In just the last few months, Bidzina Ivanishvili, one of the world’s richest men with an estimated $6.5 billion fortune, hired a small army of PR consultants and lobbyists in Washington, including at least 7 of Washington’s most prominent firms. And though Ivanishvili built his business empire in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, he is, for the moment at least, a man without a country, having renounced his French and Russian citizenship and having been stripped of his Georgian citizenship, where dual citizenship is not allowed.
Politico reports today that the firms working for the billionaire businessman – including Patton Boggs, National Strategies, Downey McGrath and a slew of others – have not filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the 1938 law that regulates efforts to influence U.S. policy on behalf of a foreign government or political party, raising a number of legal questions about the lobbying campaign.
