patokh Chodiev, Alijan Ibragimov and Alexander Machkevich have long been known as the Trio in Kazakhstan, where they built their fortunes in mining, oil and gas and banking. In the 1990s they partnered in something known as the Chodiev Group, joining with Michael Cherney, who the FBI believed was a major Russian organized-crime figure. Cherney has long denied the accusation, and a decade-long mega-probe of him by U.S. law enforcement–as well as similar probes in Israel, Spain and Switzerland–resulted in no indictments.”

“First, there’s Felix Sater. The Russian-born Sater worked at Bayrock, a New York-based firm that partnered with Trump on real estate deals in the early 2000s, including Trump SoHo. (Prior to that, Sater was a Wall Street broker until serving a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight–and then an FBI informant; in 1998 he pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering for allegedly conspiring with the Mafia in a pump-and-dump stock scheme and began working with the feds.)  Sater has said that at Bayrock he worked on an exclusive deal with Trump to develop a Trump-branded project in Russia, and in 2006, he spent time in Moscow with Donald Jr. and Ivanka. Sater has said Trump asked him to show his children around the city; a Trump lawyer maintains it was a coincidence the three were there at the same time.”Forbes

“2005 FORBES has obtained a letter to Sater, listed as Bayrock’s “managing director,” from Donald Trump Jr., which states that his father would be a partner in a proposed hotel-tower in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The letter is cc’d to the Trump Organization’s VP of development.”Forbes

“A 2007 New York Times report revealed Sater’s criminal past, but that didn’t stop Trump from using him as a “senior advisor” three years later, a role that came complete with a Trump Organization business card, email address and Trump Tower office. Sater, 51, doesn’t appear to be a Trump employee today, but it’s not clear when his relationship with the Trump Organization ended. Trump, meanwhile, has recently tried to downplay his knowledge of Sater. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it. I’m not that familiar with him,” Trump told the AP in December 2015.” Forbes

Felix Sater's Trump Organization business card.

“Nevertheless, in late January, (2017) Sater and a Ukrainian lawmaker reportedly met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, at a New York hotel. According to the Times, they discussed a plan that involved the U.S. lifting sanctions against Russia, and Cohen said he hand-delivered the plan in a sealed envelope to then-national security advisor Michael Flynn. Cohen later denied delivering the envelope to anyone in the White House, according to the Washington Post. A 2007 New York Times report revealed Sater’s criminal past, but that didn’t stop Trump from using him as a “senior advisor” three years later, a role that came complete with a Trump Organization business card, email address and Trump Tower office. “Forbes

“Sater has been profiled in the Washington Post, on ABC News and in several other outlets. But few have taken much note of him, presumably because Trump has said, under oath, that he barely knew him. “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” he said in a deposition in November 2013. Asked how many times he had ever conversed with Sater, he said, “Not many.” And asked about a previous BBC interview, in which he was questioned about Sater’s mafia connections, Trump said he didn’t recall the interview.

This past December Trump went further: “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” Trump told AP, referring questions about Sater to his staff. “I’m not that familiar with him.” Forbes

Donald Trump And The Felon: Inside His Business Dealings With A Mob-Connected Hustler  Forbes October 3, 2016