More down the rabbit hole:
Lawsuit Claims Foreign Powers Sought To Interfere In 2016 Election To Help Hillary Clinton
By: Margot Cleveland
February 04, 2022
8 min read
On Feb. 3, long-time Trump associate Felix Sater filed a cross-complaint in a New York federal court. The complaint alleges that Russian and Kazakhstan-connected individuals and entities conducted “a shadow intelligence operation of Sater and Trump for the purpose of manufacturing information to harm Donald Trump politically,” including by providing Christopher Steele a PowerPoint presentation riddled with lies Steele later fed to the FBI.
Sater’s cross suit comes nearly three years after the City of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and BTA Bank filed suit against Sater, two of the companies he owned, a former business associate, and that associate’s LLCs, in City of Almaty, Kazakhstan v. Sater.
In that lawsuit, filed in May 2019, Almaty and BTA Bank alleged that Sater and the other defendants helped Mukhtar Ablyazov, the former chairman of the BTA Bank, and Viktor Khrapunov, the former mayor of the City of Almaty, launder money the duo had stolen from the plaintiffs. In the case, the plaintiffs sought recovery of millions of dollars in stolen funds, based on claims of fraud, conspiracy, unjust enrichment, and conversion.
While that case has been pending in a federal district court in New York since spring 2019, on Thursday Sater filed for the first time counterclaims against Almaty and BTA Bank. In yesterday’s filing, Sater also added the Republic of Kazakhstan and Arcanum (Asia) Ltd. as parties.
In his lawsuit, Sater claimed that in June 2015, BTA Bank, Almaty, and Kazakhstan, referred to as the Kazakh Parties throughout the court filing, entered a “confidential assistance agreement” or “CAA,” in which they agreed to pay Sater (through his company, Litco) $100,000 per month, plus a percentage of the funds recovered, for Sater’s help in recovering assets stolen by Ablyazov.
The CAA, however, was merely a “guise,” Sater alleged, with Arcanum and the Kazakh Parties instead conspiring “to leak false and defamatory information about Sater to media outlets including ABC News.” “This was part of a concerted effort to falsely (and absurdly) portray Sater, a longtime business partner of Donald Trump, as a Russian agent and Kremlin stooge,” the lawsuit alleged.
Read more here: thefederalist.com
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