A report released by the Government Accountability Office in 2000 reveals details of how companies in the U.S. set up bank accounts that came under investigation for money laundering – and it involved Ike Kaveladze, the eighth person who has now been identified as attending the June 9, 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr., his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had with a Russian lawyer, CNN reports.
The GAO report published in October 2000 outlined how companies opened 236 accounts at two banks through which more than $1.4 billion was deposited between 1991 and 2000. It found the accounts had been opened for corporations tied to Russian brokers. The GAO did not name Kaveladze in the report.
According to a November 2000 report in the New York Times, Kaveladze opened the accounts. He told the Times at the time that the GAO investigation was a “witch hunt” and denied he engaged in any wrongdoing. He was never charged with any crimes.
In a statement posted to his Facebook page on Tuesday night, former Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan said Kaveladze established companies and set up bank accounts that came under congressional investigation for possible money laundering.
Levin said that while serving as the senior Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he learned in the year 2000 that Kaveladze, the eighth person identified as being present at the meeting at Trump Tower, established “some 2,000” U.S. corporations and bank accounts on “behalf of people in Russia.”
“The owners of those accounts then moved some $1.4 billion through those accounts,” he wrote in the post. “Kaveladze claimed he did all this without knowing for whom he was doing it.”
He called Kaveladze the “poster child of this practice.”
Be the first to comment