On Tuesday afternoon, Michael Avenatti, the attorney for adult-film star Stormy Daniels, claimed that a shell company set up by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer to funnel hush-money to Daniels had also received more than $2 million from several multi-nationals with business before the Trump administration, not to mention an investment firm with ties to a Russian oligarch. Almost immediately, multiple media outlets including CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal confirmed the payments, leaving the companies little choice but to cop to having written very large checks to Cohen’s fortuitously-named Essential Consultants LLC. And their excuses for doing so are not particularly good!

Essential Consultants LLC is not really a company, just like Michael Cohen is not exactly a lawyer. The shell company, which Cohen set up in Delaware shortly before the election to silence Daniels, does not appear to have a Web site or any employees. (Financial records describe it as a “real-estate consulting company that collects fees for investment-consulting work.”) Cohen, meanwhile, has so few clients that federal prosecutors recently challenged him in court to prove that he really is a lawyer, and not merely the president’s fixer. (To do so, Cohen named Trump, Republican lobbyist Elliott Broidy, and Fox News host Sean Hannity as clients, the latter of whom effectively denied that Cohen had ever done any real work for him.) In fact, Cohen’s main business interests appear to be flipping real estate, setting up medical companies that are later indicted for insurance fraud, buying and selling taxi medallions on which he reportedly owes hundreds of thousands in unpaid taxes, and facilitating hush payments to women on behalf of Trump.

So what exactly were multi-national conglomerates with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and hundreds of thousands of employees, paying Cohen to do? In a statement, AT&T—which is currently fending off an anti-trust lawsuit by the Department of Justice—said that its $200,000 in payments were made in order to gain “insights into understanding the new administration” and that they involved “no legal or lobbying work for us.” The pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG said its $1.2 million payment with Cohen was “focused on U.S. health-care policy matters” and, in any event, the deal was struck by its former C.E.O., with its new C.E.O. having zero “involvement” in it. (“Wow—he’s a doctor as well!!” Avenatti wrote on Twitter. “Very talented guy this Mr. Cohen.”)

Yes, it appears that Cohen is indeed a multi-talented renaissance man with “insights” into all sorts of industries. South Korea’s Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd (K.A.I.), which is currently bidding for a multi-billion-dollar contract with the U.S. Air Force, says it paid Cohen $150,000 for “accounting advice.” And Columbus Nova, the company whose biggest investor is owned by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, has said it paid Cohen half a million dollars to act “as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.” Before anyone gets any crazy ideas about what was really going on, however, all of the companies would like it to be known that their payments were strictly of the legal variety. In fact, K.A.I. took pains to assure reporters that everything was aboveboard. “We received advice from Mr Cohen’s entity on local accounting standards and the payment to the entity was legal,” a spokesperson told the Financial Times. Case-closed! No further questions!