Abramovich, Roman

Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya, who features in the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, in which she is alleged to have offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton, represented Prevezon Holdings Ltd. in the money laundering case brought forth by former New York Southern District Attorney Preet Bharara. After Bharara was dismissed by Trump, Prevezon was allowed to pay a $6 million fine in May 2017 to avoid criminal prosecution. The owner of Prevezon is Denis Katsyv, another Israeli citizen, whose father Pyotr was a high municipal official in Moscow. In 2005, the same Katsyv reached a similar settlement with Israeli authorities, paying a fine of 35 million shekels after being indicted for money laundering at a Tel Aviv branch of Bank Hapoalim. The Cyprus-registered Prevezon was managed for a while by a Tel Aviv lawyer, who also represented the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Lev Leviev

Katsyv partnered with the Dutch branch of Africa-Israel Ltd., which belongs to Russian-Israeli diamond and real estate mogul Lev Leviev. Leviev’s apartments in New York were alleged to have served as a conduit for Prevezon’s money laundering. In 2015, Leviev sold four stories of the old New York Times building in Manhattan to Jared Kushner for $295 million, secured through a loan from Deutsche Bank, which is also being probed by Mueller.

Roman Abramovich

Leviev and Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club who has recently run into visa problems with British authorities, teamed up in 1999 to set up the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia (FOR). They were responding to a request by Vladimir Putin to set up a group that would rival the Russian Jewish Congress, headed by Israeli-Russian oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, who was close to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The head of the FOR is Italian-Russian Chabad Rabbi Berel Lazar. In April 2017, Politico alleged that Chabad and FOR were used by the Kremlin as conduits for their efforts to influence the U.S. elections. The report was denied and even dismissed as anti-Semitic. Interestingly, a BBC story published this week about payments made to Michael Cohen by Ukraine in order to secure a long White House meeting with Trump for Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko notes that the approach to Trump’s lawyer was made via the Chabad branch in Port Washington, New York.

The Family

Ivanka Trump

The “first daughter” is so tight with Dasha Zhukova, the wife of Russian oligarch and Putin ally Roman Abramovich, that she reportedly invited Zhukova to attend her father’s inauguration. Ivanka has also helped her father pursue business deals in the former Soviet bloc. In 2006, Donald Trump asked formerly “Mafia-linked” businessman Felix Sater to “squire” Ivanka and her older brother, Don Jr., around Moscow, according to the Washington Post. And Ivanka was deeply involved with a failed effort to build a Trump Hotel in Azerbaijan, where the Trumps had joined forces with a family whom a government minister had accused of corruption and who had possible ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

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Until recently, oligarch was a byword forRoman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea FC.

But over the last 12 months, a 40-year-old metals tycoon, has dominated the headlines.

According to Forbes magazine, in May he overtook Abramovich as Russia's richest man, with a $28.6bn (£16.8bn) fortune.

His extraordinary wealth is based on the ownership of the world's leading aluminium company.

In an interview with the Guardian last year, he shrugged off the suggestion he was very well off. Asked how much he was worth, he replied: "I don't know." Recently, he has been a high-profile victim of the credit crisis.

Deripaska's friendship with British politicians has placed him at the centre of controversy. He has met the business secretary, Peter Mandelson, when Mandelson was the EU's trade commissioner.

Moscow's Pushkin cafe, an elite pre-revolutionary restaurant favoured by Russia's elite, was one dinner venue.

Also present, according to a political blog written by Mandelson's former special adviser Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, was Nathaniel Rothschild, a friend not only of Mandelson but of the shadow chancellor, George Osborne.

According to today's Times newspaper, Rothschild says Deripaska entertained Osborne on his yacht in Corfu last summer.

Andrew Feldman, the Tory party's chief fundraiser, was there. Feldman tried to solicit a £50,000 donation for the Tories from Deripaska, it is alleged, though this is denied.