He’s the man whose illicit foreign influence peddling is “among the most wide ranging ever prosecuted,” according to the government. Yet most people don’t even know his name. Imaad Zuberi attracted the spotlight when The Daily Beast identified his million-dollar donation to the Trump inaugural committee and his questionable foreign connections. Zuberi later appeared as a bit player in federal prosecutors’ investigation of the inaugural committee’s fundraising. That investigation into Trumpworld fizzled but the investigation into Zuberi revealed a trail of corruption stretching back years.
On Thursday, a federal judge sentenced Zuberi to 12 years in prison for a stunning campaign of illegal lobbying that included a quarter-million dollars worth of illegal campaign contributions, straw donations to American campaigns on behalf of foreign donors, and skipping out on the tax tab when it came time to account for the money it brought him. So who’s Imaad Zuberi and how did he practice the dark art of foreign influence peddling?
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Paulie two times: The heart of the government’s allegations against Zuberi is that he failed to register as a foreign agent when carrying out lobbying on behalf of his clients in Bahrain, Turkey, Libya, Ukraine, and Pakistan. Then he lied about the fortune it made him when it came time to pay his taxes.
If that sounds familiar, it should. The vast scale of Zuberi’s covert foreign lobbying (“among the most wide ranging ever prosecuted” according to the government), his attempts to cozy up to the Trump campaign, and his tax dodges are reminiscent of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, as prosecutors noted in their sentencing memos.
But Zuberi also did something Manafort didn’t. He acted as a cutout on behalf of foreign donors and funneled their money into American campaign coffers—without the knowledge of the recipients—only to be reimbursed later.
In an email to The Daily Beast, Zuberi’s attorneys declined to comment.
Going to the well: Ukraine’s abundance of crooked oligarchs with legal problems made it a magnet for lobbyists looking for clients with plenty of money, few scruples, and an interest in extracting political favors from Western officials.
It proved the downfall for Paul Manafort after his multimillion-dollar illegal lobbying scheme unraveled—and it certainly didn’t help Zuberi.
Much like Manafort, Zuberi also rubbed elbows with Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian gas baron now living in exile in Austria after federal prosecutors indicted him on corruption charges. The mafia-linked gas baron popped up several times in the Trump era, including when Rudy Giuliani reportedly approached Firtash looking for dirt on the Biden family as part of a Ukrainian fishing expedition which landed Trump his first impeachment.
Firtash made his billions as a middleman for Russian gas exports to Ukraine, a role which allowed Moscow to pressure officials in Kyiv whenever they strayed too far towards the West and helped win Firtash the favor of the Kremlin. In 2008, Firtash explored the idea of buying New York’s Drake Hotel with Manafort, who made a mint on fees from the Firtash-backed pro-Russia Party of Regions.
But when American prosecutors hit Firtash with corruption charges and a revolution swept his favored party out of power, Firtash turned to Zuberi (among others) to help him clean up his image and hold onto power in Ukraine. Prosecutors say Firtash paid Zuberi a total of $1 million for the effort, which allegedly included “unregistered lobbying activities” aimed at convincing members of Congress that the Justice Department was pursuing Firtash as part of a political score-settling rather than anti-corruption. (According to the government, Zuberi used $650,000 of the Firtash funds to put in his personal brokerage accounts, $174,000 towards his credit card debt, and nearly $40,000 to buy a BMW.)
Zuberi also tried to throw Firtash a life raft in the form of a proposed “Ukraine Development Fund.” The fund would ostensibly help with Ukraine’s energy needs and development after a revolution and Russian invasion had thrown the country into crisis, but in reality, prosecutors say, the fund “would allow [Firtash’s company] to profit in Ukraine” after his allies in the Party of Regions were ousted from power.
Mercenary for hire: Zuberi came to the attention of prosecutors in part because of his fundraising with the Trump inaugural committee, which caught the attention of federal prosecutors in New York looking into whether the Trump campaign had broken any campaign finance laws.
But during the Obama years, he was happy to give to prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a number of Democratic members of Congress. Zuberi, prosecutors argued, was “purely a mercenary, funneling money to whomever he believed would do his bidding” and not an operator driven by principle or ideology.
Zuberi’s mercenary influence-peddling didn’t always benefit his clients. In addition to cheating the American campaign finance system, Zuberi also shook down other participants in the influence industry. "Many of the lobbyists, public relations consultants, and other subcontractors also suffered losses when defendant Zuberi” stiffed them on contracts, prosecutors said.
When the government of Sri Lanka hired Zuberi to do public relations for it in the U.S., it shelled out $6.5 million for the campaign—Zuberi ended up pocketing $5.65 million of the money for personal use and didn’t report the money on his taxes, according to the government.
In another notable case, Zuberi siphoned off 90 percent of the $7 million investors had put into a company, U.S. Cares, designed to export food and humanitarian goods to Iran. Zuberi used the money to buy real estate and pay off a mortgage and credit card debt.
Prosecutors also say Zuberi used a fictitious employee, Renee Wu, to lie to investors that interest in U.S. Cares was so high investment slots were in short supply and about to fill up. In court documents, Zuberi’s attorneys’ disputed the government’s claim that Wu was a fictitious alter-ego and said she was instead a “part-time assistant from China” and that “the mere fact that the government has not spoken to a person who knows Renee Wu does not prove that she is not a real person.”
WhatsApp text records from the case, recently unsealed by a judge, showed Zuberi believed that the pay-to-play lifestyle he lived by was simply the way of the world. In one exchange, he told an associate to buy a copy of Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, a piece of conservative activist agitprop meant as a warning about the alleged corrupt ways of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Zuberi, however, took the book more as an instruction manual than a tale of moral peril. Zuberi told the man that he “must read” the book. “This is how America work[s]. How Washington work[s].”
