Written by M.W. Young, CNN
In a recent interview with Business Insider, Kim Bozic recounted how after finishing his time in prison in 1993, he secretly purchased property in Greece as well as a thinly veiled Caribbean trust.
That bank account, Bozic maintained, was housed solely in a British Virgin Islands corporation. Yet hidden within that name was an equally camouflaged offshore company — another British Virgin Islands corporation — owned by his Greek American wife, Agnes.
Since then, according to Bozic, the couple has used these companies as their main cash-flow sources for much of their financial and real estate endeavors. Now Bozic, the Business Insider article reports, is embroiled in an international and conerning political investigation .
One side of the story
It began when, on April 21, 2007, Bozic was indicted by the United States Justice Department on charges of conspiring to launder drug money. At the time, he owned a palatial New York City penthouse apartment where, he claimed , he spent much of his time drinking, dining and attending political fundraisers.
Due to Bozic’s pretrial detention, which lasted until his February 2008 trial, that penthouse was returned to his wife.
Nine months later, in March 2008, Bozic’s wife, Agnes Gokimesh, was granted sole custody of their five children.
According to the Business Insider report, the turmoil in Bozic’s marriage led to litigation and the couple ultimately divorced in 2013.
Through it all, the story remained unclear, even to their eldest son, Valentino Gokimesh.
Bozic reportedly had since established a new business venture that helped Russian billionaires redraw their own personal tax returns to benefit the corporation that owned their offshore trusts.
Bozic, as a Canadian citizen, said he used Canadian laws designed to stop double and offshore benefit fraud, and had complied with U.S. laws as well.
‘Convenient father’
“Under Canadian law,” explained Business Insider, “a company can be formed, have its dividend, money that it has been paid or earned and they can set up another subsidiary in another jurisdiction, specifically if it is a bank or other business account.”
That’s what Bozic said he did. The only problem was that the corporation he named to hold the dividends was actually owned by his Cyprus company and therefore inadmissible to the U.S.
And that’s where Donald Trump made it his business to intervene in Bozic’s case.
According to the Business Insider article, “
Bozic said he worked with the Trump Organization’s Jeff Lasher (who, as an attorney, previously held a senior position with Pinnacle Airlines) in 2011 to legally flip his Cyprus company over to a Canadian one.
Bozic paid Trump a share of the proceeds from selling the Cyprus corporation.
It’s a method, a source close to the Bozic’s family said, that has become commonplace in the international offshore real estate world.
According to Bozic, Trump and Lasher took some of the profits from the sale and split the remainder with him. He earned what he believed to be a low six-figure sum.
But that deal, Bozic told Business Insider, “put a lot of money into the Trump family fortune.”
“After his legal team was taken from him by a federal judge, and its appeal denied, his son returned his entire bank account, with all the details of the transactions, to Mr. Trump. His daughter paid half the cost of refinancing (the Cyprus account) and returned it. Mr. Trump paid another half, after most of the money he gained in a lawsuit settlement was spent on a real estate project that he had been trying to develop in London.”
Donald Trump agreed in a December 2018 letter to a federal judge in New York that he “was involved in some of the offshore conversations” concerning the Bozic’s assets,