16/06/17 15:20

Felix Sater (Felix Mikhailovich Sheferosvsky) is one of the more colorful characters in the list of Trump business associates. Born in the Soviet Union, his Jewish family immigrated to Brighton beach to escape persecution when he was 8 years old. Described as a “mob-connected hustler”Felix Sater is an American real estate executive, stock broker, business advisor with longstanding ties to the Trump Organization.
He started his career as a stockbroker and lost his trading license in 1991 after he got into a bar brawl and stabbed a man in the neck with a broken Margarita glass. That incident also landed him in prison for a year. According to Sater, after prison, he was broke and desperate and hooked up with a boyhood friend running a Mafia-linked brokerage firm. In 1998, Sater pled guilty to racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme. In order to get a lenient sentence, Sater became an FBI informant. This was reportedly unknown to Trump when he hired Sater as it was kept secret by prosecutors because of his role as an informant.
According to Sater, he changed his career to real estate and became a senior advisor to several corporations in hotels, oil and investing. He worked for Turkish hotel in 2005 and spent time advising a construction company in Istanbul Turkey. In 2008 he joined a Russian real estate company as an advisor to Sergei Polonosky and in 2009 he became a managing director in Global Habitat Solutions an energy and infrastructure conglomerate. He was also a senior advisor of TxOil, an oil company based in Turkmenistan.
Sater met Trump in 2003 when Trump was attempting to expand his business globally and was transitioning his business model to licensing agreements. At that time, Sater was a managing director at a real estate company called Bayrock. Bayrock’s principle partner Tevifik Arif, served 17 years in the Soviet government before emigrating to the United states and had attractive clients for Trump to consider. Sater also became a Trump business partner in the Trump SoHo hotel-condiminium in NYC that was sued for fraud by it’s buyers and charged with $250 million tax evasion scam in a separate case.
In a sworn testimony, Sater said he served as a senior Trump advisor in a variety of deals including represented Trump in Russia to develop licensing deals in Moscow. Sater worked two floors beneath Trump in Trump Tower, carried a Senior Advisor business card, yet Trump claims he wouldn’t be able to recognize Sater “If he were sitting in the room right now.”
Although Trump denies knowing him well or at all, in January, Sater set up a meeting between Andrei Artemenko (a Ukrainian Lawmaker, who sees himself as the future leader of Ukraine) and Michael Cohen (Trump’s personal attorney) The intent of the meeting was to give Michael Cohen a Pro-Russian peace deal for Ukraine and ask him to deliver it to the White House. According to Sater he “was only trying to stop a war” in linking Andrei Artemenko with Cohen.

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