Trump, Aras Agalarov, and Miss Universe 2013 Gabriela Isler after the Miss Universe pageant at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow Nov. 9, 2013.

A US company owned by President Donald Trump’s Russian business partner was under criminal investigation in the early 2000s, according to records reviewed by BuzzFeed News.



Aras Agalarov, the Russian developer who paid Trump $20 million to stage the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, was the largest owner of a small Connecticut company that the IRS criminally investigated in 2000 and 2001, the records show.

The investigation began around the same time that IRS auditors found that the company, Comtek Expositions Inc., had paid $44,000 in income taxes over two years when it should have paid $9.3 million, according to records. No criminal charges were filed, but a US Tax Court judge ruled in 2003 that Comtek had vastly understated its income and owed the IRS taxes, interest, and penalties. An appeals court panel upheld the ruling in 2004. It’s unclear if the tax was paid. The IRS declined to comment, as did lawyers for Comtek and Agalarov.

The IRS scrutiny occurred at least a decade before any known contact between Agalarov and Trump, but the episode provides insight into Agalarov’s start as a businessman after the Soviet Union’s collapse, before he became a billionaire developer with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Agalarov is a key figure in the Trump-Russia investigations. He instigated the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting at which Donald Trump Jr. expected to receive incriminating information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer by telling his son Emin that a Russian official had offered incriminating records on Clinton. Emin’s representative Rob Goldstone set up the meeting with Trump Jr.

Two years after the Miss Universe pageant, Aras Agalarov explored building a Trump Tower in Moscow that would have paid Donald Trump millions of dollars. The project never materialized, but special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating it, according to news reports.

The intelligence dossier on Trump and Russia compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele says Agalarov “has been closely involved with Trump in Russia” and “would know the details” of Trump’s activities, including bribes Trump allegedly paid. The assertion is unproven, and Trump has dismissed the dossier, which Democrats paid for in 2016.

The IRS criminal investigation focused on the owners of Comtek, a company that Agalarov and three others created in 1990 to recruit exhibitors for trade shows in Russia focused on computers and electronics, court records show. Agalarov owned one-third of Comtek, company records show. His three business partners — all Russian immigrants living in the New York City area — owned the remainder.

The scope of the criminal investigation is unclear. But tax court records suggest IRS criminal investigators were probing the relationship between Comtek stockholders and an Irish company with Russian connections that helped Comtek stage trade shows in Moscow’s Expo Center and elsewhere.

The Irish company, ECI Management Services, “had associations with prominent Russian businessmen with access to space at the Expo Center,” according to a document Comtek filed in tax court. These ties were vital to Comtek because the Expo Center was “controlled by Kremlin and Russian businessmen,” Comtek said.

In 1995, Comtek signed a deal with ECI in order to “secure continued preferential access to space at the Expo Center,” according to Comtek’s filing. Under the deal, ECI received 75% of trade-show revenues and Comtek, 25%.

Comtek told the tax court that “it believed the [criminal] investigation may have been related to its stockholders’ relationships with ECI or its owners,” tax court judge Renato Beghe wrote in his 2003 ruling.