CNS News– An American company that paid the now-indicted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov in 2020 is connected to a UK company owned by Trump business associates in Dubai, according to business filings and court documents. Smirnov is currently accused of lying to the FBI about Hunter Biden and his father, President Joe Biden, alleging that they engaged in a bribery scheme with executives at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
His accounts to the FBI, which federal prosecutors now say are fabrications, served as a major justification for the House impeachment investigation into the Bidens. Republican lawmakers have repeatedly praised Smirnov as a reliable informant, with the chairman of the House oversight committee, James Comer, even threatening to hold the FBI director, Christopher Wray, in contempt unless he handed over a June 2020 FBI form with Smirnov’s claims to the committee.
In 2020, Smirnov was paid $600,000 by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT), prosecutors said. That same year, Smirnov began lying to the FBI about the Bidens, according to the indictment. ETT’s CEO, Christopher Condon, is also one of three shareholders in ETT Investment Holding Limited in London. Other shareholders in the UK include Pakistani American investor Shahal Khan and Farooq Arjomand, a former chairman and current board member of Damac Properties in Dubai who is also listed as an adviser on ETT’s American website.
Smirnov’s indictment alleged that the assertions in a document, known as a 1023, and other statements made to his FBI handler beginning in 2020 and continuing until December 2023, were factually impossible. The exact business model of Texas-based ETT is murky. Its mission statement reads in part: “ETT set up the chess board to bring in top-notch executives from those sectors to help implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘new age’ technologies.”
US firm that paid indicted FBI informant tied to Trump associates, records reveal https://t.co/EeV0X7cB4P
— Patrick Tucker (@DefTechPat) March 14, 2024
Condon, a California man, has been involved in several civil lawsuits, including a civil Rico case in 2010 that he won on appeal. His official biography says he is “a former professional tennis player, and financial advisor, and currently is an entrepreneur focused on social-impact projects, public-private partnerships, and creating smart communities that benefit both individuals and governments.”
Condon, Arjomand, and Khan registered ETT Investment Holding Limited in the UK on 6 March 2020. Khan, who owns Dubai-based Trinity White City Ventures, is a New York native who partnered with New York City developer Kamran Hakim to buy the Plaza Hotel in 2018 for $600m. He was a board member of ETT from 2019 to June 2020, according to his LinkedIn page, appearing in event photographs with Condon in Miami that year.
Arjomand, a former HSBC banker from the United Arab Emirates, also invests in hospitality businesses, including the celebrity Wahlberg brothers’ restaurant chain Wahlburgers, and owns a coffee company called Reborn Coffee. ETT Investment Holding Limited was dissolved in 2021. Condon and Arjomand also registered a company called Atlas UK Group Limited the same day they registered the UK ETT, now dissolved.
The American ETT, then called Pandora Venture Capital Corp, was first registered in Florida in 2014 by a Wisconsin resident, Boris Nayflish, according to Florida business filings. Ukrainian American Nayflish is the ex-husband of Smirnov’s current partner, Diana Lavrenyuk, according to a Wall Street Journal report, which also claimed Nayflish stayed close to his ex and Smirnov after the divorce.
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Smirnov, born in Ukraine, lived in Israel before coming to the US in 2006. An unnamed former business associate told the Wall Street Journal that the $600,000 payment from ETT to Smirnov was “in exchange for a stake in an Israel-based crypto trading platform, called Bitoftrade, [that] Smirnov was working on launching.”