NEW: A former CIA director and a Trump fundraiser arrived in Turkey in 2018 to help an imprisoned pastor.
What they didn't know was that their host, a businessman linked to Turkey’s president, was entangled in a half-billion-dollar fraud case. 1/
occrp.org/en/investigati…
What they didn't know was that their host, a businessman linked to Turkey’s president, was entangled in a half-billion-dollar fraud case. 1/
occrp.org/en/investigati…
OCCRP and @LawCrimeNews have reconstructed the backchannel trip, which saw former spy chief James Woolsey and current Republican National Committee co-chair Tommy Hicks Jr. attempt to secure the release of Pastor Andrew Brunson. 2/
Their Turkish host was Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, a businessman implicated in a fraud case involving a Mormon fundamentalist sect, Armenian-American organized crime, and the theft of half a billion dollars from the U.S. government. 3/
U.S. prosecutors allege many parts of Korkmaz’s business empire — including a jet that carried the Americans to visit Brunson — was financed by the fraud, which involved claiming tax credits from the U.S. government for biofuel that was never produced. 4/
Korkmaz is now on the run. He faces criminal charges in Turkey and the U.S. government is trying to retrieve over $130 million from the fraud scheme that he allegedly helped move abroad. 5/
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