"Yuri Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general since 2006. Aras Agalarov wrote a sharply worded defense of Chaika in the newspaper Kommersant after a 2015 corruption allegation by the opposition leader Alexei Navalny."
-Agalarov & Trump, vegas 2015; agalarov visited Trump Tower NYC 2015 & 2016.
7-16-17 MOSCOW — Russian Island, near the port city of Vladivostok in the far east, was a decaying former military base and home to a scattering of cattle when President Vladimir V. Putin suddenly envisioned it as a $1.2 billion campus where he could welcome heads of state for an Asia-Pacific conference.
That sent Kremlin officials scrambling to find a developer to transform a site lacking fresh water, a pier or roads. They rejected numerous bids before one of them took a flier on a man known mostly for his glamorous shopping malls: Aras Agalarov of the Crocus Group.
A little more than three years later, in 2012, Mr. Putin opened the spectacular Far Eastern Federal University, some 70 modern buildings built in a crescent overlooking the sparkling Pacific Ocean. Not long after, Mr. Putin pinned a blue-ribboned state medal, the Order of Honor, on Mr. Aras Agalarov’s chest at a dazzling Kremlin ceremony. Soon a string of demanding, more prominent projects followed: a stretch of superhighway ringing Moscow; two troubled stadiums for the 2018 World Cup, including one in a Baltic swamp. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/world/europe/aras-agalarov-trump-kremlin.html
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the luxury footwear boutique he opened in 1991 on Moscow’s prestigious Stoleshnikov Lane, to the suburban estates and pristine golf courses he has built to satisfy the Madison Avenue aspirations of Russia’s hyper-wealthy.
A series of important government infrastructure projects, including a $1.2 billion university campus in Russia's Far East….
Agalarov, 61, was born in Baku, the capital of the then-Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, and studied computer engineering before moving to Moscow. He started his career by selling bootleg films and by 1990 had moved on to organizing trade fairs. But if he had a vision for Russia, it was in the luxury market, which he said was immune to the economic downdrafts of the 1990s. As he once joked in a 2002 interview with the business newspaper Vedomosti: “The worse the country is doing, the better the luxury retail profits.”
Now the region, which encompasses the towns and cities surrounding Moscow proper, is the seat of power of Gov. Andrei Vorobyov, who previously served as an aide to Sergei Shoigu, his predecessor as governor and currently Russia’s defense minister. Along with Yuri Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general since 2006, the officials are seen as an important interest group within Russian politics, Shumanov said.
They regularly cross paths with Agalarov. Vorobyov cut the ribbon at the opening of Agalarov’s Vegas concert hall in the city of Krasnogorsk last year, and Agalarov wrote a sharply worded defense of Chaika in the newspaper Kommersant after a 2015 corruption allegation by the opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“A lie told a thousand times becomes truth,” Agalarov wrote….
The Kremlin expects the country’s wealthiest business executives to take on, when asked, large-scale infrastructure projects, sometimes at a loss, to supplement the budget and promote Russia’s national interests….
“I read this as a freelancing project by Agalarov Sr. and maybe Chaika to do a favor to the Kremlin on two fronts: possibly harm or kill the Magnitsky Act and establish a special relationship with the Trump campaign,” said a former Russian government adviser, who asked not to be identified to speak candidly about the case. Agalarov would probably have been in contact with the Kremlin, he added, but “the Kremlin may simply have been observing where all this would go and maintaining plausible deniability.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-man-who-drives-trumps-russia-connection/2017/07/21/43485a0e-6c98-11e7-abbc-a53480672286_story.html
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“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-financial-ties-to-russia-and-his-unusual-flattery-of-vladimir-putin/2016/06/17/dbdcaac8-31a6-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html?utm_term=.0fbe1c5dc721&tid=a_inl_manual
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