The scandal surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump and his associates, including Trump’s private lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, now involves one of Ukraine’s most notorious oligarchs.
Ukrainian-born Lev Parnas and Belarusian-born Igor Fruman – hired by Guiliani to assist him with investigations in Ukraine to bolster Trump’s 2020 re-election bid – were arrested on Oct. 9 at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. as they tried to leave on a one-way ticket to Vienna.
They are charged with funneling $325,000 in illegal foreign contributions to a pro-Trump political action committee in 2018. Additionally, the Associated Press reported on Oct. 8 that Parnas and Fruman were part of an effort to install new leadership more to their liking in Ukraine’s state-owned energy monopoly Naftogaz.
Their destination, Austria, doesn’t appear to be accidental.
Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian energy and chemical tycoon, lives in exile in Vienna. Firtash has been fighting extradition to the United States since his arrest in 2014 on bribery charges that he denies.
Reuters news agency on Oct. 11, citing a person familiar with the Florida men’s business dealings with Firtash, reported that both men worked for Firtash before Parnas joined the Ukrainian’s legal team. Parnas, Reuters also reported, served as a translator for lawyers representing Firtash.
Giuliani also told Reuters that Parnas and Fruman had been to Vienna three to six times in the past two months, while Giuliani was set to travel to Vienna the day after his associates’ arrests. Additionally, on Oct. 11, federal prosecutors in Manhattan confirmed to the New York Times that Guiliani is under investigation for possible federal lobbying violations under the Foreign Agents Registration Act involving Ukraine.
Although the Austrian Supreme Court ordered Firtash to be extradited, he hired Trump-linked lawyers in July to seek a fresh review of the five-year-long extradition process. An Austrian state court said the Firtash side presented “extremely extensive material.”
Besides delaying the proceedings indefinitely as the review is conducted, Firtash appears to have sided with the Trump-Guiliani allegations of wrongdoing by ex-Vice President Joseph Biden in Ukraine. His lawyers accepted a Sept. 4 affidavit from discredited ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who blamed Biden for his firing in 2016 and claimed that Biden sought to block Firtash’s return to Ukraine. Ex-Security Service of Ukraine chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, known for loyalty to Firtash, has even gotten in on the act, writing an Oct. 10 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for a full investigation of Ukraine’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election Biden family’s role in the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
The oligarch
Read more: Dmytro Firtash is the oligarch who can’t come home
Firtash has enormous influence in Ukraine, even from exile. He has a gas distribution monopoly in Ukraine whose companies owe the state at least $2 billion for natural gas received, allegations his Group DF company dismisses as rumors.
Firtash’s television channels, including Inter, are among the most-watched in Ukraine. He controls a substantial part of the titanium market and has vast chemical plant holdings. Recently, the Anti-Monopoly Committee of Ukraine ordered a break-up of his monopoly in the nitrogen fertilizer sector.
He also has deep Russian ties and is seen as a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukraine’s top enemy because of the Kremlin’s relentless war on Ukraine. U.S. Department of Justice court filings describe Firtash as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime,” allegations he denies.
In June 2013, Firtash was charged by a Chicago grand jury with giving $18.5 million in bribes to Indian government officials to receive titanium mining licenses with the aim of selling the extracted minerals to Boeing. Austrian authorities arrested him later that month. The indictment was made public in April 2014.
On June 25, 2019, Firtash lost his extradition appeal in Austria’s Supreme Court. He was subject to be transferred to the U.S. after Austria’s justice minister approved his extradition on July 16, 2019. Yet on the same day, Firtash’s defense filed a motion for a retrial, citing new evidence.
Also in July, Firtash changed his Washington-based legal team, hiring Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, a husband-and-wife duo linked to Giuliani and Trump’s administration, and drastically switching his defense strategy. DiGenova and Toensing have appeared on Fox News to criticize the whistleblowers at the heart of the ongoing scandal in the U.S. and liken the impeachment inquiry to “sedition.”
Firtash was previously represented by Lanny Davis, who once worked for Hillary Clinton. In an interview with The Hill news outlet, Giuliani criticized Davis for working with Firtash.
“He is considered to be one of the close associates of (Semion) Mogilevich, who is the head of Russian organized crime, who is Putin’s best friend,” said Giuliani. “Davis gets $80,000 a month from this guy who’s considered to be one of the high-level, Russian organized crime members or associates.” Davis rejected Giuliani’s claims.
Firtash made a fortune serving as an intermediary selling Russian gas to Ukraine. His RosUkrEnergo company – owned jointly with Russia’s gas giant Gazprom – was Ukraine’s sole supplier of Russian gas between 2004 and 2009. He gained influence during ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s time and retained it through the presidencies of Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych, who fled office in 2014 during the EuroMaidan Revolution. He also managed to stay powerful during ex-President Petro Poroshenko’s five years in office, with the “Vienna Agreement” seen as a trade between the two men, with Firtash offering his political support to Poroshenko in exchange for no criminal investigations.
Independent energy experts call RosUkrEnergo one of the most unnecessary and corrupt schemes in the natural gas sector. Firtash has always defended his role as working in Ukraine’s best interests. But as he got rich from the gas trade, taxpayers had to spend as much as a half-billion dollars monthly to cover the losses of Ukraine’s state-owned Naftogaz, the giant gas and oil producer.
Wikileaks files in 2008 suggest that Firtash was able to receive help entering the gas trade by colluding with Russian crime boss Mogilevich, who once was among the 10 most wanted people by the FBI.
His new defense team, dismissing any Firtash connections to organized crime, say the charges against him are politically motivated.
On Sept. 4, Viktor Shokin, a former prosecutor general of Ukraine, filed an affidavit to the Austrian court in defense of Firtash. It was swiftly published by John Solomon, a columnist for the Hill, who is an associate of Giuliani. Shokin stated that ex-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian politicians to block Firtash’s return to Ukraine in 2015, after a lower level Austrian court refused the U.S. extradition request.
However, Firtash has not been welcomed back in Ukraine for many reasons.
In December 2015, Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s interior minister, threatened Firtash with arrest upon arrival. He said that Firtash “wants to return because we don’t have an extradition treaty,” but said the oligarch would face prosecution based on evidence given by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
And Firtash even has a connection with Paul Manafort, the imprisoned former campaign manager of Trump and the former political adviser to Yanukovych. Manafort is now serving a 7.5-year prison term for tax evasion and money laundering. He and Firtash wanted to go into a joint real estate venture worth $850 million, but the project never happened.
The prosecutors
Shokin and his successor Yuriy Lutsenko are highly discredited Ukrainian prosecutors, with reputations for protecting corruption rather than prosecuting it.
Their questionable testimonies and conspiracy theories provided material for Giuliani’s allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and that Joe Biden, the former U.S. vice president seeking the Democratic Party nomination to challenge Trump, pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin to help his son, Hunter, escape criminal investigation over his work with a shady Ukrainian energy firm.
In January 2019, Parnas and Fruman introduced Giuliani first to Shokin and later to Lutsenko.
Read more: 2 Ukrainian prosecutors concoct wild conspiracy theories that drive Trump’s foreign policy
During these meetings, Shokin alleged that he was ordered to stop investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden at least $50,000 a month for five years to serve in an advisory role.
Shokin stated that the investigations were halted out of fear of U.S. reprisals, and that he had been removed as prosecutor general in 2016 at Biden’s request.
Lutsenko also alleged that one of Ukraine’s top anti-corruption officials and a Ukrainian lawmaker meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. He went on to allege that the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, led by Ambassador Marie L. Yovanovitch at the time, was secretly assisting them. He has since recanted.
Following their arrests this week, Parnas and Fruman were charged with enlisting an unnamed member of Congress – since identified as former Republican U.S. representative from Texas, Pete Sessions – to push for the recall of Yovanovitch two months before her post was scheduled to end.
Much of what Shokin and Lutsenko told Giuliani amounted to unsubstantiated claims debunked as groundless by officials of the U.S. and Ukrainian governments, journalists, anti-corruption activists and most notably Lutsenko himself during multiple interviews.
Solomon himself received public attention when he helped Giuliani spread Lutsenko’s questionable testimony. On March 22, Lutsenko gave an interview to Solomon, where he repeated his January accusations, which Giuliani later began citing while on television.
According to an Oct. 3 Foreign Policy article, the State Department provided information on correspondence among Solomon, Giuliani and Toensing. Multiple U.S. news outlets also reported that Solomon sent his Lutsenko interview to Toensing, diGenova and Parnas hours before it was published.
The intermediaries
According to The Wall Street Journal, Parnas, who helped Giuliani find contacts in Ukraine, was employed by Toensing and diGenova’s firm to serve as an interpreter related to their representation of Firtash.
Parnas has a record of interacting with Ukrainian oligarchs. He and Fruman met with oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who is close to President Volodymyr Zelensky and whose 1+1 TV channel helped him get elected. The meeting took place days after Zelensky was elected president. He also met with Kolomoisky on Sept. 10.
In July, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reported that Fruman and Parnas were introduced to Kolomoisky by Alexander Levin, a pro-Trump businessman, on the pretense that they wanted to talk about their plan to sell gas to Ukraine.
However, Kolomoisky said in an interview that the two wanted him to help them arrange a meeting between Giuliani and Zelensky.
OCCRP also found ties between Giuliani’s fixers and Volodymyr Galanternik, an influential yet secretive businessman accused of criminal activity by journalists and anti-corruption activists. He along with Alexander Angert are friends and business partners of Odesa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov. Galanternik’s wife is a close friend of Fruman’s ex-wife and the two often post photographs together with their husbands.
Read more: Odesa Mob Rule: Leaders in Black Sea port have unchecked powers
Key stories and documents in the impeachment inquiry of U.S. President Donald J. Trump:
Whistleblower’s complaint against Trump released on Sept. 26
Text messages released on Oct. 3 by chairmen of 3 U.S. House committees
Prepared remarks of ex-U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker to U.S. House committees on Oct. 3
2 Ukrainian prosecutors concoct wild conspiracy theories that drive Trump’s foreign policy
Highlights of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden’s 6 visits to Ukraine and key policy speeches
