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THE ‘INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY’ LINKED TO FLYNN’S LOBBYING DEAL

Dmitri “David” Zaikin made Russian energy deals with powerful officials, advised
Eastern European parties drifting toward Russia, brokered condos at Toronto’s
Trump Tower, and teamed up with the guy who hired Michael Flynn.

by Isaac Arnsdorf

June 27, 2017, 5:20 a.m. EDT
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David Zaikin appeared on CNBC in 2006 promoting Russian oil and gas to Western
investors. He later steered lobbying for Albania, Macedonia and Turkey.

This story was co-published with Politico.

More than two years ago, two men started visiting Washington to push Turkey’s
agenda in the capital. They dined with dignitaries and enlisted prominent
lobbying firms from both sides of the aisle.

It was an unremarkable Washington story, except for one thing: the last lobbyist
one of the men hired was Gen. Michael Flynn, President Trump’s campaign adviser
at the time, who was later fired as national security adviser for lying about
his conversations with Russia’s ambassador.

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Flynn’s client, a Turkish businessman named Ekim Alptekin, has gained attention
as federal investigators examine Flynn’s apparent failures to disclose foreign
contacts. But so far, the other man in the pro-Turkey efforts has largely
avoided public notice.

That man, Dmitri “David” Zaikin, is not registered as a foreign lobbyist and has
no apparent connection to Turkey.

What he does have, a ProPublica-Politico examination found, is a long track
record of partnering with powerful Russian businesspeople and government
officials, mostly involving energy and mining deals. More recently, Zaikin has
done political work in Eastern Europe, advising parties in Albania and Macedonia
that have drifted toward the Kremlin.

Zaikin also has business connections to Trump. Working at a real estate agency
in Toronto in the 2000s, Zaikin brokered sales in one of the city’s new
high-rises: the Trump International Hotel & Tower. Perhaps coincidentally,
Zaikin was also close with a Russian woman who was the exclusive agent for one
of Trump’s Florida developments and who was branded “Trump’s Russian hand” by a
glossy Russian magazine.

Zaikin has not been accused of any wrongdoing. Alptekin and Zaikin have denied
knowing each other and say Zaikin had nothing to do with Flynn’s lobbying deal.

As this reporter previously reported in Politico, three people with direct
knowledge said Alptekin and Zaikin collaborated on Turkish lobbying, jointly
steering the work.

Zaikin referred questions to his lawyer, who declined to comment. Flynn’s lawyer
didn’t answer requests for comment. The White House referred questions to
Trump’s outside lawyer, whose spokesman also did not respond to a request for
comment.

Zaikin says he was born in 1967 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In an earlier email to
Politico, he wrote that his family long faced anti-Semitic persecution in their
homeland and that they fled the collapsing USSR for Canada in 1990.

“Mr. Zaikin reserves nothing but contempt for the Soviet government, and
whatever vestiges of it may still exist,” his lawyer, Tara Plochocki of the firm
Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, wrote to Politico.

But Zaikin gave a different account to Geoffrey P. Cowley, a British engineer
who was his business partner from 2010 until they split in 2016. Cowley said he
never heard Zaikin claim his family was persecuted, nor had he heard Zaikin
criticize the former Soviet Union.

“That might be the official line,” Cowley said.

Instead, according to Cowley, Zaikin had said his father was in the Soviet
military or diplomatic corps.

“When he was with me, whoever I wanted to see, David would pick up the telephone
and I got to see him,” Cowley said, naming officials in Albania, Serbia and
Guinea as examples. “That doesn’t happen with some Jewish refugee out of Ukraine
who doesn’t know anybody.”

Settling in Toronto, Zaikin was active in the community of Jews from the former
Soviet Union. He soon became a real estate agent, eventually with an upscale
brokerage. He marketed properties to Russian buyers. He married a woman from St.
Petersburg and had three children.

In 2002, Zaikin started a side gig. He became chairman of Siberian Energy Group,
which was incorporated in Nevada and was listed over-the-counter on NASDAQ. The
company’s archived website notes Zaikin’s “extensive ties to Russia’s business
community, as well as to federal and regional government authorities.”

Zaikin worked to help the governor of the western Siberian province of Kurgan
attract Western investors for energy exploration and infrastructure, according
to Tim Peara, whom Zaikin hired to help raise money in the United Kingdom.

“He did the government of Kurgan a lot of favors in terms of helping to raise
money for them,” Peara said. The governor reported directly to President
Vladimir Putin, according to a company press release.

The region’s prospects didn’t pan out: Zaikin’s company never pumped a single
barrel of oil or cubic foot of gas, according to disclosures filed with the
Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC repeatedly queried the company about its financial dealings,
specifically about its payments to Russian executives and consultants in shares
and options whose values were opaque or shifting.

“We note that although you describe various transactions utilizing common stock
of the company, it is not clear from your disclosures how the value of such
stock for each transaction was determined,” SEC officials wrote in one letter.

In 2006, Siberian Energy Group used shares worth $2.7 million to buy a Russian
company, Kondaneftegaz. Less than two years later, Zaikin’s company sold
significant stakes in Kondaneftegaz to two Russian investors for just $10 each.
Kondaneftegaz had actually been awarded two additional drilling licenses before
those sales, according to SEC reports.

Zaikin previously told Politico that he was “not involved” in that transaction,
though his signature appears on the purchase and sale agreements filed with the
SEC.

View note

Zaikin obtained Siberian Energy Group’s licenses at auctions that weren’t
publicized and were only attended by people who had government connections,
according to a contractor for the company. Zaikin’s lawyer refused to comment on
this.

“David was on the inside track,” said Jordan Silverstein, who worked for a firm
doing investor relations for Siberian Energy Group. “He seemed like an
international man of mystery.”

Zaikin’s business career continued to involve both Russian oil work and Toronto
real estate dealings. In 2005, Zaikin told the Globe and Mail newspaper about a
new development he was promoting: the Trump International Hotel and Tower. The
newspaper reported that Zaikin called his “top five international clients” and
four agreed to buy.

1990: Dmitri “David” Zaikin arrives in Canada from the Soviet Union.

2002: Zaikin gets involved in the Russian energy industry, helping a regional
governor attract Western investors.

2005: Zaikin brokers condos in the Trump Tower in Toronto.

2007: Zaikin helps lead a mining company for a Russian oligarch.

2015: Zaikin starts advising Kremlin-friendly political parties in Turkey,
Macedonia and Albania.

2016: A businessman whom Zaikin worked with on Turkish lobbying hires Gen.
Michael Flynn to lobby for Turkey.

“When this project was announced I instantly became a strong believer that it
would be a significant winner,” Zaikin told the newspaper. “I have stayed at
Trump Hotels and seen how other similar projects went in New York, Chicago and
Las Vegas.”

Not long after, Zaikin and several colleagues from Siberian Energy Group became
directors or shareholders of a mining company called RAM Resources, later First
Iron Group, according to corporate filings. First Iron’s board included the
deputy chairman of Russian state bank VEB, who had also been Putin’s deputy
chief of staff. The company was registered in the British isle of Jersey, a
haven for offshore companies.

Other investors in the company were themselves offshore firms, based in the
Cayman Islands, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere.

According to Zaikin’s partner Cowley, who served on the company’s board, the
venture drew a takeover bid from Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbek-born Russian iron
oligarch. Usmanov’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Cowley, an experienced mining executive who had worked for other Russian
oligarchs, said he was impressed by Zaikin’s global political connections.

A consulting firm that Zaikin and Cowley started advertised Zaikin as having “a
network of contacts with senior executives and top government officials and
Presidents in Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Ethiopia, Albania, Sierra Leone,
Mali, Liberia, Moldova, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, [and] Romania.”

By 2011, Zaikin had moved to London. He set up several companies registered at
his home address. One of them, EM Infrastructure Ltd., lists two names on a U.K.
incorporation document: Neither is Zaikin’s. One is his wife, a jewelry
designer. The other is a Viktor Grabarouk, whose address is listed as Zaikin’s
home — though the same document states that he usually resides in Belarus — and
whose birthdate is listed as one day after Zaikin’s own.

A search of corporate records and the comprehensive British phonebook showed no
references to a Viktor Grabarouk.

View note

A few years later, Zaikin’s career took yet another turn. After working in
residential real estate and the Russian energy sector, Zaikin became an adviser
to the ruling parties in Turkey, Albania and Macedonia. He also began working
with those parties to set up lobbying in the United States.

Zaikin told Cowley he wanted to be “working with the staffs of senators and
high-profile people in the States,” Cowley recalled. The two stopped working
together as Zaikin focused more on politics.

Starting around 2015, Zaikin helped run pro-Turkish nonprofit groups to lobby
U.S. lawmakers, according to an American consultant who worked with him, John
Moreira. Alptekin, the Turkish businessman who later hired Flynn, told Politico
he worked with the main group Zaikin helped set up.

In August 2016, Alptekin signed a contract with Flynn for $600,000 to urge the
U.S. to turn over Fethullah Gülen, a cleric now in Pennsylvania whom Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses of trying to topple him.

The contract refers to Alptekin as “Capt. Ekim Alptekin.” Alptekin said he’s not
a captain and he doesn’t know why the contract calls him one.

View note

Flynn was paid by a Dutch consulting firm that Alptekin owned called Inovo,
according to Flynn’s Justice Department disclosures. But records show Inovo had
no significant business activity in the three years before the Flynn deal. In
fact, the company was in debt for more than 125,000 euros in the months before
paying Flynn. Alptekin acknowledged in an interview that Inovo lacked sufficient
funds and said he used his own money to pay Flynn.

Flynn’s firm ultimately repaid $80,000 to Inovo. Alptekin has said it was a
refund. Flynn’s filing with the Justice Department called the payment a
“consultancy fee.”

View note

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian efforts to influence
the election, is interested in the source of Flynn’s lobbying income, according
to a person familiar with the probe. Mueller’s spokesman declined to comment.

While working on Turkey, Zaikin also facilitated lobbying and political
consulting deals for the Macedonian political party VMRO-DPMNE, according to
four people with direct knowledge of the activities. He did the same for
Albania’s Socialist Movement for Integration, known as LSI, according to four
people familiar with the arrangements. Zaikin introduced leaders of both parties
to American lobbyists and campaign advisers, the people said.

VMRO, like Turkey, historically aligns with the West but has recently cozied up
to the Kremlin. VMRO for months refused to leave power despite failing to win
enough seats in a December election to form a parliamentary majority. The
standoff put the party at odds with the U.S. State Department, whereas it’s
received forceful backing from the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Albania’s LSI and its leader, Ilir Meta, are avowedly pro-Western but have
sometimes clashed with the State Department over the U.S.’s push to reform the
country’s criminal justice system.

Around the same time Zaikin started getting more involved in Eastern European
and American politics, he and his wife repeatedly met with a friend named Elena
Baronoff who worked with the Trump Organization to sell condos in Florida.

On social media, Zaikin and Baronoff discussed plans to meet and posted photos
of themselves dining out in London. In October 2013, Zaikin posted back-to-back
photos of himself and Baronoff with the chef of a French restaurant in the posh
Mayfair neighborhood. Two weeks later, he tweeted a photo of his wife and
Baronoff hugging with the comment, “It was warm like in Miami.”

On another apparent visit, in July 2014, Baronoff posted to Instagram a photo of
herself and Zaikin’s wife, Yana, on a London sidewalk and then a photo of the
lobby of a five-star hotel captioned, “with love to Yana and David Zaikin.”

Baronoff was born in Russia, earned degrees in journalism and mass
communication, and served as an official “cultural attaché in public diplomacy”
for the Russian government at an unspecified time, she said in interviews and
bios. In 1989, she moved to Iowa, then Florida.

Starting with little means, Baronoff became a travel agent and later a real
estate agent. She wrote on LinkedIn that her diplomatic training was key to her
success in “marketing and building the brand of high-end luxury condominiums
under the Trump brand.”

By 2004, Baronoff was Trump’s on-site director of customer relations for the
Trump Grande near Miami. She was photographed with Trump and his daughter Ivanka
and celebrated on the cover story of The Women’s City magazine as “Donald
Trump’s Russian hand.”

As the exclusive agent for the Trump Grande development, Baronoff sold 44 units
to Russian buyers, according to an analysis by Reuters. An undated photo
surfaced on Twitter showing Baronoff in Moscow with Trump’s children Ivanka,
Eric and Don Jr.

Last month, Trump released a letter from his lawyers saying any of his firm’s
transactions with Russians were “immaterial,” though Donald Trump Jr. said in
2008 that the company was seeing “a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

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After intense opposition and skepticism, two elementary schools opened 20 days
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Baronoff fell ill while traveling to Turkey in 2014 and was diagnosed with
leukemia. She died in 2015. Following her burial, her family received visitors
at the Trump International Beach Resort.

Her son, George Baronov, said his mother worked for Trump after first doing
business with Trump’s partner in Florida. “She was the in-house broker,” Baronov
said. “She did a lot of marketing and advertising and traveling around the
world.” The Moscow trip with Trump’s children was in 2003 or 2004, he said.

Two years before she died, Baronoff worked on a $28 million Manhattan real
estate deal with Turkish President Erdogan’s son and son-in-law, according to
hacked emails published by Wikileaks. The emails also showed the son and
son-in-law receiving updates about Zaikin’s lobbying efforts. In September 2016,
as Flynn later disclosed, Alptekin arranged a meeting between the same
son-in-law and Flynn himself.

Do you have information about David Zaikin, or Michael Flynn’s lobbying? Contact
Isaac at isaac@propublica.org or via Signal at 203-464-1409. Here’s more
information on how to leak to ProPublica.

Clarification, July 27, 2017: We added that Victor Grabarouk, whose name appears
on a U.K. corporate record with Zaikin’s wife, usually resides in Belarus,
according to the corporate record.

Update, July 17, 2017: We updated the description of Alisher Usmanov’s
involvement with First Iron Group. Geoffrey Cowley, who served on the company’s
board, originally said Usmanov controlled the company. After publication, Cowley
said Usmanov bid for control.

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Isaac Arnsdorf

Isaac Arnsdorf was a reporter at ProPublica covering national politics.

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THE ‘INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY’ LINKED TO FLYNN’S LOBBYING DEAL

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<h1>The ‘International Man of Mystery’ Linked to Flynn’s Lobbying
Deal</h1>ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
Sign up for <a href="https://go.propublica.org/bigstory-20180905-CC">The Big
Story newsletter</a> to receive stories like this one in your
inbox.<div>More than two years ago, two men started visiting
Washington to push Turkey’s agenda in the capital. They dined with dignitaries
and enlisted prominent lobbying firms from both sides of the aisle.It was
an unremarkable Washington story, except for one thing: the last lobbyist one of
the men hired was Gen. Michael Flynn, President Trump’s campaign adviser at the
time, who was later fired as national security adviser for lying about his
conversations with Russia’s ambassador.Flynn’s client, a Turkish
businessman named Ekim Alptekin, has gained attention as federal investigators
examine Flynn’s apparent failures to disclose foreign contacts. But so far, the
other man in the pro-Turkey efforts has largely avoided public
notice.That man, Dmitri “David” Zaikin, is not registered as a foreign
lobbyist and has no apparent connection to Turkey.What he does have, a
ProPublica-Politico examination found, is a long track record of partnering with
powerful Russian businesspeople and government officials, mostly involving
energy and mining deals. More recently, Zaikin has done political work in
Eastern Europe, advising parties in Albania and Macedonia that have drifted
toward the Kremlin.Zaikin also has business connections to Trump. Working
at a real estate agency in Toronto in the 2000s, Zaikin brokered sales in one of
the city’s new high-rises: the Trump International Hotel & Tower. Perhaps
coincidentally, Zaikin was also close with a Russian woman who was the exclusive
agent for one of Trump’s Florida developments and who was branded “Trump’s
Russian hand” by a glossy Russian magazine.Zaikin has not been accused of
any wrongdoing. Alptekin and Zaikin have denied knowing each other and say
Zaikin had nothing to do with Flynn’s lobbying deal.As this reporter
previously <a
href=http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/25/michael-flynn-turkey-russia-237550>reported
in Politico</a>, three people with direct knowledge said Alptekin and Zaikin
collaborated on Turkish lobbying, jointly steering the work.Zaikin
referred questions to his lawyer, who declined to comment. Flynn’s lawyer didn’t
answer requests for comment. The White House referred questions to Trump’s
outside lawyer, whose spokesman also did not respond to a request for
comment.Zaikin says he was born in 1967 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In an
earlier email to Politico, he wrote that his family long faced anti-Semitic
persecution in their homeland and that they fled the collapsing USSR for Canada
in 1990.“Mr. Zaikin reserves nothing but contempt for the Soviet
government, and whatever vestiges of it may still exist,” his lawyer, Tara
Plochocki of the firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, wrote to
Politico.But Zaikin gave a different account to Geoffrey P. Cowley, a
British engineer who was his business partner from 2010 until they split in
2016. Cowley said he never heard Zaikin claim his family was persecuted, nor had
he heard Zaikin criticize the former Soviet Union.“That might be the
official line,” Cowley said.Instead, according to Cowley, Zaikin had said
his father was in the Soviet military or diplomatic corps.“When he was
with me, whoever I wanted to see, David would pick up the telephone and I got to
see him,” Cowley said, naming officials in Albania, Serbia and Guinea as
examples. “That doesn’t happen with some Jewish refugee out of Ukraine who
doesn’t know anybody.”Settling in Toronto, Zaikin was active in the
community of Jews from the former Soviet Union. He soon became a real estate
agent, eventually with an upscale brokerage. He marketed properties to Russian
buyers. He married a woman from St. Petersburg and had three children.In
2002, Zaikin started a side gig. He became chairman of Siberian Energy Group,
which was incorporated in Nevada and was listed over-the-counter on NASDAQ. The
company’s <a
href=https://web.archive.org/web/20080821140817/http://www.siberianenergy.com//s_18.asp>archived
website</a> notes Zaikin’s “extensive ties to Russia’s business community, as
well as to federal and regional government authorities.”Zaikin worked to
help the governor of the western Siberian province of Kurgan attract Western
investors for energy exploration and infrastructure, according to Tim Peara,
whom Zaikin hired to help raise money in the United Kingdom.“He did the
government of Kurgan a lot of favors in terms of helping to raise money for
them,” Peara said. The governor reported directly to President Vladimir Putin,
according to a company <a
href=https://www.energy-pedia.com/news/russia/baltic-oil-terminals-spuds-exploration-well>press
release</a>.The region’s prospects didn’t pan out: Zaikin’s company never
pumped a single barrel of oil or cubic foot of gas, according to <a
href=https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1301299/000143209311000218/siberian10k123110.htm>disclosures</a>
filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The SEC <a
href=https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1301299/000000000004033038/filename1.txt>repeatedly</a><a
href=https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1301299/000000000008014766/filename1.pdf>queried</a>
the company about its financial dealings, specifically about its payments to
Russian executives and consultants in shares and options whose values were
opaque or shifting.“We note that although you describe various
transactions utilizing common stock of the company, it is not clear from your
disclosures how the value of such stock for each transaction was determined,”
SEC officials wrote in one <a
href=https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1301299/000000000007046689/filename1.pdf>letter</a>.In
2006, Siberian Energy Group used shares worth $2.7 million to buy a Russian
company, Kondaneftegaz. Less than two years later, Zaikin’s company sold
significant stakes in Kondaneftegaz to two Russian investors for just $10 each.
Kondaneftegaz had actually been awarded two additional drilling licenses before
those sales, according to SEC reports.Zaikin previously told Politico
that he was “not involved” in that transaction, though his signature appears on
the <a
href=https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1301299/000133227706000635/siberian8k121306.txt>purchase</a>
and <a
href=https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1301299/000143209308000259/siberian8k093008.htm>sale</a>
agreements filed with the SEC.Zaikin obtained Siberian Energy Group’s
licenses at auctions that weren’t publicized and were only attended by people
who had government connections, according to a contractor for the company.
Zaikin’s lawyer refused to comment on this.“David was on the inside
track,” said Jordan Silverstein, who worked for a firm doing investor relations
for Siberian Energy Group. “He seemed like an international man of
mystery.”Zaikin’s business career continued to involve both Russian oil
work and Toronto real estate dealings. In 2005, Zaikin told the Globe and Mail
newspaper about a new development he was promoting: the Trump International
Hotel and Tower. The newspaper reported that Zaikin called his “top five
international clients” and four agreed to buy.“When this project was
announced I instantly became a strong believer that it would be a significant
winner,” Zaikin told the newspaper. “I have stayed at Trump Hotels and seen how
other similar projects went in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas.”Not long
after, Zaikin and several colleagues from Siberian Energy Group became directors
or shareholders of a mining company called RAM Resources, later First Iron
Group, according to corporate filings. First Iron’s board included the deputy
chairman of Russian state bank VEB, who had also been Putin’s deputy chief of
staff. The company was registered in the British isle of Jersey, a haven for
offshore companies.Other investors in the company were themselves
offshore firms, based in the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands
and elsewhere.According to Zaikin’s partner Cowley, who served on the
company’s board, the venture drew a takeover bid from Alisher Usmanov, an
Uzbek-born Russian iron oligarch. Usmanov’s representatives did not respond to a
request for comment.Cowley, an experienced mining executive who had
worked for other Russian oligarchs, said he was impressed by Zaikin’s global
political connections.A consulting firm that Zaikin and Cowley started
advertised Zaikin as having “a network of contacts with senior executives and
top government officials and Presidents in Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea,
Ethiopia, Albania, Sierra Leone, Mali, Liberia, Moldova, Ukraine, Kazakhstan,
[and] Romania.”By 2011, Zaikin had moved to London. He set up several
companies registered at his home address. One of them, EM Infrastructure Ltd.,
lists two names on a U.K. incorporation document: Neither is Zaikin’s. One is
his wife, a jewelry designer. The other is a Viktor Grabarouk, whose address is
listed as Zaikin’s home — though the same document states that he usually
resides in Belarus — and whose birthdate is listed as one day after Zaikin’s
own.A search of corporate records and the comprehensive British phonebook
showed no references to a Viktor Grabarouk.A few years later, Zaikin’s
career took yet another turn. After working in residential real estate and the
Russian energy sector, Zaikin became an adviser to the ruling parties in Turkey,
Albania and Macedonia. He also began working with those parties to set up
lobbying in the United States.Zaikin told Cowley he wanted to be “working
with the staffs of senators and high-profile people in the States,” Cowley
recalled. The two stopped working together as Zaikin focused more on
politics.Starting around 2015, Zaikin helped run pro-Turkish nonprofit
groups to lobby U.S. lawmakers, according to an American consultant who worked
with him, John Moreira. Alptekin, the Turkish businessman who later hired Flynn,
told Politico he worked with the main group Zaikin helped set up.In
August 2016, Alptekin signed a contract with Flynn for $600,000 to urge the U.S.
to turn over Fethullah Gülen, a cleric now in Pennsylvania whom Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses of trying to topple him.The
contract refers to Alptekin as “Capt. Ekim Alptekin.” Alptekin said he’s not a
captain and he doesn’t know why the contract calls him one.Flynn was paid
by a Dutch consulting firm that Alptekin owned called Inovo, according to
Flynn’s Justice Department disclosures. But records show Inovo had no
significant business activity in the three years before the Flynn deal. In fact,
the company was in debt for more than 125,000 euros in the months before paying
Flynn. Alptekin acknowledged in an interview that Inovo lacked sufficient funds
and said he used his own money to pay Flynn.Flynn’s firm ultimately
repaid $80,000 to Inovo. Alptekin has said it was a refund. Flynn’s filing with
the Justice Department called the payment a “consultancy fee.”Robert
Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian efforts to influence the
election, is interested in the source of Flynn’s lobbying income, according to a
person familiar with the probe. Mueller’s spokesman declined to
comment.While working on Turkey, Zaikin also facilitated lobbying and
political consulting deals for the Macedonian political party VMRO-DPMNE,
according to four people with direct knowledge of the activities. He did the
same for Albania’s Socialist Movement for Integration, known as LSI, according
to four people familiar with the arrangements. Zaikin introduced leaders of both
parties to American lobbyists and campaign advisers, the people
said.VMRO, like Turkey, historically aligns with the West but has
recently cozied up to the Kremlin. VMRO for months refused to leave power
despite failing to win enough seats in a December election to form a
parliamentary majority. The standoff put the party at odds with the U.S. State
Department, whereas it’s <a
href=http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/george-soros-russia-republicans-214938>received
forceful backing from the Russian Foreign Ministry</a>.Albania’s LSI and
its leader, Ilir Meta, are avowedly pro-Western but have sometimes clashed with
the State Department over the U.S.’s push to reform the country’s criminal
justice system.Around the same time Zaikin started getting more involved
in Eastern European and American politics, he and his wife repeatedly met with a
friend named Elena Baronoff who worked with the Trump Organization to sell
condos in Florida.On social media, Zaikin and Baronoff discussed plans to
meet and posted photos of themselves dining out in London. In October 2013,
Zaikin posted back-to-back photos of himself and Baronoff with the chef of a
French restaurant in the posh Mayfair neighborhood. Two weeks later, he tweeted
a photo of his wife and Baronoff hugging with the comment, “It was warm like in
Miami.”On another apparent visit, in July 2014, Baronoff posted to
Instagram a <a href=https://www.instagram.com/p/qXlh-5AChO/>photo</a> of herself
and Zaikin’s wife, Yana, on a London sidewalk and then a <a
href=https://www.instagram.com/p/qaJHu5ACs2/>photo</a> of the lobby of a
five-star hotel captioned, “with love to Yana and David Zaikin.”Baronoff
was born in Russia, earned degrees in journalism and mass communication, and
served as an official “cultural attaché in public diplomacy” for the Russian
government at an unspecified time, she said in interviews and bios. In 1989, she
moved to Iowa, then Florida.Starting with little means, Baronoff became a
travel agent and later a real estate agent. She <a
href=https://www.linkedin.com/in/elena-a-baronoff-25b9396/>wrote</a> on LinkedIn
that her diplomatic training was key to her success in “marketing and building
the brand of high-end luxury condominiums under the Trump brand.”By 2004,
Baronoff was Trump’s on-site director of customer relations for the Trump Grande
near Miami. She was photographed with Trump and his daughter Ivanka and
celebrated on the cover story of The Women’s City magazine as “<a
href=https://www.instagram.com/p/qkJlQfACsO/?taken-by=elenabaronoff>Donald
Trump’s Russian hand</a>.”As the exclusive agent for the Trump Grande
development, Baronoff sold 44 units to Russian buyers, according to an analysis
by Reuters. An undated <a
href=https://twitter.com/funder/status/873559866983534593>photo surfaced</a> on
Twitter showing Baronoff in Moscow with Trump’s children Ivanka, Eric and Don
Jr.Last month, Trump released a letter from his lawyers saying any of his
firm’s transactions with Russians were “immaterial,” though Donald Trump Jr.
said in 2008 that the company was seeing “a lot of money pouring in from
Russia.”Baronoff fell ill while traveling to Turkey in 2014 and was
diagnosed with leukemia. She died in 2015. Following her burial, her family
received visitors at the Trump International Beach Resort.Her son, George
Baronov, said his mother worked for Trump after first doing business with
Trump’s partner in Florida. “She was the in-house broker,” Baronov said. “She
did a lot of marketing and advertising and traveling around the world.” The
Moscow trip with Trump’s children was in 2003 or 2004, he said.Two years
before she died, Baronoff <a
href=https://wikileaks.org/berats-box/emailid/36106>worked on</a> a $28 million
Manhattan real estate deal with Turkish President Erdogan’s son and son-in-law,
according to hacked emails published by Wikileaks. The emails also showed the
son and son-in-law receiving updates about <a
href=https://wikileaks.org/berats-box/emailid/6424>Zaikin’s</a><a
href=https://wikileaks.org/berats-box/emailid/26646>lobbying</a><a
href=https://wikileaks.org/berats-box/emailid/11039>efforts</a>. In September
2016, as Flynn <a
href=https://www.fara.gov/docs/6406-Supplemental-Statement-20170307-1.pdf>later
disclosed</a>, Alptekin arranged a meeting between the same son-in-law and Flynn
himself.</div><link rel="canonical"
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