Questions about Republican Rep. George Santos are not going away, in part because Santos and other Republicans are so conspicuously not answering them—but equally because new damaging information about Santos just keeps coming out, from his lies to his shady financial dealings. The latest? Santos appears to have more of a relationship than previously known with an investor with close ties to a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
It had already been revealed that Santos didn’t have the real estate portfolio he claimed as a candidate; that he hadn’t worked at the big-name financial institutions he claimed; that he worked at a company, Harbor City, that’s under investigation for being a Ponzi scheme; and that his own company, which supposedly paid him millions of dollars over its first two years in operation, has no real evidence of having made any meaningful money, let alone enough to pay Santos so lavishly. All that left big questions about how exactly Santos could afford to lend his campaign $700,000.
That’s a lot of asterisks on one man’s finances. But there’s more! One of Santos’ major campaign donors was a man named Andrew Intrater, a cousin of sanctioned Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. Not just incidentally a cousin of Vekselberg—Intrater’s own investment firm, Columbus Nova, has listed Vekselberg’s business, Renova Group, as its largest client, and Renova Group has listed Columbus Nova as one of its subsidiaries, though Columbus Nova has said it is not controlled by Vekselberg. Both Vekselberg and Intrater were drawn into the Mueller investigation of Russian ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, though neither was ultimately accused of wrongdoing.
So Intrater is a major Santos donor. That’s mildly interesting but doesn’t make the top 10 or 20 biggest eyebrow-raisers about Santos. The discovery of deeper ties between the two, though, gets more noteworthy.
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The Washington Post reports that Intrater and Santos seem to have had business dealings early on in Santos’ first attempt to run for Congress, back when he was still working for Harbor City, the Ponzi scheme. The Post got footage of an internal Harbor City Zoom meeting at which Santos claimed Columbus Nova as a client he’d hooked.
“You might know who they are,” Santos said on the recording. “They’ve made the news on several occasions. They were heavily involved with the Russia probe. Unjustified.”
If this sounds like Santos lying again, there’s reason for that: In Harbor City Zoom meetings viewed by the Post, he claimed ties to other prominent investors who denied any dealings with him. And more generally, we know by now that if Santos is claiming to have done something impressive, we should be asking if it’s a lie.
But an exhibit from the SEC case against Harbor City suggests that Santos may really have gotten Intrater to invest. Harbor City got “a $625,000 deposit from a company registered in Mississippi that identifies Intrater as its lone officer, according to an exhibit included in the SEC’s complaint against Harbor City. The alleged deposit, which is undated, is included in a chart that lists several entities that the SEC says made payments to Harbor City,” the Post reports.
In other words, the one time Santos may have been telling the truth was when he told fellow employees at a Ponzi scheme (he has not been alleged to be in on the scheme) that he had gotten the cousin/close business associate of a Russian oligarch to invest. Vekselberg and his company were already under sanction for at the time of Intrater’s 2020 investment in Harbor City, having been sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2018 for connection to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “malign activity around the globe.”
How did Santos get connected with Intrater before he was a serious candidate for anything and while he was working at a dubious company? Did he really convince Intrater to invest in a Ponzi scheme, or was Intrater’s company’s investment in Harbor City a total, freaky coincidence with Santos’ claim to have hooked Columbus Nova as a client? What’s the relationship between that and Intrater’s large campaign contributions to Santos in 2022? And, perhaps most significantly, what else is out there on this relationship?
It doesn’t look like the flood of questions about Santos is slowing anytime soon, and with his finances being the area of his lies most likely to lead to significant criminal or civil charges, new information about possible sources of shady money is particularly relevant.
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