His network of businesses extends from the United States to the city of Odesa, a Ukrainian Black Sea port notorious for corruption and organized crime.
Reporters found that Fruman has personal ties to a powerful local: Volodymyr “The Lightbulb” Galanternik, a shadowy businessman commonly referred to as the “Grey Cardinal” of Odesa.
Galanternik is described by local media and activists as a close associate of Gennadiy Trukhanov, the mayor of Odesa who was shown in the late 1990s to be a senior member of a feared organized criminal group involved in fuel smuggling and weapons trading.
Galanternik also owns a luxury apartment in the same London building as the daughter of another leader in the gang, Aleksander “The Angel” Angert, OCCRP has previously reported.
Vitaly Ustymenko, a local civic activist, describes Galanternik as an overseer of the clique’s economic domination of the city.
“[Galanternik] is not ‘one of the’ — he is actually the most powerful guy in Odesa, and maybe in the region,” Ustymenko said.
Fruman’s recent ex-wife, Yelyzaveta Naumova, is the self-declared best friend of Galanternik’s wife, Natasha Zinko, according to her Instagram posts. Galanternik and Zinko also celebrated the New Year in 2016 with the Frumans in South Florida, according to a photo posted online by an acquaintance of Fruman.
Galanternik’s name is seldom tied directly to his businesses. Instead he operates via a network of offshore companies and trusted proxy individuals. But there are signs that either Fruman or his long-standing local partner, Serhiy Dyablo, may have a business relationship with Galanternik via two Odesa firms (see box).
🔗FRUMAN’S ODESA TIES
Ukrainian records show what appears to be overlap between the web of businesses belonging to Fruman and his partner Dyablo and Galanternik’s empire.
Companies linked to Fruman include a New York-registered business, F.D. Import & Export. In Ukraine, Fruman jointly established a series of companies with Dyablo. Largely grouped under the brand name Otrada, the companies include a hotel, apartment buildings, a series of luxury boutiques, and a beach club on Odesa’s shoreline called “Mafia Rave.” Fruman is listed on Otrada Luxury Group’s website as its president and CEO.Fruman, Dyablo, and F.D. Import & Export previously held controlling stakes in many of these companies, but local registry documents show those holdings are mostly now under the ownership of Fruman’s ex-wife Naumova, Dyablo’s wife Inna, and a 74-year-old woman, Lyudmila Kalmykova.
Kalmykova appears to be a proxy shareholder. A reporter who visited several of the Otrada businesses found that employees had never heard of her, instead identifying Dyablo as their boss. Her relationship with the other shareholders is unknown, although members of Dyablo’s family are among her relatively low number of Facebook friends.
On paper, Kalmykova is in business with two long-standing business partners of Galanternik.
The two Galanternik partners are co-owners, along with Kalmykova, of a warehousing company on the outskirts of Odesa. One of those partners is also a co-owner, along with Kalmykova and another person, of a property development company that is registered in the same Odesa building as several of Fruman and Dyablo’s companies. That company began winding up in early July.
Reporters were unable to reach Kalmykova for comment.
In an interview, Parnas said that Fruman and Galanternik knew each other through their wives, but said there were no business connections between the two men.
Galanternik and Fruman did not respond to written questions. Neither Dyablo nor Naumova responded to multiple requests for interviews.
“Where is the money coming from?”
Parnas and Fruman’s work with Giuliani was just one part of a broader foray into U.S. politics.
In 2018, the men made hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to Republican causes while enjoying VIP access to party and Trump administration circles.
Filings with the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) show that Fruman and Parnas spread their money widely.
Fruman kicked off the effort on Feb. 20, giving $2,700 each to two pro-Trump groups, Trump Victory and Donald J. Trump for President.
Less than two weeks later, Fruman and Parnas attended a fundraiser for Trump’s re-election at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
This was followed by a several-month-long spree of donations — of a total value of at least $576,500 — to campaigns including the successful 2018 Senate bid of former Florida governor Rick Scott, and the re-elections of Texas Representative Pete Sessions and South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson. All are Republicans.
The lion’s share of these donations, however, was just one $325,000 payment, made on May 17, 2018, to America First Action. The group is one of the largest pro-Trump Super Political Action Committees (commonly known as Super PACs), a kind of outside campaign organization that is allowed to raise unlimited funds in support of a candidate, but is barred from working directly with their campaign.
That payment was declared as coming from a Delaware company, Global Energy Producers LLC, set up by Fruman and Parnas just weeks before as part of their plan to sell gas to Ukraine.
The donation is subject to an ongoing complaint to the FEC by the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, alleging the company is likely a shell intended to hide other donors.
Parnas said the complaint was unfounded. “We have a real business,” he said.
Parnas said the contributions were designed to get the attention of key lawmakers at a time he and Fruman were launching their gas export business. “We’ve got a business. We just want to get recognized,” he said.
However, Parnas and Fruman’s plans to sell American gas to Ukraine has so far not borne fruit. In response to inquiries, Naftogaz, Ukraine’s natural gas monopoly, said that Global Energy Producers has not participated in any tenders to sell gas to Ukraine and has concluded no contracts. The company’s website contains only a countdown timer that has already reached zero.
The donation ascribed to Global Energy Producers in fact came from the bank account of another company belonging to Parnas. Days earlier, that company had received a wire transfer of $1.26 million from the trust fund of a Florida lawyer who specializes in real estate, court records show.
Parnas said that money came from the sale of a Florida condominium, but did not provide documents to back up his claim.
Within months of Parnas and Fruman’s six-figure donations, and even as their work with Giuliani began, allegations emerged in a public lawsuit in Florida that they had jilted an early investor in their Ukraine gas venture.
Felix Vulis, the head of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, a firm owned by a trio of Kazakhstani oligarchs, asserted that Parnas and Fruman had failed to repay a two-month $100,000 loan he had given to Global Energy Producers earlier in the year. The two men had boasted about their relationship with Guiliani and other influential figures while asking for the loan, according to the complaint.
Vulis has yet to be paid, according to his lawyer, Robert Stok.
The men said “they had all this influence,” Stok said. “They said Trump and his associates were going to back their company. That they had direct access to the White House.”
Tony Andre, a Florida lawyer who has been trying to collect the $500,000 movie deal judgement against Parnas, also expressed astonishment at what he sees as the businessman’s brazenness.
“Someone takes a half million dollars from you and he’s hanging with the president and the president’s lawyer,” Andre said.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “Where is the money coming from?”
Dinner with the President
Amid their donation spree, Parnas and Fruman took part in an impressive series of meetings with senior Republicans.
On or about May 1, 2018, while staying at the Trump International Hotel in the U.S. capital, both men had dinner with the president in a meeting documented by Parnas in a now-deleted Facebook post.
Later that month, the two men had a “power breakfast” in Beverly Hills with Donald Trump Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., who has since become co-chair of the Republican National Committee, according to a now-deleted Facebook post by Parnas. At the time, Hicks was head of America First Action, which had received the men’s $325,000 donation in the same month.
Parnas also had meetings in May on Capitol Hill with several Republican congressmen.
Among them was Sessions, the Texas Republican, according to a now-deleted May 9 Facebook post by Parnas. In a meeting also attended by Fruman, the two men urged the dismissal of the United States’ ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch.
On the same day that Parnas posted pictures of the meeting, Sessions wrote a private letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling for Yovanovitch’s dismissal.
Parnas said he and Fruman told Sessions that Yovanovitch was disloyal to the president and questioned whether she should serve. “She was bad-mouthing our president about getting impeached,” said Parnas.
Sessions, however, said he had been the one to bring up concerns about Yovanovitch with Parnas and Fruman, but that he could not remember when or where the discussion took place.
“I do know both these gentlemen,” Sessions said. “They are Republicans. They are people who have an interest in foreign affairs. They have a strong interest in America not backing away from Ukraine.”
The next month, Parnas and Fruman donated a total of $5,400 to Sessions’ unsuccessful 2018 re-election campaign, FEC records show.
Yovanovitch stepped down this May following a flurry of negative stories about her in the conservative media, which included the publication in The Hill of a leaked copy of Sessions’ letter. The press blitz also included frequent reference to Lutsenko’s inflammatory allegations against the ambassador.
THE YOVANOVITCH FALLOUT
Ambassador Yovanovitch’s departure from Kyiv was politically charged.
According to the State Department, her rotation in Ukraine had simply ended. But Congressional Democrats and veterans of the diplomatic corps have said she had become a partisan target who was pulled from her job two months early.
The affair hurt the United States’ relationship with Ukraine, said Nina Jankowicz, a Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute.
"[Yovanovitch’s retirement] was a clear indication Trump was using Ukraine as a political football and that he wasn’t concerned about its democratic future,” Jankowicz said.
“To take the word of a corrupt foreign prosecutor general over a career diplomat — one who has served both Republicans and Democrats — is an affront to the Foreign Service and undermines the credibility of our diplomats everywhere.”
Given Parnas and Fruman’s relationships with senior Ukrainian officials and their business interests in the country, their lobbying against a U.S. ambassador raises questions about their compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The act requires Americans operating on behalf of a foreign entity in the United States to declare their work to the Department of Justice. Parnas and Fruman did not do so.
Their lobbying of Sessions raises “the thorniest red flag,” said Ron Oleynik, a Washington attorney who advises clients on FARA compliance. “That, to me, is clearly trying to influence an office of the United States toward Ukraine.”
Parnas, however, said they acted on their own accord.
“I just kept hearing [about Yovanovitch] from different people,” he said.
Introduction to an Oligarch
After setting up meetings between Giuliani and Ukrainian prosecutors, Parnas and Fruman set their sights on connecting with Ukraine’s new president, former television comic Zelensky.
As Zelensky stormed to a landslide victory in the April election, Parnas and Fruman flew to Israel to meet Ihor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch who is alleged to have stolen $5.5 billion from the country’s largest private bank. Earlier that month, the Daily Beast reported that Kolomoisky, who is a key Zelensky backer, was under FBI investigation for financial crimes.
Fruman and Parnas were introduced to the oligarch by Alexander Levin, another pro-Trump Ukrainian-American businessman, on the pretence that they wanted to talk about their plan to sell gas to Ukraine, Kolomoisky said in an interview.
However, once inside the meeting, the two men told Kolomoisky that they wanted his help getting in touch with Zelensky, in order to help set up a meeting between Giuliani and the president-elect.
Offended, Kolomoisky said, he then stormed out of the meeting.
“I told them I am not going to be a middleman in anybody’s meetings with Zelensky,” Kolomoisky said. “Not for them, not for anybody else. They tried to say something like, ‘Hey, we are serious people here. Giuliani. Trump.’ They started throwing names at me.”
In response to inquiries, Levin said of Parnas and Fruman: “I met these gentlemen for the first time in March of 2019. I have no information about what they have done in the past, or what they have done since they met with me. I plan no involvement with them in the future.”
“I broke no laws and any suggestion otherwise constitutes slander.”
Despite the debacle in Israel, Parnas and Fruman continued their efforts to connect Giuliani with Zelensky. By mid-May, in the lead-up to Zelensky’s inauguration, both men were in Kyiv, staying in the city’s Hilton as they set up appointments around town.
The official reason for Giuliani’s visit was to give a paid speech for American Friends of Anatevka, a New York-based charity run by Fruman that supports the reconstruction of a Jewish village outside of Kyiv that was the setting of the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” The meeting with Zelensky was intended to take place on the sidelines of the event.
Though Giuliani cancelled his trip, Parnas and Fruman managed to hold meetings with two figures close to Zelensky: Serhiy Shefir, who has since been appointed as an aide to the president, and Ivan Bakanov, now acting head of Ukraine’s secret police. The meetings failed to lead to a meeting between Giuliani and Zelensky.
The two men also held a meeting with Ukraine’s national gas monopoly, Naftogaz, in order to pitch their plan to sell liquified natural gas (LNG) to the country, company spokeswoman Aliona Osmolovska confirmed in response to reporters’ questions.
“Among other initiatives, we had meetings with a number of potential suppliers of LNG. In this context, we have been approached by Mr. Parnas and Mr. Furman [sic], and met them,” Osmolovska wrote.
While Parnas and Fruman were in Kyiv, Kolomoisky, who had just returned from years of exile abroad, gave an impromptu interview to a local media outlet where he denounced the men as “scammers” and said he would take them “into daylight soon.”
Giuliani responded quickly. In a series of tweets, he labeled Kolomoisky a “notorious oligarch.”
“This is real test for President [Zelensky],” Giuliani tweeted. “Will [Kolomoisky] be arrested?”
Parnas and Fruman responded by filing a criminal complaint with Ukrainian police, alleging that Kolomoisky had threatened their lives. They also lodged a defamation suit against the oligarch, their lawyer Alina Samarets said.
Giuliani personally joined at least one call to discuss the case, Samarets said.
Despite these setbacks, Parnas told reporters that his and Fruman’s work in Ukraine would continue.
“It’s all going to come out.”
From reporting by Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
https://www.occrp.org/en/investigati...ump-in-ukraine