PAY DIRT

Kazakh Government Enlists Oversight Expert Days After Cohen Testimony

One new potential target of those House investigations just beefed up its lobbying muscle.

Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.

Congressional investigators picked up plenty of new leads during Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee last week. And in its immediate aftermath, one new potential target of those investigations beefed up its lobbying muscle with an apparent eye toward such a probe.

Committee Republicans grilled Cohen on his work for BTA Bank, a financial-services firm in Kazakhstan that hired Cohen in the early months of the Trump administration to help the bank recover billions of dollars that it claimed were stolen by a former executive and laundered in the United States. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) questioned Cohen about BTA Bank’s ties to the Kazakh government, which Meadows claimed owns a majority stake in the bank.

The government in fact sold off its 93 percent stake in the bank in 2014. But the Kazakh Ministry of Justice appears to have taken notice of Cohen’s testimony. Just four days after the hearing, the ministry’s D.C. lobbying firm, Greenberg Traurig, assigned a new employee to the account. Monica Schulteis will provide “advice and counsel related to foreign-relations issues, as well as educating the government and other opinion leaders regarding the same,” according to paperwork filed with DOJ.

According to her bio, Schulteis’ areas of expertise include “government oversight,” and she has “worked closely with many key policymakers in several House and Senate Congressional committees,” including the Oversight committee.

Schulteis did not respond to questions about her work for the Kazakh government.

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