Some of the dossier's broad threads have now been independently corroborated. Steele's 17 memos laid out an extraordinarily detailed narrative of how the Russian government supposedly collaborated with the Trump campaign in an elaborate operation to tilt the 2016 presidential race in his favor. They include the strategic consulting firm Control Risks.In the 18 months since the dossier's release, government investigations and reports, criminal cases, and authoritative news articles have begun to resolve at least some of the questions surrounding the memos.Īs a whole, the Steele dossier now appears to be a murky mixture of authentic revelations and repurposed history, likely interspersed with snippets of fiction or disinformation, an Associated Press review finds.Īt the vortex of all the arguments is Steele, often described as a buttoned-down, earnest defender of Western interests, who spied on Russia for the British government and later founded a business intelligence firm built on his network of confidential informants. Several other intelligence firms hired by Meiningen as part of her investigation have also not been paid, it is understood. If the parties fail to agree, the case will go to a full trial. It was the first time a client had failed to settle a bill since Orbis was set up a decade ago, he said.īurrows – a fluent German speaker who lived in Berlin and Bonn in the 1980s – will attend a court hearing in Mannheim scheduled for late February. It added: “This, however, is nothing particularly unusual and is being dealt with by normal means of negotiation, settlement, or potentially also legal disputes.”īurrows said Orbis was “perplexed” by Bilfinger’s approach: “With some regret we are having to take legal action following six months of intensive work for this client on a range of projects.” Disagreements might involve scope, work products and “ultimately compensation”. It said disputes sometimes arose, especially with complex international investigations. The company said it regularly used law firms and consulting and research firms like Orbis in the course of investigations. “This dispute will be settled by the district court, and not by the media,” it said. It said it saw no reason to pay the intelligence firm’s outstanding bill. In a statement Bilfinger described Orbis’s legal claim as “unfounded”. It launched a counter-suit against her for €1.8m. Meiningen sued the company for unfair dismissal. This happened on the eve of a major deal with Oman, Bilfinger’s Middle East hub. However, soon after Bilfinger appointed a new British CEO, Tom Blades, Meiningen was put on leave and fired. The firm was paid for some of its work including a report on a facility management deal between an energy company on the Russian island of Sakhalin and a Bilfinger subsidiary. Orbis’s reports were sent to Meiningen who passed them on to the compliance monitor. They discovered that the subsidiary, Julius Berger Nigeria PLC, was still involved in government projects. Orbis’s research lasted eight months, covered three continents, and involved a network of sources and contacts, it says.īurrows and his colleagues concluded that the business environment in Nigeria had not changed, and that the payment of bribes to politicians was widespread. They included the Nigeria-based firm that gave bribes. Meiningen hired Orbis to carry out a confidential investigation into Biflinger’s international subsidiaries. As part of the DoJ deal, Bilfinger appointed a compliance monitor and in 2016 a high-powered head of investigations, Marie-Alix von Sachsen-Meiningen. It paid a $32m fine and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
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