President Trump had an associate that was born in Russia and later came to America as well in order to practice business. Felix Sater is his name, and he was facing some quite harsh charges in the realm of tax fraud with the total that was allegedly pilfered reaching above $250 million. However, a New York court has now dismissed the case so that there is no need for him to be concerned about those penalties.
As a former associate of President Donald Trump, Felix Sater was facing the civil tax fraud case. He had helped to co-found a company named Bayrock that mostly specialized in real estate, and a whistleblower had filed the case against him in the form of a qui tam. That means that the person had filed on behalf of the state. After that occurs in such a case, the attorney general then has the option to intervene or not, and this time chose not to do so.
Fred Oberlander is the name of the whistleblower according to sources, and he is no stranger to lawsuits and court cases. In the past, he had represented the partner of Mr. Sater in a money-laundering case that involved the Bayrock company. Jody Kriss is the name of that partner who had felt that things were awry at the organization. Some of the information that had been given by Jody Kriss in an original complaint had been stricken by federal judges, and that is where Oberlander looked to gain much of his data for the case that he had been trying to get through against Sater.
Those federal judges had noted that much of that statement held confidential information, and when Oberlander tried to have it resurface in this subsequent case things did not go over too well for him. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office had already refused to intervene once before last year, and the New York supreme court had been delivered a letter that talked of a ‘misleading’ press release by Oberlander then. It seems that Oberman has been trying hard to get something ‘green-lighted,’ in his words, but the state has refused to take it any further.
Likewise, the Department of Justice in the state has also given him warnings of criminal contempt twice in reference to some misconduct that has taken place during the proceedings against Mr. Sater. The former finance director, Jody Kriss, had alleged that the company was basically mob-owned, and that this led to numerous levels of crime including money laundering, bank fraud, conspiracy, and more. Kriss had tried to make a claim that Tevfik Arif, the founder of Bayrock, had actually worked to cheat him out of millions of dollars through some similar measures as mentioned above.
Kriss, Sater, and Arif had allegedly joined together in order to market some of their projects using President Trump’s name, but they had not revealed the criminal background that Sater held. Trump has since said that the project Trump Soho would have never been agreed upon had he been told the truth about who he was dealing with. The president also noted that he would not even be able to recognize the man if they were next to each other in the same room, and that gives the public a little more insight into the distance between them. He mentioned that he is not hiding that he is investing in Russia since it is one of the hottest markets at the moment, but he certainly would not be trying to carry out anything illegal or partner with those who have done so in the past.