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DetlefK

(16,423 posts)
Thu Jun 7, 2018, 02:29 PM Jun 2018

Russian lawyer from Trump Tower meeting once tried to recruit swiss official as double-agent.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tower-russian-lawyer-natalia-veselnitskaya-exposed-in-swiss-corruption-case

One of Switzerland’s top investigators has been fired after allegations of bribery, violating secrecy laws, and “unauthorized clandestine behavior” in meeting with the very same Russian actors linked to the Trump Tower encounter.

...

The reports, which are based on Swiss court papers, describe how K. was lured to Moscow during a call from (Russian Deputy Attorney General) Karapetyan before Christmas 2016. He was told not to go by his boss, ostensibly because he was working too much overtime, but he made the trip anyway, using his diplomatic passport to fly to the Russian capital. There, he was put up in a luxury hotel and asked to attend an unexpected meeting with Veselnitskaya.

In the case against K.—who had been entrusted with investigating the Swiss financial arrangements of the Russian mafia and oligarchs for decades—it emerged that he had previously met Karapetyan in Geneva and Zurich, as well as Russia “without the knowledge of his superiors.”

...

The interest of Veselnitskaya and the Russian prosecutor general’s office is likely to be linked back to a $230 million tax fraud that was uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky,

...

A large portion of those stolen funds are believed to have made their way into the Swiss banking sector, sparking investigations by Swiss authorities, including its federal police and the Swiss prosecutor’s office, both of which worked closely with K.

...

The Swiss court investigating K. heard that Veselnitskaya had raised the question of the Magnitsky case with him during that Moscow meeting. Swiss accounts linked to the fraud are still frozen.


What was the purpose of these several clandestine meetings? And what was Veselnitskaya doing at a meeting of top law enforcement? By official accounts, she's no russian government employee: She's supposedly a simple lawyer.





And this gem:

Alexander Perepilichnyy, a Russian businessman living near London, had tipped off Magnitsky about the role played by Switzerland in the international scam. A few weeks before he was due to give evidence at a hearing in Lausanne, he died suddenly while he was out running.

British detectives initially concluded there was nothing suspicious about the sudden collapse of the 44-year-old whistleblower—despite his own fears that he would be assassinated. A later toxicology investigation found traces of the deadly Gelsemium elegans flower, which is a known weapon of Chinese and Russian contract killers.
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