Yahoo News Moscow-Born Former Trump Associate Felix Sater Granted New Money-Laundering Trial
(Bloomberg) -- Felix Sater, the controversial real estate operative who was once part of President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle, won his fight for a new trial in a Kazakh bank’s civil money laundering suit against him in New York.
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Sater’s request for a new trial was granted Wednesday by US District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan, dealing a blow to the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and one of the country’s biggest lenders, BTA Bank. Their 2019 lawsuit accused Sater and others of helping a wealthy Kazakh man launder millions of dollars through US real estate, including condos at the Trump SoHo tower.
Sater, who once had offices at Trump Tower, initially lost the case in June after a jury awarded Almaty and BTA $32 million in damages, including interest. But Sater argued a new trial was warranted because the jury had used incorrect dates when deciding whether the claims were too old under the statute of limitations.
“This new trial is a step toward justice after years of blatant lawfare and political attacks,” Sater said in a statement.
Koeltl, in a separate order, also denied BTA’s request to hold Sater in contempt and to refer him to the US Attorney’s Office for a perjury investigation for allegedly lying under oath. The judge said BTA and Almaty hadn’t proved that Sater deliberately provided false testimony about the date of a key meeting in 2015.
Almaty and BTA claim that Sater helped Ilyas Khrapunov launder a portion of the roughly $6 billion allegedly looted from the bank by Khrapunov’s father-in-law, former BTA Chairman Mukhtar Ablyazov, in the years before the financial crisis. The case is part of a global effort by BTA to recover the money, which was allegedly siphoned from the bank through a web of shell companies and bogus loans.
Sater, who at one time handed out business cards identifying himself as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump,” denies wrongdoing.
BTA and Almaty were represented by Matthew L. Schwartz, who earlier this month assumed the top role at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP in New York. Neither he nor the firm responded to a message seeking comment.
The case is City of Almaty v. Sater, 19-cv-02645, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
(Updates with detail on the allegations against Sater by a Kazakh city and bank.)
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