“For me, it’s just absurd,” he said. “I had no interest in the U.S. election. Why on earth, if I have no interest, would somebody offer private briefings to me?” He last met Mr. Manafort in 2011, he said.
“It’s not even sociable,” he said of the reported offer of briefings. “It looks like this: You haven’t seen this guy, you know you have this huge sum of a dispute, and then you are like, ‘Let’s go and drink a cup of coffee.’”
Mr. Deripaska said that he indeed suspended his multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Mr. Manafort, but not because Mr. Manafort had asked him to do so or because he had received anything from the campaign chairman in return.
“My lawyers felt that might put me at risk, which anyway happened later, when Manafort appeared in the campaign,” he said, referring to the eventual sanctions that came in 2018. “They didn’t want to bring more attention,” to the business dispute with a man who had become prominent in American politics, he said. He later refiled the lawsuit.
In fighting to lift the personal sanctions, Mr. Deripaska must overcome years-old accusations of ties to organized crime related to his path from the ashes of the former Soviet Union’s aluminum industry to a billionaire with global reach, and allegations he is a front for the Kremlin on foreign policy matters.
Mr. Deripaska called these accusations “balderdash” and his lawsuit challenged the sanction on constitutional grounds. He also denied he is close to Mr. Putin, insisting he only deals with the government on matters of business regulation.
The conclusion of the special counsel’s investigation, he said, gave him hope for success. “I reaffirm to myself that the U.S. systems, that U.S. institutions, still exist.”
Source : Nytimes
