of legal cases. This is the only one that involved Russia. And in the course of any legal case, you know, various people are retained by a law firm to perform various services. So you would meet other subcontractors in the course of doing legal work. That's common.
Q. What types of services would they tend to be providing?
A. Translators would be common, in this case particularly. Forensic people, accountants, PR people, all those services are facets of modern litigation.
Q. And to the best of your knowledge, did Fusion ever work with any other contractors hired by Prevezon Holdings?
A. I'm sorry. Could you repeat that?
Q. Sure. I asked if Fusion had hired any subcontractors that you worked with on the Prevezon matter, whether Baker hired anyone that you worked with. Now I'm wondering did you work with anyone hired directly through Prevezon on this as opposed to Baker Hostetler?
A. It's difficult to give a yes or no answer to that. I would have to say I think so, but when you're a subcontractor to a law firm, you know, you're sort of in a lane and, you know, my lane was research, discovery, William Browder's business practices, his activities in Russia, his history of avoiding taxes.
So people—other people, you know, in a big case come and go and it's not really my position to ask, you know, who hired them and why. Generally if I'm introduced to somebody they'll explain, you know, why there were other lawyers who worked for Prevezon who were part of the case. Other people were brought in—you know, were brought in either by Prevezon or by the lawyers and I didn't always try to pin that down.
Q. In general would the decision whether you would share Fusion's information with them be dependent then upon the attorneys introducing you to them?
A. It would be dependent on the direction of the attorneys. I basically—you know, in all these cases for reasons of privilege and simply just professionalism you work at the direction of the lawyers and you do what they instruct you to do.
Q. Did anyone from Fusion ever help arrange for other entities to be hired by Prevezon or Baker Hostetler for the Prevezon case?
A. I don't think you could say we arranged for others to be hired. If you're asking me if we made referrals, we would refer—you know, we made quite extensive—fairly extensive efforts to get a PR firm hired for the trial that we were expecting and we made a number of referrals in that case, in that matter.
Q. What was the name of that PR firm?
A. There were several. We actually, you know, had a series of screening sessions. I think Weber Shandwick was the one we ended up with.
Q. You mentioned that Fusion was conducting litigation support in regard to the Prevezon case. Could you expand a little more about what type of litigation support activities you undertook?
MR. LEVY: Beyond what he's already told you?
MR. DAVIS: With a little more detail.
BY THE WITNESS:
A. Yes. In the original period of the case the question—the client's explanation for or response to the government's allegations was that they originated with an organized crime figure in Russia who had been extorting them and who they had reported to the police and who had been jailed and convicted for blackmailing them, and they claimed that that was where these allegations originated, which, you know, seemed remarkable because it was in a Justice Department complaint.
So the first thing, you know, in any case really is to sort of try and figure out whether your own client's story can be supported or whether it's not true, and the lawyers—you know, we work with a lot of prominent law firms and in many cases the first thing the lawyers need to know is whether their client's story is real, whether it can be supported, you know, because in any new case you don't know whether your own client is telling you the truth.
So originally one of the first things we were hired to do was to check out whether this was, in fact, the case. So they claimed that the allegations originated with a mobster named Demetri Baranovsky, B-A-R-A-N-O-V-S-K-Y, who was, in fact, jailed for running a shake-down operation in which he posed as an anticorruption campaigner for the purpose of extorting money from people by threatening to accuse them of some kind of corrupt activities. As you know, Russia is rife with corruption and there's a lot of anger over corruption.
We were able to ascertain that Mr. Baranovsky was, in fact, associated with Russia's biggest organized crime family, the Solntsevo Brotherhood, S-O-L-N-T-S-E-V-O brotherhood, which is the major dominant mafia clan in Moscow. So as far as it went, the client seemed to be telling the truth. You know, there was extensive record of these events and we found some indications from western law enforcement that western law enforcement did consider Baranovsky to be a lieutenant in this organized crime family. So we did that for a while. Edward Baumgartner helped a lot with that because of his Russian language skills and his ability to interface with the court system in Russia.
And, you know, around the—similarly, there was a deposition of a customs agent by one of the lawyers who—you know, in this initial effort to trace the origin of these allegations, where they came from, how they could have ended up with the Justice Department, the first thing we did was interview the client, got their story, and interviewed the agent who worked on the case for the DOJ and that agent said he got all his information from William Browder.
So at that point I was asked to help see if we could get an interview with William Browder. They wrote a letter to Browder and asked him to answer questions and he refused. Then the lawyers wanted to know, you know, whether he could be subpoenaed. So a lot of what I did in 2014 was help them figure out whether he could be subpoenaed in the United States to give a deposition, and the first thing that we did was we researched the ownership and registration of his hedge fund, which was registered in Delaware and filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
So we subpoenaed his hedge fund. A lot of the early work I did was just documenting that his hedge fund had presence in the United States. So we subpoenaed his hedge fund. He then changed the hedge fund registration, took his name off, said it was on there by accident, it was a mistake, and said that he had no presence in the United States and that, you know—as you may know, he surrendered his citizenship in 1998 and moved outside the United States. That was around the time he started making all the money in Russia. So he's never had to pay U.S. taxes on his profits from his time in Russia, which became important in the case later.
In any case, he said he never came to the United States, didn't own any property here, didn't do any business here, and therefore he was not required to participate in the U.S. court system even though he admitted that he brought the case to the U.S. Justice Department. So we found this to be a frustrating and somewhat curious situation. He was willing to, you know, hand stuff off to the DOJ anonymously in the beginning and cause them to launch a court case against somebody, but he wasn't interesting in speaking under oath about, you know, why he did that, his own activities in Russia.
So looking at the public record we determined that he did come to the United States frequently, and I discovered through public records that he seemed to own a house in Aspen, Colorado, a very expensive mansion, over $10 million, which he had registered in the name of a shell company in a clear attempt to disguise the ownership of the property. We were able to ascertain that he does use that property because he registered cars to that property with the Colorado DMV in the name of William Browder.
So we began looking for public information about when he might be in Aspen, Colorado, and I found a listing on the Aspen Institute Website about an appearance he was going to make there in the summer of 2014. So we—I served him a subpoena in the parking lot of the Aspen Institute in the summer of 2014 using two people—two subcontractors. Actually, those other subcontractors were—their names escape me, but I forgot about those. We can get you that. This is all in the Pacer court record, the public court record.
In any event, the three of us served—there was another subcontractor working for the law firm whose name I also forget. I did not retain him, but I was asked to work with him on this. He is