I wrote recently about former White House Counsel Greg Craig’s work in a messy, high-stakes bribery case in the Republic of Georgia. I hadn’t been able to reach him before I posted, but caught up with him this week, and he strenuously objected to my suggestion that he’d been brought in for his legal connections, not his lawyering skills.
The case revolves around a $ 98 million arbitration award to an Israeli businessman and his partner, compensation for Georgia’s seizure of a pipeline they bought in the early 1990s. Craig said he’d initially become involved because his firm, Skadden Arps, represented the businessman, Rony Fuchs, at the arbitration in London. When Fuchs was jailed for a (video recorded) attempt to bribe a government official to drop Georgia’s appeal in the case, Craig was called in, he said, "a lawyering job" of trying to settle the case.
"That role is a very different role than what Lanny plays in going to the media," he said, and it had nothing to do with his administration ties. "I’m not the United States government, and nobody thinks of me as the United States government. I’m a lawyer in Washignton, D.C.," he said.
Craig contends the case is "a classic example of putting pressure on two executives that they had disagreements with [by] putting them in jail," said Craig, who called the case "a gross miscarriage of justice."
His clients, he said, had been "the victims of a plot to target them," though he conceded that his client "took the hook" and that "they have a good case that he offered bribe in the course of that meeting."
His objection: "[The Georgians] have used that status of him in jail as a tool to try to get them to relinquish" the arbitration award. "The cost of his release from jail is $ 98 million," he said.
The Georgian government, he said, had made clear that the criminal case and civil negotiations are linked, he said.
In an interview, Georgia’s First Deputy Prosecutor, Davit Sakvarelidze, called Craig’s contention of linkage "complete nonsense."
"We have not had any neogitations regarding the payment or non-payment of the award," he said, claiming that it was Fuchs’ lawyer had raised the possibility of linking the two in a plea-bargain.
The prosecution, he said, is "a typical criminal case, a typical bribery."







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