TRUMP'S LIES ON HIS BUSINESS DEALINGS IN RUSSIA WERE A PROFOUND BETRAYAL OF VOTERS By Editorial Board January 22 at 7:33 PM
THERE HAS been a welter of news reports, denials, statements and retractions in the past week concerning President Trump’s pursuit of a major real estate deal in Russia during the 2016 campaign, so perhaps some clarification is in order. Here’s what is not in dispute: For most of the time he was running for president, Mr. Trump was also encouraging negotiations that would have put his name on a 100-plus-story tower in Moscow and yielded tens of millions of dollars in revenue for his company. He did this secretly, while publicly defending Russian President Vladimir Putin and arguing against sanctions against Russia. And he repeatedly deceived U.S. voters by saying he had no business in the country.
It may not be true, as BuzzFeed reported last week, that the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III collected evidence showing that Mr. Trump instructed lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow deal. Mr. Mueller’s office called the report inaccurate. It may be, as Mr. Trump’s counsel Rudolph W. Giuliani said Sunday, that negotiations on the deal continued until the November 2016 election; or maybe, as he said Monday, that timeline was merely “hypothetical.” But we know Mr. Trump thought it perfectly acceptable to clandestinely pursue his personal business interest with the government of a prime U.S. adversary while advancing a presidential platform of improving relations with the regime. Whether that was illegal, it was a profound betrayal of the voters.
Mr. Trump defended his actions last November, after Mr. Cohen confessed to lying about the extent of the negotiations, by saying there was no reason for him to give up “opportunities” such as the proposed Moscow tower because “there was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won” the election. But the record shows it was his presidential candidacy itself that created the opportunity.
Mr. Cohen and another Trump associate, Felix Sater, began working on a plan to license Mr. Trump’s name to a Russian developer after he announced he was running for president in June 2015. Before then, Mr. Sater told BuzzFeed, “a lot of Russians weren’t willing to pay a premium licensing fee to put Donald’s name on their building. Now maybe they would be.”
The two men brokered a deal with a Moscow developer for a tower that was to be the tallest in Europe. Mr. Trump signed the letter of intent the same day as one of the Republican candidate debates, Oct. 28, 2015. According to BuzzFeed’s reporting, the Trump World Tower Moscow was to include a spa created by Ivanka Trump and a penthouse reserved for Mr. Putin.
Mr. Cohen and Mr. Sater continued to work on the deal at least until June 14, 2016, and as Mr. Giuliani confirmed, Mr. Cohen updated Mr. Trump on their progress. One of Mr. Cohen’s aims was to arrange for Mr. Trump to visit Moscow and meet Mr. Putin following the Republican National Convention; presumably both the Trump tower and U.S.-Russian relations would have been on the agenda.
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Factbox: Guilty pleas, indictments abound in Trump-Russia probe January 25, 2019 / 9:40 AM / Updated 2 hours ago (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s long-time ally and campaign adviser Roger Stone was arrested on Friday on seven charges of obstruction, lying and witness tampering as part of the U.S. Special Counsel’s Office Russia investigation. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=146346392
Swiss Mystery Company Is at the Heart of a Mueller Puzzle
You’ve never heard of Zurich-based Salix Services AG. But Robert Mueller’s team has.
Erin Banco, Adam Rawnsley 02.12.19 4:57 AM ET
EXCLUSIVE Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast
(omitted most of embedded links)
A little-known company located in Switzerland has come under scrutiny by the Special Counsel’s Office for its connection to Psy Group, the firm that created a social-media manipulation plan to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. That’s according to three sources with knowledge of the office’s questioning, and documents obtained by The Daily Beast.
Former employees of Psy Group said the FBI interviewed them in 2017 and asked detailed questions about the firm’s business and ownership structure. These same sources told The Daily Beast that while working at Psy, which is now defunct, they operated under the understanding that Joel Zamel, an Australian with links to Israeli intelligence, ultimately owned the firm. But the financial structure of Psy Group was much more complicated, they said, and included offshore entities registered in the British Virgin Islands.
At the end of that chain of opaque offshore entities sits a Zurich-based financial-services group known as Salix Services AG, according to interviews with former Psy Group employees and two other individuals with insight into the firm’s ownership. And financial documents appear to show a relationship between Salix, named after the Latin word for a willow tree, and at least one of the companies that owned Psy Group.
Robert Mueller’s team has eyed Salix as part of his wide-ranging probe into foreign meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Details about Psy Group’s financials and its ties to Salix could shed new light on a pair of mysteries that could be key to this part of the special counsel’s probe: Why did international business and influence-peddler George Nader pay Zamel $2 million after the election? And where did all that money go?
On its blander-than-bland website, Salix offers few clues about its operations. (“Like the Willow, at Salix our roots as well are deep and run wide through a network of clients, professional intermediaries, financial institutions and family offices,” the site reads.) And the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Zamel’s lawyer declined to comment. The Special Counsel’s Office declined to comment.
For more than a year, Psy Group and its owner, Zamel, have flown somewhat under the radar, despite the questions they’ve faced about their efforts to use online propaganda to help Trump win the presidency.
In August 2016, Zamel met with former Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Donald Trump Jr., and Nader to discuss ideas that could potentially help Trump win the election. During that meeting, as first reported by the Times and later confirmed by The Daily Beast, Nader told the room that the crown princes of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE were eager to help Trump win the election.
Zamel, through his lawyer, has previously denied pitching an official plan for the campaign or working with campaign members. Two other sources close to the Trump team said they did not believe Zamel, or Psy Group, carried out an official cybercampaign. But according to The New Yorker, Zamel told Nader after the election, “Here’s the work that we did to help get Trump elected.”
Nader’s payment of $2 million after the election went through to Zamel. Exactly what for—that’s unknown. The ultimate beneficiary could offer clues.
Lawyers for Zamel—a self-styled Mark Zuckerberg of the national-security world—have previously refused to say how much of a stake he held in Psy Group and therefore how much controlling power he had over the company. But records obtained by The Daily Beast show Zamel is a director of the company that owns Psy.
Furthermore, documents reviewed by The Daily Beast and interviews with individuals familiar with Psy Group’s financial structure lay bare a complex web of companies with connections to Zamel that point to Salix.
“It’s how Joel holds his shares,” one former Psy Group employee told The Daily Beast. “They set up trusts and provide nominee services to… shield beneficial owners from their holdings. It’s completely legal.”
Psy Group, registered as Invop in Israel, has its ownership obscured by a series of offshore companies. In June 2018, after the company’s name surfaced in the Mueller investigation, employees asked an Israeli court to liquidate the company and financial records revealed that all of Psy Group’s shares were owned by a Cyprus-registered company known as IOCO Limited. Former Psy Group employees also told The Daily Beast that IOCO was “just another name for Psy.”
Since its creation in 2014, IOCO’s shares have been owned by a handful of companies registered to post-office boxes in the British Virgin Islands. Bank records show that ownership of IOCO changed hands on a roughly annual basis through a rotating cast of anonymous offshore companies.
There are few hints about who owns the handful of companies that hold IOCO’s shares, but at least one of the companies listed as a former IOCO owner has links back to Salix.
Leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca show that a company named Cornell Enterprises SA was at one point a shareholder of Prime Nominees Limited, IOCO’s sole shareholder from late 2015 through mid-2016. Salix is listed in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Panama Papers as an intermediary of Cornell, and Cornell shared an address with Salix in Zurich, Switzerland.
Protexer Limited, another former owner of IOCO, is listed as a subsidiary of the Trident Trust Company (Cyprus) Ltd., which currently serves as a secretary on the board of IOCO.
IOCO appears to have fallen on hard times itself. In December, the company announced a voluntary liquidation by its creditors scheduled for January 2019.
Meanwhile, former Psy Group employees believe they’ve been “cleared” by law enforcement in the U.S., they told the Daily Beast, and do not expect to face more questioning. Zamel appears to still be operating his other major global consulting firm, Wikistrat, which holds contracts with the U.S. government.
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