Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Did Michael Cohen Get $500K Payoff From Jewish Oligarch?

The lawyer for adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who says she was paid $130,000 by Cohen to stay quiet about a sexual encounter with Trump, on Tuesday claimed that the longtime attorney for President Trump, Michael Cohen, received $500,000 from a Russian billionaire in the months after the 2016 election.

In a tweet and report released on Tuesday, Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti said a company controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, a Jewish oligarch with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, sent the payment to Cohen.

Reuters could not immediately verify the claim and it was not clear how Avenatti would have knowledge of any payment from Vekselberg to Cohen.

Avenatti said Vekselberg and his cousin, Andrew Intrater, made eight transfers to Cohen between January and August 2017 through a company called Columbus Nova LLC for a total of $500,000.

Columbus Nova is an U.S. investment arm of Renova Group, a conglomerate controlled by Vekselberg. Both Vekselberg and Renova were hit last month by U.S. sanctions for suspected meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and other alleged “malign activity.”

The New York Times reported last week that Vekselberg was questioned by agents working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year.

Avenatti also said he discovered four payments of just under $100,000 each by drugmaker Novartis to Essential Consultants, the same company used by Cohen to make payments to Daniels.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.