Rinat Akhmetshin

[6] He came to the American media's attention in July 2017 as a registered lobbyist for an organization run by Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya,[7] who, along with him, had a meeting with Donald Trump's election campaign officials in June 2016.

[4][5] According to his statements, from 1986 to 1988 Rinat Akhmetshin served as a draftee in a unit of the Soviet military that had responsibility for law enforcement issues as well as some counterintelligence matters and was briefly in Afghanistan.

[13] In 1998, he set up the Washington D.C. office of the International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research to "help expand democracy and the rule of law in Eurasia".

[14] He has been tied to lobbying for political opposition to Kazakhstan's ruling president Nursultan Nazarbayev, efforts to discredit former member of Russia's parliament Ashot Egiazaryan who fled to the U.S., as well as major corporate disputes.

[19] In 2013, both John Moscow and Mark Cymrot of BakerHostetler hired Glenn Simpson and Akhmetshin for support during the Bill Browder, Hermitage Capital and Sergey Magnitsky related case involving Prevezon and Preet Bharara.

[20][21] Previously, John Moscow of BakerHostetler represented Hermitage Capital interests for nine months beginning in September 2008 while Rengaz associated 2006 theft of tax rebates in Russia by a Russian criminal organization.

[22] Natalia Veselnitskaya represented Denis Katsyv's interests during the court cases related to Prevezon and also assisted the Glenn Simpson associated Fusion GPS during its research into Bill Browder.

[1][24] In 2011, Akhmetshin was hired by Andrey Vavilov to mount a media campaign in order to derail Egiazaryan's application for asylum in the United States.

[27] Also in 2011, Akhmetshin was employed by an alliance of businessmen led by Dagestani politician Suleyman Kerimov, a financier close to Putin who was in a commercial and political dispute with competitor Egiazaryan.

He said he gathered research for the firm by bartering information with journalists before he was fired because of his ties to another client, the former prime minister of Kazakhstan, who was then an opposition figure in exile.

[28][29] In July 2016, an article in Radio Free Europe stated: "Barely registering in U.S. lobbying records, the 48-year-old Akhmetshin has been tied to efforts to bolster opponents of Kazakhstan's ruling regime, discredit a fugitive former member of Russia's parliament, and undermine a Russian-owned mining firm involved in a billion-dollar lawsuit with company information allegedly stolen by hackers.