Trump associate Felix Sater to testify before the House Judiciary Committee
The FBI informer, property developer, and former business associate of Trump, Felix Sater will give evidence in front of the U.S congressional committee this week. Sater is Russian born and he is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee days after a lawsuit was filed. The lawsuit claimed that he had plotted to use £440 million allegedly stolen from a Kazakhstan bank on a Trump Tower project in Moscow. It has also been claimed that he helped hide payments made on 3 condominiums at the Dominick (formerly the Trump SoHo hotel in New York).
On Monday, the lawsuit was filed in a Manhattan court by BTA Bank and the City of Almaty. The lawsuit blamed that Sater had personally arranged meetings between Trump and Ilyas Khrapunov (the son of a former mayor of the Kazakh capital) to discuss possible investments. The father-in-law of Khrapunov, Mukhtar Ablyazov is a former chairman of BTA. He was alleged of stealing billions of dollars from the bank and siphoning it offshore. Trump’s former lawyer and confidante, Michael Cohen has cooperated with prosecutors after being arrested in the Mueller inquiry.
It is noteworthy that Khrapunov wasn’t named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Trump isn’t accused of being engaged in any impropriety over the BTA money. Sater said in a statement that he denied BTA’s baseless allegations. Ablyazov also denied wrongdoing. Sater was also due to appear before the House Intelligence Committee during the current week, but this has been temporarily postponed. The Committee needs to prioritize the quizzing of FBI and Justice Department officials and members of Robert Mueller’s team. This move was due to attorney general William Barr’s decision that Trump will not be charged with obstruction of justice and the Special Counsel’s conclusion that there was no collusion between the Trump team and Russia.