Thread: 8th person at Trump Tower meeting identified

8th person at Trump Tower meeting identified

By Pamela Brown, CNN
Updated 12:40 PM ET, Tue July 18, 2017

Washington (CNN)The eighth person who attended the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower is a senior vice president at the company founded by the Russian oligarch who initiated the meeting, CNN has learned.

Ike Kaveladze's identity was confirmed by his attorney, Scott Balber.

Kaveladze is a senior vice president at Crocus Group, the real estate development company run by Azerbaijani-Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov, according to Kaveladze's LinkedIn. His personal website says he "holds responsibility for multiple elements of the company's Russian development project."



Trump Jr. attorney offers details about 8th person at meeting


He studied at the Moscow Academy of Finance and also got an MBA from the University of New Haven in Connecticut, according to his website.

Kaveladze has worked for the Agalarovs' business since 2004, which means he was with the company when it partnered with the Trump Organization to pull off the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Balber said Kaveladze is a long-time US citizen who speaks fluent Russian and has "never had any engagement with the Russian government in any capacity."

Special Counsel investigators are seeking information from his client, Balber said. "The eighth person has been identified by prosecutors and we are cooperating fully with prosecutors as a result of the investigation."

Balber's comments offer a rare glimpse inside Mueller's investigation into allegations that Trump's campaign colluded with Russia.

Balber said his client hasn't been interviewed yet and that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators have not reached out about Emin and Aras Agalarov, whom he also represents.

Emin Agalarov is an Azerbaijani-Russian pop star who has previously done business with the Trumps alongside his father, Aras Agalarov, a Russian real estate billionaire with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kaveladze was asked to go to the meeting at Trump Tower last June with the understanding he would be Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya's translator because she didn't speak English, Balber said. He then realized at the meeting that she already had a translator that she had brought with her.

Balber said Kaveladze remembers discussions surrounding the Magnitsky Act -- a 2012 US law that imposed sanctions on Russian individuals -- and the retaliatory Kremlin-imposed ban on adoption of Russian children by American citizens.

The special counsel's office declined to comment.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/18/politi...sia/index.html

JULY 18, 2017, 12:26 P.M.REPORTING FROM WASHINGTON

Eighth man at Trump Tower meeting was focus of congressional probe into Russian money laundering in 2000

Joseph Tanfani and David S. Cloud

Irakly (Ike) Kaveladze, from his Twitter account. (Twitter)

The California businessman who took part in a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer in June 2016 was the focus of a congressional inquiry into possible Russian money laundering in November 2000.

Irakly (Ike) Kaveladze, who immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet republic of Georgia in the early 1990s, set up 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian brokers, according to the report by an arm of Congress that is now known as the Government Accountability Office.

Some of the corporations operated as shell companies and were used to move about $1.4 billion through more than 100 accounts at Citibank of New York and the Commercial Bank of San Francisco, the GAO report said.

“These banking activities raise questions about whether the U.S. banks were used to launder money,” said the report.

The banks said "no illegal activity in the Kaveladze-related accounts" was found, but they closed the accounts after they were contacted by investigators.

Kaveladze told investigators that he did not know who owned the corporations because the law in Delaware, which permits an unusual degree of secrecy for registered corporations, did not require it.

He told the New York Times at the time that he had done nothing wrong, calling the congressional inquiry “another Russian witch hunt in the United States.”

Kaveladze’s attorney, Scott Balber, did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.

Earlier Tiesday, Balber confirmed that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government, had contacted Kaveladze for information about a meeting he attended at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.

At that meeting, a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, provided Donald Trump Jr., the candidate's oldest son, what he was told was damaging information on Trump's rival, Hillary Clinton.

Kaveladze attended the meeting at the request of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian developer with close ties to the Kremlin, Balber said. Kaveladze has worked for the Agalarov firm, one of the largest development companies in Russia, since 2004, he said.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/wash...htmlstory.html

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